Am I voyeuristic? My first response would be a big no.
Voyeurism does not only sound creepy but definitely appears to be a wrong thing. It is barging beyond somebody's privacy walls.
What I do, and is one of my favorite pass times during my journeys, is just observe people and try to draw conclusions on how their body language or the manner they talk over phone calls or in person, to their partners, leads to determine how their overall personality is.
I claim to be no expert in this, but to my knowledge at least I have concluded a few telling things which have formed my opinion on few practices that people follow.
I am currently reading this interesting book that is called Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. The book talks about this phenomenon as thin slicing. As I understand, the thicker the slicing, the more you already know about the person.
So thanks to the author, who is also a famous NY times columnist, we now have a new term for my time killer- thin slicing.
The processes he explains pretty much overlap with another gem of a book that I read just halfway through- Thinking fast and slow, by Daniel Kanheman, who was awarded a Nobel prize for his research. The book talks about how we have 2 parts in out brain, of which one is intuitive and the other bases itself on hard facts- much like thin and thick slicing respectively.
So coming back to my findings, as I am personally not big into religion as much as I believe in karma, I have always wanted to know how superior those who believe in God much more than I do are. After all religion or prayers should have a positive rub off on people, else nobody would have started preaching them for centuries.
Although the fears of rebirth and heading to hell are big enough drivers for most people, there would have been more spiritually inclined ones who would have benefited from prayers.
Now, most people who pray and have reds, whites, yellows in horizontal, vertical and ,3 stripes adorned, or cup caps on their heads or crosses on their chests, I noticed are the ones who bother about other people the least. Religious are the least humanitarian. There, I said it.
It is purely on basis of unrecorded but empirical thin sliced analysis.
These are the people, much to my amazement, pushing people to get a seat first, throwing garbage on roads, and other uncivil behaviors.
I fail to understand the correlation between them but I suspect it is due to a lack of understanding of such a correlation on their side.
While people can accept that there is a higher force guiding us, call it nature, luck, fate or God, theories such as butterfly effect go to show how even our smallest of actions are so meaningful in the framework we live in. By just finishing off your 5 am prayers, doesn't give you a superior sense of entitlement to pass off as an unruly pushover.
It appears as a wordy rant without much of a conclusion, so let me get to that now.
While an open religion such as Hinduism is a best case scenario, people need to be spiritual and not get even more religious. They need to understand doing good is being good. God is in people around and us and within us. An unselfish Do-gooder is plainly a God to someone in need. I tend to believe in this principle, which was the spine of the movie Khaleja, totally
