Skip to main content

Intolerance


“Most people I hate. The rest I tolerate”.   
                                                                                                               – Everybody Loves Raymond

I walked into the kitchen and he was washing his plates at the sink. I nodded a polite Good Morning and waited for him to finish. Feeling something hot behind me, I turned to see the stove turned to the maximum without any dish placed on it. He noticed my annoyance at having seen this, for the second time in a week, and rushed to defend himself.

“Its very cold so I turned it on”.

Not that I am a staunch environmentalist, but his statement just triggered me. Instead of increasing the heater temperature or just wearing a jacket, he took the energy wasting alternative of turning on the kitchen stove to the full to heat up the kitchen. His sheer ignorance irritated me, just like how a month earlier I had caught my neighbor leaving the shared shower turned on while she returned to her room, since there was ‘no hot water’. In both cases, I felt the need to retort and make the ignorant less ignorant.

“If its cold, close the window and increase the heater temperature. You waste a lot of energy when you do this”, I snapped pointing at the stove. He remained silent while I grabbed my stuff and stormed off.

The irony was that I was not paying his bills, so in a sense he had every right to leave it turned on for as long as he wanted. Same went for my neighbor who apologized profusely for leaving the water turned on. However, in both cases, their actions were sufficient for me to blacklist them in my head and unsettle me for some extended minutes. They had not done anything that affected my way of life or disturbed my daily routine, but they had crossed certain principles or ideas that I held dear. Simply because of that, I was quick to jump to conclusions about who they were.

I feel this more and more as I grow older, a growing judgement and intolerance towards anything that I feel goes against my beliefs or affects me directly. If you are not doing what I am doing or want you to be doing, chances are that you are probably ignorant, because you know, ‘I know better’. This attitude of intolerance for something that could differ from what I had in mind, worries me. It had never intensely bothered me this much before and makes me wonder if it is a sign of adulthood, when one becomes increasingly rigid with one’s opinions and beliefs. Consequently, everything starts to be seen as black and white when the world is in fact a million shades of grey (because 50 shades of grey is too mainstream).

The Buddhists and Stoics propose a method of compassion and passive acceptance of the way things are. That does help, for often anger and frustration are the result of having an excessively optimistic expectation of how things will turn out. The key is to temper these expectations. Unfortunately, that requires infinite patience, something that I have in infinitely small amounts. However, with people, you have to be patient and hope they buy into your message. Usually they won’t, but sometimes they do.

After all, did he not turn off the heater when you went back into the kitchen 5 minutes later?


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Fool's Pride

I was rolling up the sleeve of my uniform, preparing for a call up that might never come, when I realised that somehow I was overcome by a strange sense of pride, a pride that wanted the length of my sleeve to be precise as I have always pictured in my mind. Any longer, I would look shabby. Any shorter, I would look amateur. Then I donned the green, tightened the velcro around my waist and looked in the mirror. It was just like before and the memories started flooding me. I never really liked it when I donned it for 2 years in a row. Then I was in a place where I detested the culture, the harsh discipline, the unreasonable demands and the lack of purpose in everything I did. But now that it was over, when I look back, it was perhaps the greatest time of my life. The suffering, the digging, the starving, the cold, the banter, the rowdiness, the jungle, the marches,the mountains, the food, the stories, the friendships, it was all worth the 2 years. A girl friend of mine once asked...

Clubbing

Somebody up there do not want me to club. It has been one experience that has eluded me despite my multiple visits, that has brought as much excitement as me sitting in a meditative pose.  This is all the more interesting because my intention was simply to get a feel of it, and not kickstart a career as a party animal, that would either way not work for a person who dared not even to dance in the shower. Perhaps  though, it is not the circumstances, but the person to blame. I should have known I was not the party kind the very first time I set off. As I was tying my shoe laces, my father would politely enquire where I was going to. “Going to club”, I responded. “What? Like a community club?”, he carried on. I am not the most superstitious of persons, but when you are about to do something, it has to start off on the right tone. There and then, my father set the expectations of me, and all the stamps I received on my waist before entering the club became but so...

Marriage and All That : Part 2

"How about I get married?" "Are you serious?" "Yea" "No really. If you are serious, I can start looking for one" "Uhh....Nah. I was just kidding" After a while, she stopped asking me if I were serious. Instead, she would laugh it off every time I suggested it, which was the original intention of my question. For me it was just comic relief, this idea of marriage that parents back in India would pester their children with once they reached just about where I was right now; young, working with a steady income and of totally no use at home. Though when she did ask me if I was serious, I do remember feeling a palpitation in my heart, the kind one gets when having to make a yuge decision (#trump2016 #makeamericagreatagain), knowing very well that she, along with an army of aunts, waited for my green light to start searching for a bride for the most promising of their nephews. A NRI (non residential Indian used to refer to the ...