rearranging our prejudices

I have many times talked about this. The best experience in reading is when you get two books to read as a set. Sometimes they are complimenting each other, sometimes one takes the learning of the other forward and sometimes… sometimes they are actually two points of view of the same history. Right now I am reading Rahul Pandita’s book – Our Moon has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits. Rahul has written a book called Hello Bastar (about the naxal movement) in the past and he writes well and I have felt that he does try and be objective about what he writes about. This time he writes about his childhood and his growing up as a Kashmir Pandit who was forced to leave the Kashmir valley with his family while he was still a boy. The book may have many flaws but it does bring alive some of the horrors of the terrorism in Kashmir that forced the pandits to leave the valley.

Some time back I read another book. This one was called Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer. Similarly this is also a memoir but from the opposite point of view. Basharat is a Kashmiri Muslim and he sees the same situation so differently. He is also a very balanced and objective writer. He talks about how as a young boy he idolized the Kashmiri Fighters who crossed the borders over and received training. And how it was to be a Kashmiri under constant threat from the Indian Armed Forces.

The same situation but the villains are the opposite parties. Who do you believe? I would assume that both are telling the truth. I don’t think either would really dispute the other’s point of view. But the contrast is telling. There is never an absolute truth. I would like to gift these two books in unison to Jispa when she grows up. What is the truth always depends on what you have been exposed to. Your knowledge no matter how vast is colored by your own experiences. Truth is relative. Muslims were killed and so were the Pandits. One believed in fighting for freedom and the other believed that freedom was already achieved. Both the authors were touched at am impressionable age by the fundamentalist forces and both wanted to take arms and exact revenge but were taken by their fathers to a land free from this racial animosity. And both seemed to have grown up to be largely secular. They realize the futility of violence but bear such deep scars that it may be impossible for them to be completely neutral.

Can one ever be neutral? For life to go on one must take a strong stand in one direction. These choices are made every day. We take a stand basis the information and experience we have. I am not saying to not take a stand. That is stupid and a complete waste. Devil’s advocate is a nice term for it and as one of Devdutt’s piece on this explains (link) this is many times the wrong way to discuss. Just a few days back, at the gymkhana where I got active with the swimming department, we were presenting the budget. Most of the office bearers were understanding and practical. One fellow was completely irritating. He kept switching sides and said, yes, that’s a good idea to every point and on both sides of the same point. Yes it was nice and diplomatic but it just prolonged the meeting and got nowhere. Endless argument and recognition of both sides got no one anything.

It is important to see both sides, to hear both sides to recognize both sides, to understand that both exist and that both are right in their own way. But at the end life and reality is that you have to take one side and move on. You have to take a stand while being polite and accommodating of the other. Its easy to be brusque about the other side. I have been guilty consistently about this. I have tried my best to change. From merely brushing them off to thinking actively from the other side I have understood another point of view. Now instead of brushing the other side I try and make an argument to convince the other. But that itself creates another sense of pressure on the opposite side. A convincing argument is so difficult for the other to accept, possibly more difficult that a brush off. One can be forced to accept defeat to power but not to reason. Oh dam!

But we all need to understand the other side. See that it exists, acknowledge it and try to live in that shoe. Possibly then we realize that the demons on the other side aren’t that demonic after all. They too were just acting on their prejudices. That’s all.

Like this quote my friend showed me “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” - William James

Side note – I was talking to a colleague who happened to be a Kashmiri Pandit who too left when he was 9 yrs old. I urged him to read both the books. HE ordered one. Rahul’s book. He was reading it and he said a lot of that was the truth. He was pretty excited. It was going to be the first book he has ever read. On any topic! That’s a good start. I asked him if he ordered the one by Basharat. Nopes, he dismissed it. Later. Possibly.

I guess we only know what we want to know