I Am The Judge

So they made me a judge. Of a dance contest. Either that or a drama contest. To put this into perspective, I have no experience in either. 

I am a terribly boring person when it comes to the stage. I don’t exactly love it. It is true that I have made my peace with the stage in terms of public speaking. I am not good in it but I have refined my 5 minutes extempore speeches. You learn it in the job. Even then, in terms of statesmanship, I probably am not even a camp site.

Take all these into the equation and the other day, I started musing on judging. Believe me, judging is something I do on the daily. I am not always vocal about it, though, because if I were, I’d have a lot of enemies. You learn to keep quiet as an adult. It’s just survival.

So, judging. A lot of times, people say as Christians, we aren’t supposed to judge. I don’t think that’s entirely true. Jesus never said to not judge. He said: be careful not to judge when you aren’t cleared of the same charge. Judge not, he said, lest you be judged by the same measure. And then he said: be pure like me. So essentially, dont judge sanctimoniously. Much more importantly, don’t be a hypocrite.

But me being me, and not always the most morally upright, I have convinced myself that the loophole here is: if I am not guilty, I can judge. And let’s be honest, if we don’t judge, how is society supposed to function?

In college level Sociology, we talked about crime a lot. We always said crime is that which offends the sensibility of the collective. In itself, a person taking bread from a counter is not a crime. But if that bread was on the counter because someone else was selling it, and the first person hadn’t paid for the bread, it becomes a crime because they’d be offending the generally accepted rule that you have to pay for the bread that the second person was selling. That’s how even when you have killed a person, which is easily the biggest no-no of human actions, if you can prove that you have done it in self-defence, it is not a crime; it does not offend the sensibility of the collective.

It's just nuances. Rules sew the society together. Without rules, we fall apart. Sometimes, the rules are suggestions. There’re layers of it even. Norms. Mores. Guidelines. Regulations. Crimes. Sins, too, maybe? Although that last one is very – almost exclusively – Christian-coded.

So yes, my stand on judging is that if I don’t do the crime, I can judge. And I can even judge mercilessly if I do that only with my sisters and my best friends and I know my judgment and righteous condemnation will not be made public. To my detriment. 

One of my favourite go-to clichés about judging is that if you live in a glass house, you should not throw stones. If you can’t maintain your house, don’t try to expose someone else’s mismanagement of theirs. If you have dirty laundry, don’t air out other people’s. It’s just a rule of thumb. You should not try to make yourself look good by making someone else look bad.

So that being said, seeing as I can neither dance nor act on stage, nor do I know anything about dancing or acting, either amateurly or professionally, I think I’ll just go enjoy the art and award points liberally. Ethically coded, no? Score some brownie points with the Universe, even? No?

Pedal Stools

You only know what you know. Beyond that, you cannot know. And sometimes, knowing can be dangerous, so even if you know a little, maybe you don’t want to know very much.

Ignorance is bliss, they say. How well I understand this! Even more so as a technically functioning adult working a 9-to-5. Used to be there was a time I wanted to know everything but everything is the very thing I cannot know. Maybe the very thing I should not know. In any case, I no longer wish this.

Today, older, wiser, I wish for calm. But then again, not much wiser and duplicitously youngish, I can’t always control my recklessness. Or my curiosity. More often than not, that is the root cause to my life’s problems. One day if I ever learn to control my seemingly insatiable thirst for stories, I might truly start to live under the radar and be at peace. Sounds boring, though.

Drama I am not a part of is something I can’t seem to chill with. I revel in it. Incurable gossip, you might call me. Which is not nice and I am very selective about the people I share gossip with, but the ones I do gossip with… whoo! Zero limits.

One thing I have actually learned finally is to consider people’s feelings and their lives. I have learned to appreciate that people were not brought up the same as me. I have come to understand that even twins could have a vastly differing POV and act in diametrically opposite ways. How much more so your everyday Joes and Jills, your Rahuls and Anjalis, I don’t know a Mizo equivalent – maybe Lianas and Mawiis (those are my parents’ names, by the way!).

It is so easy to judge. And judge away, all you like. But when you do recount your judgments, exercise caution. You don’t know who you hurt. You don’t know how karma can (and will!) bitch-slap you for what you did. You just don’t know who is good and who is bad. Or in fact, are we good or bad really? Even Jesus didn’t answer that question.

Someone wonderful to you can be absolutely loathsome to someone else. So don’t hype people up and put them on pedal stools. Pedal… stools… pedastools? Pedestals? It’s probably pedestals, yes.

People don’t belong on pedestals. They belong in lives. In all its rich complexity.