Hybrid Hues '15-'17 AIIMS, New Delhi | Page 31

S o, being intolerant means NOT letting another man or woman express and/or follow his/ her views and way of life and imposing your thought on another person which in its truest sense is a crime. The fact that we know what is right is because we've seen its wrong counterpart so we know for sure that the former is right. It's fair if one is told about both right and wrong and then asked to decide. (which is not normally done) So, this right and wrong, let me tell you, is according to the cur- rent mood of the society. Every population is a bell. What a ma- jor chunk of people follows at a particular point in time form the society’s moods. They keep having mood swings, you see. This right and wrong is but a perspective which keeps changing with more knowledge, with time, with the kind of people around you. It's fair if one is taught how to discern between the so-called right and wrong rather than blind- ly following them just because they had been taught in the infan- cy of our cortical development. At a time when we probably be- lieved that the sky could fall. At least I did. As I am about to touch my one score milestone I've realized that something being right or wrong is just a statistical probability. And since every population is a bell, that means that at all times, at least 10-20% of the people will have thoughts and ideas which differ from those of mass socie- tal acceptance.But the fact is that these numbers approximate to only 10-20% because genera- tion after generation there hasn't been any evolution of thought. There's just been a mere passage. Those 10-20% passed it on to an- other 10-20%. And also because nobody wanted to hear the so called minorities out. So the re- maining 80-90% of the population does not know the alternative view because they were too busy being intolerant. The former sec- tion of the population has been suppressed from time immemo- rial; maybe an attempt by a wile crooked nosed guy. On a more serious note,because today, suddenly there's been an awakening where the ideas of those minorities or lateral think- ers are coming to the fore, (the social media revolution. Coming to the fore for phony reasons or for genuine reasons, that's a whole different discussion, alto- gether) many of the majoritarians are realising that the ideals they stood for all these years might have been out of compulsion or out of dearth of other suitable ideas or probably just because of irrational blind faith. Today, as the society gets more and more ideas, different sections of the popula- tion are conforming to what suits them rather than what ought to suit them. Rather than buying something because that's the only thing in the market. This is as sim- ple as Coke and Pepsi or Com- plan and Horlicks. “ So who are the ones who've been fooling masses for all these centuries and millennia into fol- lowing what suited their tastes? Well, I call them dictators and mass murderers. Murderers of ideas, murderers of creativity. Centuries together, Dalits had to tolerate intolerance, until one of them awoke and explained and quietly expressed, I will NOT be a bhangi anymore just because it suits the taste of a pack of manip- ulative narcissists. Centuries together lives got burnt literally, until somebody chose to change the perspective. You and I like to call that practice Sati. Maybe there were 50 out of the 100 women who did not wish to burn themselves, but JUST be- cause it was the "trend" they had no choice. For them, it was the Only option. Stark irony! Today, it'd be a criminal offense if the wife tried to burn herself down (even if willingly) on the pretext that her husband was dead. The point about tolerance is to break rigid statistical ideas and let people do what they choose to. Of course, they don't have the right to hurt others. That's not tolerance. It's tolerance only and only when there's NO negative influence on another person's life. Having said that, I also understand that hurting somebody is a very ill-formulated gray arena. Now, As I am about to touch my one score milestone I’ve realized that something being right or wrong is just a statistical probability.