Step up, son!

The word 'rigor mortis' has kept haunting me ever since my JC interview. Hardly ever in life have I faced a situation where in a crucial position, I have been totally blank. I had never heard of this before, and it took me a while to even get what it sounds like, especially coming from an interviewing Supreme Court judge. I didn't know back then at the time of the interview, that not having heard about a term like this would hurt me like a bitch later to find out that I didn't end up getting a clerkship. But then again, I thought, if there are people judging others not on the basis of whatever they've done till now in life, not counting in the possibility that a person may 'know' things later in life as long as the person can go one up against the same judge on pure logic, but deciding someone's career based on him knowing/not knowing what 'rigor mortis' means, what's the point of working with such judges! Thus, I reconciled myself, in the comfort of my illusionary ego and the company of those other fellow human beings, including a senior advocate, who wouldn't know what rigor mortis means, or whether a criminal court can appoint a receiver or not, but only till I met a certain college senior, who was like, "What?! How can you not know what rigor mortis means?". And it wasn't sarcasm. An honest expression of surprise at the lack of my worth in not knowing what 'rigor mortis' means! And this happened with more seniors whom I know and cared to tell my story to. It made me realize, that it's all too easy to rubbish something or someone off and pretend to be in an illusion of supremacy, but there shouldn't be any excuses for any sort of failure. Agreed that bad performances happen in interviews, and a person cannot possibly know everything that exists. But, one can at least prevent himself/herself from shutting out possibilities of growth by being honest, and without ego. Oh my god! I think I just had a humbling experience!

Still remain a non-clerk though, watching others, one from every college, go past, only wishing if I had a bad CLAT score 5 years back, and was in any other college, where I could have cried foul about the 'NLU bias', and gotten a preference over others like the present me in this. I need another humbling experience soon. Opportunity cost is slowly setting its teeth on my rotting yet tender sweet cake of happiness, I can't let it have the cake and eat it too. Who can save me right now? Oh wait, I see parents, girlfriend, family, extending a life-saving jacket to me, diving in the freezing ocean herself to swim up to me to give it, going through more pain than me. I have to swim somehow to stop that, I need to get to the boat myself, I need to swim. How do I learn, I am all alone. I either learn it myself, or wait to see people I care about suffer in order to comfort me. I need my passion to keep me alive. What is it? I see a lush green field, a rectangular turf pitch, I see myself facing fast ruthless, killer bouncers from Curtley Ambrose in Perth, and I know what I need to do. I just need to make sure I don't get out. I can't think of hitting sixes when the ball is new and I am facing chin music. I know I need to just concentrate, play my best game, and just hang on there, be on the pitch, batting. I can only score if I am patient and diligent, when I pace my innings. I want to hit a 300 on the first day itself, but I need to know that I am batting on WACA, facing the scariest of bowlers, not on a flat track facing Sreesanth with an old ball. A boundary hit right now will be as good as a 50 otherwise, and even if it takes 50 balls to open my account, by the time the day finishes, I'd be close to a 100, with eyes so well set that they see a football, and feet gliding around, hitting the old ball coming on the bat well. In the end, the greatest of innings are all played in challenging conditions, not on flat tracks.

If given a choice, 99% batsmen would want to bat on flat tracks without any grass, typically in the sub-continent. But then, globally, hardly any player has received as much respect and adoration as Rahul Dravid, because I am sure, he'll choose the grassiest, and bounciest, and fastest of tracks, or even a 5th day pitch in India playing spin. There is always a choice, but would you hit sixes like Chris Gayle at Chinnaswamy against Mitchell Marsh's timid bowling and get bored in a couple of matches, or rather face the chin music at Perth just to enjoy the process of survival and then come on top of it. I guess, the courts are enchanting me again. I don't care about the money right now at least. I'm just too hungry to slog at work, can't wait to get an appearance, can't wait to argue before those same judges, can't wait to feel the pressure and nervousness, can't wait to manage in very limited means, can't wait to save up, use up, solve problems, make others happy, and be an advocate!

Don't judge!

The title refers to one really lame-ass attempt made by one of my friends to crack one of my-type jokes, on me [for the really lameness thirsty curious lot of you, the joke was a question, 'what can I never tell my dad']

Anyway, this post marks a rather unplanned return for me into blogging after a gazillion ideas to write a post which could never materialize due to various reasons which all can be grouped under the simple head 'mea culpa'.

I asked one of my friends what she would love to become, keeping aside all considerations but the kind of work, and she said, "I'd love to be a judge". My reply was simple, "tell me something that you already are not". Tis' true. We all are judges, not judges of law, but judges of each other. For a long time I used to hate the fact that people judge, and I really used to judge those who judge others! I had somehow judged the activity of judging as inherently negative, something anti-liberal, that'll make people conscious. Well, that was how I judged the activity of judging and the extremely judgmental people. Going by the number of times I have used the word 'judge', it is no rocket science for me to conclude that judging is inevitable. It is a part of 'human nature', something that people cannot stop, they can only mould it in a certain way; just like food and dieting.

However, judging others, and even oneself, is still considered a bad thing. I remember reading some cheesy lines on the internet on some totally unconnected instagrammed or photoshopped picture, which I used to find true and deep at some point of time. One of them said "don't judge others when you don't know the battles they are fighting". I read this and immediately thought 'how true'. But then, come to think of it, everyone's fighting some battle or the other in life, and if some dude ends up being an asshole, or some girl decides to be just crazy, their battles are definitely not an excuse for troubling others, specially when others can fight their battles without being a pain.

Similarly, I read some article on some never-heard-of-before-foreign-website, which tried bringing out the fact that how horrible a thing it is to judge yourself. While I agree that opportunity cost is the single most disturbing thing that can take over people's happiness and sanity, I also believe that not-judging oneself for the fear of being taken over by your opportunity costs can often end up in you being in a fool's paradise. So, it is clear that judging oneself and others is not only natural and inevitable, but also quite necessary. Why, then should it still be considered bad, and have those side effects of making judgmental people be judged as judgmental, and make people feel bad about being judged?

I feel the answer lies in the huge baggage of judgments coupled with sweeping generalizations that these judgments carry. "He's so irresponsible!", "Oh! He's worse that pigeon shit." "Oh! you are so untrustworthy" "Oh! She is such a rich bitch!", etc. All these tend to indicate an entire person with one characteristic so as to indicate others how to be with him/her. But at the same time, they all are judgments, not evaluations. Now I said above, that the act of judging is inevitable and necessary, but not the act of passing judgments. There is a huge difference. When you judge someone, you analyse, you evaluate, so what you should have at the end of it is a result, maybe something similar to a balance sheet, where you look at a person's attributes objectively. A judgment is a decision made on such an evaluation. That is a highly subjective thing. So, what blots this wonderful, intellectually superior activity of judging in humans as a bad thing is its confusion with the act of passing a judgment. Here's a cliche that I would not mock at "judge the acts, not the person". Now this, is very true. You may pass a decision on a particular act, like, "You shaved off the dog's hair to match his owner's haircut. That is a very inconsiderate act. However, you are not inconsiderate. You are just a person who..." (well, let me come to the bit about analysing persons!)

Having clarified the difference, I will now propose my tried and tested tools of judging a person, which can be passed off as 'objective', and will in 99.99% cases not affect the person being judged in a way passing a judgment would, and at the same time, will enable the person judging to get the relevant info about the person. (I would have written a long long long never ending post about how amazing this 'technique' of mine is without telling what it is and then at the end, tell you to buy it by selling your kidneys, but I preferred to go the Telebrands way). This is about identifying where a person is in certain scales. These scales are about certain attributes that tell about a person more than their acts. In all these scales, there are two extremes (obviously), and my assumption is that the sum total of the attribute on both the extremes is constant at all the points on the scale.

The first scale is between talks and actions. The amount a person can talk and act is constant. So if he/she talks about doing things more, chances of doing the same are a little less. Similarly, if someone stays quiet about things, he/she'll (actually only he) will be up to doing more things that you'd know. The middle point on the scale will be the equilibrium between the two. Similarly, the second scale is about attitude/outlooks: positive/optimistic and negative/pessimist. Although these depend a lot on the specific state of mind, everyone has a natural tendency to respond to things in a particular way - sporty or complaining; happy or sad; angry or chill; repenting the opportunity costs or looking forward. A person at the equilibrium, would be aware of both the ends and be balanced. Autonomy/Dependence form the third attribute. The extreme end of autonomy would imply someone who only listens to himself and everything else falls on a deaf ear, while dependence extreme would render a person thoroughly confused and scared when alone, and they'd do whatever others tell them to do, without much problem. The fourth attribute is rigidity and flexibility/adjustability. This one's self explanatory I believe. And the last one is the scale of Justice in the Jesus sense. 'Do unto others what you would want/expect others to do unto you'. How much does a person believe in this, is the sixth scale.

The above, I feel, are parts of a person's nature, which can place them on different scales in different points to give an evaluation about them. The primary purpose of such an evaluation, I believe, is to know how to exist peacefully with others. Just like you can't expect a blind person to walk to you in a path strange to him/her without any assistance, you can't expect any person who is naturally inclined towards pessimism to take a defeat being sporty. We often tend to not consider these evaluations while branding others as 'crazy' or 'psycho'. It's as wrong and insensitive as judging a person who is on a wheelchair as a bad or undesirable person because he/she needs a wheelchair to move. Maybe, undesirable to some as a personal choice, but it still remains an objective fact. That is what I have tried to sum up above.

And just to make it cool, let me throw in a hash tag here #just-another-attempt-to-harmonize-people