Note : This article is something that I thought will be interesting to write after watching a YouTube video and is by no means an advisory or a pump fisting post to anyone or a post that goes on to say “Karma is a boomerang”.

It was a warm weekend during the demonetisation period and I was having my scoop of ice cream as my friend was tasting the warmth of the coffee. Suddenly a girl of 8-10 years came in front of me and asked me for some money. I took out a ten rupees from my wallet and was about to give it to the girl before my friend interfered with the usual swing of argument “Hey, don’t encourage begging. This girl might be employed by some group of people who use her to get their share of money and these girls earn more than you think!” . Well as a usual reply I said “Well economics is not fair. So is life. I am just concerned that she might not have had the enough amount of opportunities I had. When I was in the shoes of that girl my first thought will be to get some money irrespective of the situation she is currently in.” . He just shook his head as a sign of disagreement.

Thinking about it for a moment both of us were right that I shouldn’t have encouraged begging and the girl turned out to have several hundred rupees notes in her hand and continued begging along with a group of other girls and I don’t know whether I just encouraged the trap he was mentioning about. He too agreed with a little uncertainty that life is unfair and the expectation and need for money will be much higher than both of us thought being in the shoes of the girl. Both of us had completely polarised perceptions and opinions about the same situation yet both of us thought we were right with the other person being wrong. But how can two people completely contradict each other and yet be right at the same time? The fact of life is that notion of being right and wrong is highly relative in a lot of things that what turns out to be right is completely wrong and unfair for the other yet both of them are right and wrong in the given situation in different ways.

The death sentence

The other day I was watching a video lecture from Harvard Law School about justice and death sentence. I just wish to throw in a spoiler alert and a strong deficiency in my writing skills to paraphrase the whole lecture. The YouTube link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY. The example is a straightforward one that goes along with the blog topic. A group of people are working on a railway track and you are the one who is driving the train. You suddenly realise your horn is not working and you can’t signal away the people to get off the track. But you are before the point where you can switch lane to make sure you don’t get to kill the group of people that should have killed in the scheme of things except that you have the one other guy who was working on the other side of the track you will be switching to that you will be killing one to save a dozen lives.

The speaker asks the students to imagine themselves being the train driver and what will be their decision. A lot of eager hands go up and decide to kill the guy on the other lane who shouldn’t have been killed at all since he is not at all involved with the situation. Their answer was to kill the other innocent person that they said had to sacrifice his life in order to save dozen lives by the name of humanity. Some of the people who were on the opposite side felt that its injustice to kill the single person who never had to undergo the situation in the first place. The professor said ok and asked the students to imagine themselves being part of the group of the people instead of being the driver. The hands were still up since they don’t want to get killed.

Now after a lot of discussions over this the speaker asks the students to imagine themselves as being the guy on the other lane and asks their decision given the change. The bewildered students who voted for the single guy to be killed with strong faith suddenly felt that it was wrong to have him killed and hesitantly turned over to the other side to have the group of people killed instead. Now don’t ask me about the decision of the judge or what was right or wrong. I strongly encourage you to watch the video and its worth a watch.

Being fair about being unfair

I am not talking about killing people and claiming it to be a right thing which of course is a wrong thing to do in general. The point being made is that the notion of right and wrong is a highly relative term that a lot us fail to understand. The human mind is a highly complex machinery that passes through lots of hoops to assess what is best for one’s self in the given situation and is highly susceptible to take decisions without thinking about the other side of the things. Sometimes even with the a serious consideration of things in place its lot easy to get carried away be ego, selfishness, etc. to make a decision that is best for one’s own self.

Is it wrong to make a selfish decision ? Nope, it just differs by situation that sometimes you have to stop the notion of whether its right or wrong to keep moving further. Ok so I have to fill myself with a magic portion of positivity around myself so that I go through all the failures with a blind notion that they are good for me ? Yes and no, things turn out to be good in one way or another with time as I said in previous post but its about experiencing and acknowledging your failures and fuck-ups with truest spirits and learning from them instead of using getting swayed away in distress or sugarcoating failure with too much of positivity instead of learning from them never helps.

The same happens with relationships too as mentioned in the previous post. Its just a matter of time before you realise that whatever happened had happened because the other person thought its the right time to move on. None of them were wrong or right but its one of those rare situations that is a true test of spirit and can be excruciatingly painful or an enriching experience based on how each other move further from there. It will be distressing but its easy to get swayed by distress and wasting opportunities and precious time in the meantime. But its also the distress and disappointment that makes it more memorable and enriching too after looking back at it after a couple of years with positivity. It all depends upon how people proactively handle it and they have to do it on own and there is no universal recipe for it. To read it along the voice of Alfred as he says to Batman after losing Rachel and Harvey “You spat in the faces of Gotham’s worse criminals. Didn’t you think there might be some casualties? Things were always going to get worse before they got better.”

Positivity is a relative thing (Sorry, physicists!)

Let me tell you a story, almost a year back I was preparing for my first onsite interview and it takes around 15 hours to reach the office by train and I had several phone interviews and a take home assignment that I had to solve with more efficiency. The process took three weeks. I was completely confident that I will be able to ace the interview with flying colours except that after 15 minutes of brain teasers I was rejected. I am not good with whiteboards and the amount of distress was considerable since getting rejected in 15 minutes after clearing several tests and travelling 30 hours was downright hard. What’s more ridiculous was that I was able to solve two of the four unsolved problems while travelling to railway station from their office.

It was one of the most distressing days for the year. Its not about the white board interviews that I am going to complain about. It made me better at interviewing and things got pretty good later. You get to a point where everyone encourages you after a failure and you feel that they don’t have the slightest clue over what it feels like when your fundamental notion over a thing like programming or a person breaks. Hey! , Welcome to the sweet part. The part about the distress is that it can be soul crushing and soul enriching in different ways that its upto the perception and discipline of the involved individual to understand and learn from the whole incident. It might be an interview, competition, relationship or whatever.

Its not about writing a Quora answer like post to help you pump up your fists but more about the fact that even with the best of the notions, things can get pretty distressing sometimes and its upto the individual to learn from the whole experience with great discipline and move ahead with more open mind and richer experiences since being positive after all is a relative thing. You might disagree with me and both of us can be right. Such is life :)

Oops, it turned out to be way longer and redundant than I thought!

scratches his head with fuzzy memories about his linear integrated circuits paper :)