Different, is it?

Why do we – and frequently at that – feel that the circumstances that govern us are unique? Is this our need to feel special? One of the earlier conversations I recall – from school days - is our (9 of us) believing in and taking pride in our batch being the naughtiest / silliest batch (as if we had knowledge of what earlier batches had been upto!) and being told by the teacher - with a particularly dead pan face - that all batches are the same! As I write I recall Amitabh Bachchan in Sholay telling Dharmendra ‘Muje to sare policewale ek jaise lagte hain’. This continued – during later years - as we talked of how we were in more remotely located places or without phone / net connectivity or how traffic was bad, especially the particular stretch we had to cover daily!

Two conversations, during the past fortnight, brought up the question 

again.

A remark, by a co-participant, during a workshop on leadership and its overlaps with personal and work spaces – organized as a part of a larger conclave struck me. As we discussed leadership we were told ‘Just to point out that in India leadership has a slightly different connotation and the caste or families one hails from could play a major role in one’s getting a leadership position including leadership being forced on at times.’ My co-participant could have been talking about Brahmins or Gandhis or others and I am not sure I recall the first line of the facilitator’s response; but the crux was clear. He, a European, said roughly 55 per cent of the members of parliament in his country had passed through a single university! How different was that from casteism he asked? Would we not have favoured classes in most societies across the globe?

The second conversation was concerning complexities involved in wildlife conservation. A researcher talked of the landscape – we were then deliberating on - presenting multiple complexities; especially when it came to responses of people and their roles in site specific threats and mitigation measures. Was this not the case of putting in time in a particular landscape and as a corollary getting familiar to the human dynamics touching upon wildlife areas or species I asked? In other words, is not wildlife conservation a complex phenomenon in most landscapes and investing time possibly the surest way to get aware of these complexities? Recalled a conversation with a friend, some time ago, where I was told – Many times we assume human factors to remain constant and as a result remain unaware to the complexities. The only way to then to comprehend their depth is to invest time!