What really matters is invisible to the eyes!

‘It is easy to look at people and make quick judgments about them, but what the world sees of the person is only one tiny faucet of the iceberg. There is a story behind every person. There is a reason why they are the way they are. Think about that before you judge someone.’

Our life has a meaning only if we keep having an interaction with people. Right. We meet a multitude of people in our lives with whom we chat, talk, discuss various matters, etc. But now let us pay attention to the details. Can you tell me the first thing we all do when we see new people?

Do we instantly go to talk to them or do we straightaway shake hands with them? Let me tell you; we do nothing of this sort. The foremost thing we do after meeting someone new is that consciously or unconsciously we make a judgement. A judgement like: Wow, he has so much wealth, He is so rich. She looks so sweet. They are so weird. Oh! she is so ignorant. We make a quick judgement that may not be quite true, a judgement that may not be complete, but we create an image, a perception for every individual.

Let me tell you an incident to support this, in my school, there was a boy named Aakash who was my band buddy. I never really liked him as he was weird and a slowpoke. He did not have any friends in the school and would always sit alone during the recess lost in his Wonderland doing quirky stuff. Whenever he was told to answer in the class, he would take a lot of time to answer. I did not know why. Girls teased him and the boys bullied him. One day when our music class was going on, we all were practicing for the upcoming band competition but Aakash who wasn’t finding it interesting was as usual sitting idle. Towards the end of the class, Mr. Dipankar, our Music teacher posed a question to all of us.

He said, ‘Who can tell me what note it is just by hearing the pitch?’

A quite unusual and difficult question. Nobody raised their hand except Aakash. 

The moment he did this I laughed. I thought how a slowpoke like Aakash would possibly get this right? EVERYONE WAS AMAZED but Aakash looked pretty confident. 

Mr. Dipankar played a tune and told him to guess the note.
Aakash replied, E flat?
Mr. Dipankar said Good.

Hearing this, the whole class got silent. And looked in awe at Aakash. He was answering back every question diligently. This was quite impressive and shocking.

Now, Mr. Dipankar challenged him by playing three pitches at the same time. Aakash had a spark of confidence in his eyes and he accepted the challenge. He played 3 pitches at the same time and guess what, Aakash told the correct note in no time yet again.

He said G, A flat, and E sharp.

Mr. Dipankar congratulated him and selected him to lead the band group. No one had ever imagined this to happen. They felt that all of it was happening in their dreams, but no. It was real. WAKE UP. At this moment I literally got goosebumps. How did he do that?

That day I realized that I should not judge people without knowing them completely as the little things we see may not be a complete picture of the person and it may put me into a false interpretation about someone.

From that day, I had a totally different view of Aakash, and I viewed him as my mentor who could help me greatly in achieving my goal of a musician.

So, never judge a book by its cover, because we never know how impressive and interesting that book might be. My only motive of narrating this story was to make you all understand that external appearance isn't everything. The cover of the book is not what defines the story inside. Interpreting from the cover itself that the book is boring or exciting is not an ideal thing to do. Please don’t prejudice the worth of something by its outward appearance alone. Do not form an opinion on someone on what you see on the surface, because after we take a deeper look inside, the person may be very different than what we had thought. Afterall, What really matters is invisible to the eyes!

A similar thing happened with a Philanthropist and a founding Chairman of an Indian multinational corporation providing next-generation digital services. Before I get into this let me ask you, what image of the lady comes to your mind when I say Founding chairman of an IT firm. I am sure the image in your mind would be of a lady dressed in business suit, denims and jacket, right. This is a real-life incident that happened with the founding chairman of Infosys Foundation - Sudha Murthy.

She was at the Heathrow International Airport in London and was about to board a flight. She was wearing a sari - a senior citizen dressed in typical Indian apparel at the terminal gate. She was waiting in the queue to board the flight. There was a woman in front of her who was really well off and was wearing an Indo-Western silk suit with a very expensive necklace. Suddenly, the woman looked at her and confidently said ‘Well, this line is meant for business class travelers only’ and pointed her finger towards the economy class queue ‘You should go and stand there,’ she said. 

But Sudha Murthy smiled and stayed where she was. The lady turned to her friend and said, it is hard to argue with these “cattle-class people”. Sudha Murthy did not comment back on this and kept moving forward with the queue. When it was her turn to show her boarding pass to the attendant, the woman ahead of her stopped and waited a short distance away to see what would happen. The attendant took her boarding pass and said: Welcome again, we met last week, didn’t we?

‘Yes.’ replied Sudha Murthy. 

Then Sudha Murthy asked the woman: What made you think that I couldn’t afford a business class ticket?
She told them that class does not mean possession of a huge amount of money and left without waiting for a reply.

This is a big mistake, big, HUGE.

Well! It is not always this way. It also might happen the other way round, which means that initially, you might have admired the person a lot but later on got to know the true attitude of him.

This incident made me learn the biggest lesson of my life and I am happy to share the same with you all. First, do not quickly make a mindset about someone, appearances can be deceiving and misleading. Only judge people when you have a complete picture about them - what they truly are from the soul, because that is truly what defines the person.

Second, even if you judge someone, don't make a negative impression, as it will impact the way you will interact with the person and you will feel really bad if later on you find that you were wrong.  

So, the old saying ‘Don't judge the book by its cover’ holds true.