It is uber easy for each one of us to judge people. We may know them, we may have hardly interacted with them. However, we know exactly who they are. We couch it in the shiny empowering wrapper that says "our opinion", but we know that we know all about the person. It is not a perception. It is that thought that allows us to bask in the glory of understanding someone through and through. But whether we admit it or not, judgments always have a stream of vileness running through them. We see a stranger walking down the street and in a glance we discern the person that he/she is. The dress he wears, the way he walks, the way she twirls her hair, that spring in her step. He is shabby, he is weird, she is too girly, she is too hyper. Every trait is iffy and undesirable. Why can't people be perfect? Darn it! And while we are busy judging them, we fail to recognise the hypocrisy within ourselves. People are ok with being intimate with someone they haven't met before and yet, when a stranger smiles at you out of kindness and respect for you being a person, there is definitely something weird about that. The first is termed as progressive independent behaviour while the latter is definitely the sign of a person out to please everyone. Let's face it. No one likes to hear about their flaws. There are very few who accept their flaws. Some work on them, some think that these make them unique. Irrespective of your way to handle these statements, we all firmly believe that we are entitled to dish them out. However, while airing out our opinions under the comfortable umbrella of "free speech" we fail to recognise how each person is different. The intentions differ, their disposition differs. Some people find the stranger smiling at them weird and creepy. For others, such an act can reinforce the humanness in humanity. For some, an over enthusiastic new acquaintance is just hyper and childish and without a life. For others, the same person can be the understanding empathetic person genuinely trying to distract you, at least for a while, from the rough patch you are going through. Giving everyone a fair chance is not naivety, but the mere acceptance of many many possibilities.
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