Gifted!

Last weekend, when I was making this journey home from college for navratri with my dad, I was feeling quite low, didn’t show any interest in talking and sat sad. Dad, after easily making out that I was unhappy asked me what happened, I replied, “Nothing.”
“Got awful marks in some midsem or quiz?”
“No.”
“Someone said something? Fought with a friend?”
“No.”
“Then, what happened? Everything sounds so perfect!”
“Nothing!”
Then he went on to explain how people of our generation have developed a complex which just prevents us from being happy. We glorify sorrow and like being sad. Irrespective of whether we achieve or we keep struggling, we always whine about our situation, we keep asking for more and complain to God if we do not get everything. We have just forgotten how to thank Him and people around us for whatever we have. We just look at all that we do not have, and never take pleasure in what we have. I tried to understand what he was saying, threw a light smile but couldn’t just feel good. In a few minutes, I dozed off to sleep.

A couple of days later, at home, I went to visit our maid at her home with mom. She was teaching a bunch of kids from the neighborhood. They were mostly watchmen’s or other maids’ kids. Three of them were there. One was scribbling down Gujarati counting, another was recognizing pictures of objects and writing their names in English and the third was trying some basic addition. Except for the one who was recognizing pictures, the rest were 100% correct in their work. I sat down beside the girl who was writing counting and tried to chat with her. She was friendly! :D
She told me that she goes to the municipality school outside the street and her mom is a maid and dad does some job of transferring furniture stuff from a shop to home on his raali. Her school starts at around 11 in the morning, before that, she does the housework along with her sister while her mom leaves early morning to work. She gets back in the evening by 4 or 5 and directly comes to this tuition after which she goes to home, prepares dinner along with her mom. I asked her as to why she needs the tuition (silly of me, how would a kid know that!) and quite much to my surprise, she answered me! She said that her parents aren’t literate beyond doing some hisaab, and she wants to grow up and become great. She wanted to grow up and become a Chartered Accountant just like the daughter of one of her mom’s employers. Amazing and surprising, so much struggle, at this meager age without any complains! She made me go back to my childhood. At around her age, I would go to school, study some shit, get back and mom would keep a check on what I was studying, I never realized whether I needed that check from mom or not, in the evening, I would go out to play with the colony kids, get back, have dinner, watch some TV and go to sleep. Since mom’s chat with the maid almost got over and the kid’s exams were to start in a couple of days, I wished her luck. She thanked me cheerfully (in the gujju accent - thenks).

This small interaction with this kid made me realize all that dad was trying to communicate through his lecture. I learnt that the education I took for granted for these many years is such a precious and valuable thing for this kid! If we just try to look at things we have been taking for granted as a gift, we realize that we are actually very gifted! Whether struggling or not, if we try to do everything with pleasure, it’ll be done just better! And now, I am reminded of the booklet by Panna Ma’am, which said that irrespective of whether we believe in God or not, in the concept of nirvana, there is one thing certainly common with all beings, we all want to be happy and the more we try to look for this happiness together, the easier we get it. It also taught that this happiness is intrinsic. It lies within oneself, and if you really want to be happy, nothing on earth can prevent you from being so.

Blame game - the psychology behind

So, which blame game am I talking about? Well, not hard to guess! Its about the society blaming the victim for crimes. Particularly victims of sexual violence against women. Let's start with this awesome sarcastic, viral video:

Sparing the ones with modern thoughts, the ones who get and love the above video, there is a huge population in India that firmly believes that somewhere, it must have been the victim's fault. Okay, lets go through this, it must not be hard: Its a normal daily activity that you are pursuing, travelling or just your profession. Most of us have at least one daily activity in which we interact with strangers, travelling is one example. So, on a regular encounter with strangers, you had a male companion but you had no idea that those regular strangers were a bunch of united people with a good level of mutual understanding and ofcourse bad intentions too. The strangers execute what was on their mind and control slips out of your and your male companion's hands in just seconds and once they have the power on you, its even harder to beat that and escape. In all this, do you see any fault of the victim? Probably (hopefully), no. But, there is a huge population of India that sees largely the victim's fault. I am not saying that they say find the criminals correct or good, but before anything else, they'll point out something where, according to them, our victim went wrong. Obviously, its unfair and incorrect of them to call the victim at fault. So, lets go through the psychology behind this.
Its defensive attribution which is at play. Now, what is that? As wikipedia defines it: The defensive attribution hypothesis is a social psychological term from the attributional approach referring to a set of beliefs held by an individual with the function of defending the individual from concern that they will be the cause or victim of a mishap. In simpler words, we humans have a tendency to believe that this world is a good and fair place to live in. Acknowledging that the world is unfair and that something unfortunate can happen to you based on chance factors would lead to a sense of fear and vulnerability which we would naturally want to avoid. So, whenever we hear of some incident we have a tendency to explain that it was the victim's fault and that if I or someone closely related to me doesn't make that mistake, we'll be absolutely safe. In some sense, that's a coping mechanism to make oneself feel better and less insecure about it.
Well, I learnt all that in my psychology class. Now the next thing that comes to my mind is, why is this blaming trend more in India than in the west. Is there something like the tendency to make defensive attribution is higher in our culture than in theirs? So, let us look at the basic difference in our cultures. Western culture is predominantly individualistic while ours is a collectivistic one. Individualistic culture is one which is oriented around the self, where humans are viewed as independent beings instead of being identified with a community, Whereas, a collectivistic culture is one where there is a higher emphasis on interdependence of beings, where people belong to a particular political, religious or ethnic group and are expected to exhibit behavior that matches the interest and beliefs of the group. A simple way to understand this cultural discussion is to look at an example: If in a group of people that share the same workplace, some guy lives a different kind of lifestyle, wears different kinds of clothes and pursues an indifferent set of hobbies than the usual one. Such a group in India has a tendency to talk about that person behind his back, exclude him out of casual group meetings, and call him a not-normal or not-our-type person. While such a group in the west is more likely to accept this guy's differences, live with it comfortably and even let him be a part of their larger group. 
Now here is my attempt to relate this cultural difference with the blame game: Generally, in a collectivistic culture, if something goes wrong, people have a tendency to blame everyone involved while in an individualistic culture, the fellow at the root cause is solely responsible for what happened. In a crime, both the criminal and victim are deeply involved and hence we have a tendency to put some amount of blame on each given our culture. While the same crime in the west will be viewed more as the criminal's fault than that of the victim's. So, our cultural structure in addition to the normal tendency of defensive attribution leads to a relatively high tendency to blame the victim than the westerners do.
Now is it okay or acceptable on someone's part to blame the victim? Well, no! Although defensive attributions are self-protective, somewhat natural but certainly an irrational strategy that helps us avoid unnerving thoughts and give a feel of our life being in our control. As healthy individuals, we should try to look at things from the perspective of the victim and stop this blaming!
Note: the relation of culture with blaming is completely my view and arguments are most welcome. :)