Jagdish Bali
(The writer is based at Kumarsain, Shimla)
There are many perspectives to a thing. Can a round ball become a wide ball? A big no to this can put you in a spot of bother because even a perfectly shaped round ball becomes wide ball at times while it is in play in cricket. If a shepherd saves sheep from the wolf, sheep call him saviour of their lives and liberty, but wolf calls him a destroyer of his life and liberty. Of course, sheep and wolf are standing at extreme opposite angles. After spending a day with his child at Fun World, a father may lament, “A day wasted!” But the child may exclaim, “The most wonderful day of my life!” We often form a view about a person and then stick to our judgement as I had once formed about a student.
I had developed a block in my mind that he was not sincere and was not respectful to the teachers. However, after two years on Teachers’ Day, I got a greeting from him, “You are my ideal teacher. You always inspired and motivated me.” A feeling of guilt pricked me for nurturing wrong notion about him. To pen-portray a person, we have to look at different dimensions of his personality. Ghazal composer, Nida Fazali, has poured much truth into his lines – Har ek aadmi mein hote hain das-bees aadmi, Jisko bhi dekhna. kai baar dekhna In Middlemarch, George Eliot says, “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” We oftentimes forget that when there is day in the Northern Hemisphere, there is night in the Southern Hemisphere; the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere is the Summer Solstice in southern; the Spring Equinox in Northern Hemisphere is the Autumnal Equinox in Southern Hemisphere. It depends on which part of the world you are residing in.