Few of you may have wondered sometimes why in your class 6th or 9th examination papers – one word answers only had one mark while the essay type answer always carried 5 or 8 marks. After all, one word answers were always the more difficult ones and more accurate test of your knowledge – you either know the answer or you don’t. With essay type questions, even if you beat around the bush in not too distant vicinity you always had a chance of scoring 2-1/2.

But I guess it was probably because most important questions in life could never be answered in one word. Is it right or is it wrong, is it true or is it false – these are valid questions only in study of sciences and nowhere else. Least of all in life, which is a work of art spanning generations. Sometimes we see things in our lifetime which seems wrong and there comes the temptation to paint things black and white but we forget that in the grey of life – a touch of black or white is merely a part of continuum and not an absolute event.

It’s like mixing colours in a palette. You want to make grey – you put some white, then some black you realize the grey is not dark enough and you put some more black and may be some more white later. Now, our lifetimes are just long enough to witness a touch of white or black and based on our limited exposure we mistake things to be right & wrong or black and white but its only when we look at things in their historical perspective that we realize that what’s in the palette is neither black nor white - its grey and that’s how it will remain.

Lot of us point to various things which seems unfair and say look that’s a wrong but then life is never fair or just at any given point in time. It’s always skewed one way or the other but what it does is that it shifts weight as years pass by and so when you average things out over years life still seems fair.

Say for example the reservation for backward or draconian dowry laws for women, they may not be just but probably they are justified. Because the wrongs today are meant to set right the wrongs of yesterday. A generation pays for the wrongs of previous generation or the other way round a generation gets compensated for sufferings of the previous generation. At no point in time, what prevailed was absolutely fair and just but if we aggregate all the points in time may be all that happened was justified.

All of us must have heard the story of the blind men and the elephant. Each blind man touched a different part of elephant and made their opinion about what an elephant is like but none of them got their description right because all of them focused on parts but none of them remembered to aggregate those parts. And that’s why I sometimes hesitate to answer in absolutes on how I view certain events because they may just represent a dot on the bigger canvas of life. May be it’s worthwhile to step back and hear what others have to say and look beyond what’s obvious to your eyes before you step forward and put forth your view.