blink

Mornings are beautiful.....whichever corner of the world you wake up in.... mornings are beautiful..... the freshly laundered sky....the luxuriant trees basking in the dawn and the dew.....with nature’s maestros exquisitely proclaiming another new day on their branches....oblivious to the attention or, in a growingly fast and unappreciative world, non-attention of others..... mornings are beautiful..... the sights, smells and sounds of a Chennai morning are extra beautiful to me.... now more than ever....because it will be a very different sun that will greet my bleary eyed stretches a month from now.....mornings in this nook of the earth are particularly early....as early as 4 AM..... with the tangy smell of the coast wafting in along with the uplifting aroma of fresh filter kaapi.... the elevating strains of suprabhatham in MS’s ethereal voice..... a tradition almost as emblematic of a Chennai household’s sunrise as kaapi....the newspaper sellers and doodhwalas whizzing past on their bicycles....passing maamis nonchalantly drawing intricate kolam’s..... while the men sit nearby with The Hindu in front of their noses savouring their brews along with the news.... mornings are beautiful.....

Interestingly, it is not mornings that I wanted to talk about.... as I was basking in yet another beautiful Chennai morning on my front porch, my thoughts turned to this rather boring crime movie i was watching yesterday in which a cop busts a criminal at the last, crucial moment even though he had almost no reason to believe that this respected honourable man was the bad-guy.....his awed partner (a feeling we were supposed to mirror, but sadly, it was too predictable and the clichés were too many..) asks him how he did it....and our man sagaciously says ‘I saw it in his eyes’.... and this pushed my thoughts to a rather fascinating book I recently read called ‘blink’ by Malcolm Gladwell.... now though our movies and their heroes proclaim it rather smugly, we do our own share of face-reading quite a few times everyday..... we try to gauge the boss’s mood before asking for a day-off.... we try to perceive what kind of product the customer will be interested in, not just from his face but also from the way he dresses, the way he walks and talks and the shoes he wears....we steal looks at someone across the restaurant because we feel he/she’d be a good companion.... we can ‘instinctively’ tell if a person’s a good orator or a good teacher just by looking at him..... extensive research has been done on body language.... we read articles that claim to be able predict if a relationship will last just by analysing the first kiss.... we know a loving touch...a comforting hug.... a critical eye.... a scornful stare....a flirtatious glance....an envious look.... we just know.... this knowing is not based on anything literal.... it’s not something the person explicitly said! It is just something we infer....so, we, normal mortals, engage in this occult science of mind-reading enough and more.... it does seem like a pretty useful ability to have, doesn’t it....

In ‘Blink’, Gladwell explores, among many other subjects, Autism.... he says that one of the most intense and evident effects of Autism is the inability to read faces... autistic people find it difficult, if not impossible, to do what we do automatically, to interpret non-verbal cues such as gestures and facial expressions .... to understand anything beyond the absolutely literal.... this is supposedly caused by the malfunctioning of a part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus.... the person might have a very high IQ....may have impressive degrees from prestigious institutions...but he will face problems in the most routine of practical situations because of his total lack of perceptual understanding..... we commiserate with these people....we feel sorry for them and try to imagine how difficult it must be for them to cope with daily situations.... but we should stop to wonder..... is our celebrated ‘ability’ all that it’s made out to be? Don’t most of our failed relationships break because of things that we didn’t say and thought understood or things that we didn’t mean but were unconsciously implied.....Don’t most of our caste-based and religious conflicts arise because of generalised and baseless judgements made based on anything but what is actually said.....aren’t all our prejudices based on assumptions and presumptions based on colour, ancestry, history and geography rather than on the person in front of you and what he has said and done....conscious and intended prejudice is not its only form.... it is a fact that juries in the USA take significantly lesser time to convict coloured people.... these juries aren’t entirely comprised of racists and xenophobes.... but this chauvinism is imbued in our very essence....don’t we instinctively cringe and feel a little more threatened when we see a two hundred pound African American man on a deserted street than when we see a blond man in a crisp business suit? unconscious prejudice is as bad as, if not worse than, its conscious form....Maybe we need to pity rather than laud ourselves for this burden of ‘mind-reading’ that we carry.... maybe we need to base our judgements more on fact than on the figurative.... maybe we need to appreciate the literal and tone-down the symbolic.... maybe we should learn to overlook, atleast sometimes, the implications, the inferences and the innuendo.... maybe we all need a malfunctioning fusiform gyrus once in a while....