Basically we encounter good people and bad people in our life, and we associate 'white' with a good person and 'black' with a bad person. That much is taken for granted. But after that comes the tricky part, when we slip. It is our tendency to see a person as completely white or completely black. This is the sort of characterization used mostly in Bollywood movies, where the hero is totally white and the villain is totally black. But in reality, there is no such thing as a completely one-dimensional character. The fact that we percieve people to be black or white is a perceptive distortion and is called the "halo effect".
In reality, there is no black or white, but only everchanging shades of gray. The very building blocks of this world are the maybes, the can-bes, the what-ifs, the could-bes, the if-nots, the if-elses, the half-truths and the like.
We can take the case of former Satyam CEO Ramalinga Raju. Today we know that he embezzled some funds and showed faulty balance sheets. So just about everyone paints him in bad light and wants to get even with him. But we must not forget that he was the one who opened a gave bread and butter to thousands of engineering graduates who may have been struggling to find a decent enough job, and the company also set benchmarks in good corporate governance practices. Thats about the bottomline, that we need to have a really wide perspective so as not to be parochial in our approach, and when we are carping about how tough life is, we need to keep in mind the positives we might be enjoying at the moment or how worse life could have been.
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