How to judge?

Life gives us many opportunities to judge others. The more power one gets, the more opportunities one gets. If you are a senior in your company, you get an opportunity to judge the calibre of the person you are interviewing, you see a fight happening on the road, you get the opportunity to judge who is right, etc. This is because as humans, we have the tendency to judge, decide what is right or wrong and may be take some action about it. Why is that, is a different topic and will explore later.

Judging is not an activity without consequences. This is especially true when you decide to take an action based on that judgement and even more true when your action affects some one else. Therefore, judging should be done with careful thought. There are three aspects that I consider very important when one has to judge. This may not be an exhaustive list and I may modify it later but for now this should do:

1. Past circumstances
2. Listening and understanding all sides of the story from all people involved
3. Think about the isolated incident first and then to confirm use past history

Let me explain this with a few examples.

Many of my relatives are very superstitious. One such superstition is about Kanjak that I have discussed in the linked blog before. I usually get very angry when something like this happens. When an action of somebody affects the other person(s) negatively and provide absolutely no benefit except a satisfaction of following a superstition but still people do it. I was analyzing my anger and it just clicked me that this is a very normal behavior. Normal does not mean right just normal. This is because many people in the world are not able to critically analyze their choices because they have not been taught to do so. They just follow what was told to them when they were kids or do what they saw others doing. So things like these are such things that people did not even think that it could affect anyone, did not critically analyze it and now it has become second nature. By the time someone tells them to think, it is probably too late and the person has become too rigid to change. This is not an excuse for the person to not change but just another perspective. Once I thought about this, my anger seemed misplaced.

Another example comes from when I was getting my interior work done at my home. A few carpenters came with a lot of raw material like ply board, laminate board, etc. Now the story might seem very unhappening but it taught me a lot that day. There was these laminate boards, which we asked the carpenters to not take it back to their shop and keep it in parking. I do not remember the reason why I said that but that is irrelevant. In the evening when I came back, I saw there were no laminate boards in the parking. I called the carpenter, Lalal Kumar and without listening to him I started shouting at him. My thought was – when I explicitly mentioned to not take the laminate boards back, it should not have been taken back. I could not think of any reason why he would be forced to take it. When I was finished shouting, he told me that security person forced him to take it back as it was not allowed to keep those things in parking. When I discussed with security person, he mentioned it was true. When I later analyzed it, I felt such uneasiness. How could I think that there could be no reason for Lalal Kumar to take the boards back? Is my thought process so myopic? That day I realized the importance of listening. I always try to see if there is any possibility of another angle that I have not thought about so that I don’t falter on my judgement.

For the third aspect, I do not have any example that I can discuss about its importance. If we judge people by what they were, we are robbing them of a chance to change. It might only take us a few extra minutes of thought but for the other person it might give them a chance to believe that if they change positively, there is someone to acknowledge that. Even if the incidents or situations seem similar, the motivations and reasons behind them could be completely different. Therefore, it is essential that one thinks about a particular incident or incident(s) in isolation first and then can use past behavior as a confirmation for the conclusion of analyzing isolated incidents.

I do not claim to be following everything I wrote. In fact, when it is time to follow, I mostly forget every good thing. But I try to analyze and think what I did and hope that in future I will become a better person who does minimal bad things for others.