Every one is not the same… One of the easiest assumptions in life is that if I am like this then how can the rest of the world not be the same. If I feel so much pain over something everyone also must feel the same in the same situation. It is when they fail to react the same way that most of the hurts, fights, tears spring up. It is the most difficult thing in the world to place ourselves in another person’s shoes. I wonder if it can ever be done. Each of us is an end product of different water cement ratios with our own unique combination of admixtures; compacted to a different degree and placed in our own mould. How can we ever transcend all these differences and understand why a person behaves such and such???
So, did Hitler never feel guilty for all the atrocities that have been committed because of him??? May be the wonderful thing called conscience was never in his recipe at all. So he probably never thought of it that way. Like Alfred says in the Dark Knight “Some men just like to see the world burn”. The world around us offers us so many choices. So many paths we can take. I believe destiny has our own picked out way ahead of us… we get there some time in life. It is only the longer or shorter path that is in our hands. Well may be we also have this emergency button of totally shipwrecking our future also within reach. So, how much of who we are meant to be is really in our hands? If the right ingredients are left out then even the best of opportunities may not help us make the right future.
The only way to understand the present is to know the past. This was one theory I picked up from my uncle (Ravindranath Kola) when he told me that caste was kind of important even today because it gives us a broad idea of how people of a certain caste tend to behave in a certain way. So knowing what a person has been through explains his attitude and thinking at the present moment more then anything else. But then I am caught between thinking if their past excuses them for the present or is it a “so what? They should learn to get over it!” situation. I tend to lean over the former most of the time… unless I am too angry and then I wonder why they shouldn’t get over it. Then, when I mellow down I tend to think ‘well, not every one has the fire to get over big obstacles in life.’
Getting over our shortcomings is a difficult task. It is the task of life time I think. Though it seems that getting to know our shortcomings is the major hurdle I think it is mustering enough determination and courage to actually begin to change your own self. It is those rare individuals that do that that enter the historical records of great people admired and slightly envied by the rest of us common folk. I know I have contradicted my own statement many times… but then again there isn’t a universal right or wrong is there. It is all a matter of perspective… and each situation calls for its own set of rules to play with.
3 comments:
are u sure it wasn't me who said past does matter for what we see at present??...or maybe we never had that talk- but i do believe in it..
one can always explain the reason for things turning out the way they did- why a person reacts in a certain way can be understood from what he has been through in the past...but mind you- the important thing here is that - irrespetive of the person there are some things that are morally right and some that are wrong....and when a person does something wrong it doesn't mean that it becomes right just because he has been through a lot of things- right is right and wrong is wrong...
for all that hitler did- he believed he did the right thing from what he had been through and from what he knew...but when u look at it from another view one would say- how can killing innocent people be right?...it definitely is wrong....and hence what hitler thought was right was actually wrong!...can't blame him for thinking wrong- somewhere something went wrong and he got confused :) but even then he was wrong and his history does not justify forgiveness for what he has done around him.
There is a school of thought that believes that Hitler wasn't really aware of what was happening in the concentration camps. He may have known at some level that people were being killed, but he wasn't really aware of how horrible the situation really was. I'm pretty sure he gave the authorization for setting up the camps, but what happened in them was not in his control (he probably had a lot of other more important things to worry about).
Some of the people managing the camps were truly monstrous. There's no way someone like Josef Mengele could have been sane, in any sense of the word. I'd like to think that these people were truly crazy, or were driven (temporarily?) insane by the job at hand.
The people who actually carried out the killings (the security guards) claimed they were just following orders. You probably couldn't blame them, if they failed to follow orders, they'd be executed too.
Either way, looking at war time situations to judge human beings will just shock and horrify us. It's not just the Germans who did some terrible stuff. Check out 'The Rape of Nanking'or the 'My Lai Massacre'. Rational thinking is suspending in such situations, and they bring out the absolute worst in people. Even if they're thinking about right or wrong, do they really have an option of being able to do the right thing in such a situation?
Hmmmm... I agree with the both of you. Though, Prannoy I think wars also bring out the BEST in people.
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