I look, I don’t see

12/12/09

I read somewhere that we look at various objects around us but many of them don’t necessarily register in our brains. A simple exercise to prove this was given: leave your room right now without looking around at anything and then start to describe your room in detail. Write about every wall and whatever hangs/leans on it, each and every table shelf and the stuff on it. Take your time and when you feel that you’ve done the job to the best of your abilities, return to your room and tally the list with the facts. It is said that most people will, more often than not, be quite surprised if not downright shocked at many things that are either wrong or missing from their list. So we look but don’t see, there might be clutter everywhere but after sometime, the brain stops to register it (ha! It needs to do other stuff not waste resources in what you choose to ignore time and again). So we live on in the clutter, things might get really grimy till we start to notice them. This generally happens when the dirt/clutter starts to create hindrance, say your shoes and slippers are lying scattered on the floor and you trip over them a few times and finally take notice and put them in order, or some may just chose to throw them in some corner. The table might be dirty but not till you sit down to work on it and feel that it’s difficult to do so because of the clutter, will you finally tidy it up. Your vehicle might be dirty but you wouldn’t take notice till one evening you come out of the house all dressed up to realize that you wouldn’t wanna be seen in that dirty cocoon on wheels. It’s either relative to something better (your dirty car at the parking next to a same clean and gleaming model next to it) or the hindrances in daily work (tripping over shoes) that make you see the disorder.
Disorder, anarchy, demagoguery, dirt, mockery of the parliament, filth, hatred, defalcations, bribery, sycophancy, injustice, murder, inequality, discrimination; when will the billion trip over these grimy sneakers in unison to see it all. I look at these everywhere, I chose not to see.