Before I make you understand my definition of Perspective Distortion, let’s first understand what Wikipedia has to say.

 “Perspective distortion is a warping or transformation of an object and its surrounding area that differs significantly from what the object would look like with a normal focal length, due to the relative scale of nearby and distant features.”

Now let’s understand mine.

One day I walked into a local store to buy some groceries. There I saw a teenage girl wearing a pair of denim shorts with a deep black tee-shirt. She held a cigarette in her left hand and a hot glass of tea in her right. She exhaled the smoke and looked at me and curved her lips gently. I smiled back and asked the shopkeeper for a liter of milk. In the next minute, another lady walked into the same shop. She was wearing a plain simple pink saree and her forehead was decorated with a big bold red bindi. She asked the shopkeeper for sugar and kept her bag on the desk. Suddenly, she looked in the direction of the smoke and exclaimed! “Oh god, this generation girls are all like this!” Soon, she grabbed her bag and dashed out. On the other hand, the girl returned the tea glass, threw the cigarette bud and left.

I stood there alone, surprised and with thousands of questions popping inside my head. “Why didn’t this girl react?  Why did this lady generalize all the girls of this generation? How were the girls in the previous generations? Was the lady judging me as well?” I went home puzzled and today it’s been five years and I still don’t have a satisfactory answer for any of these questions, yet I think about it almost every single day.

Tell me one thing, what is right or wrong in this world? Well, according to me there is nothing right or wrong, it all depends on the side of the perception you lie on. For example, a butcher chopping the head of an innocent creature is wrong according to me but for him it’s his job, now who is right or wrong? Let’s consider one more example. I am sure most of you would have heard a story of your friend’s break up. Whose side do you usually take? By default it’s your friends, but why? Is it because they are always right or is it because you have no other option? Well, the answer is simple, your actions depends on how you see things. Here, there are three kinds of people, firstly, people who take their friend’s side no matter what. These people live in their bubble and maintain relationships around them without going out of their comfort zones. Secondly, there are people who listen to both sides of the story and then pick a side. These people are mostly confused and think they know everything, but remember there is always his story, her story and the truth. Finally, there are people who stay out of other’s business. These are the ones who actually see things as they are.

To understand why there are different categories of people and how do these different people develop a perspective, we have to take a flashback tour to our childhood. When a child is born, it’s taken care of very gently and cautiously as it has no idea about anything. As that child grows older, it starts asking questions. This is the stage where most of the opinions are made and a basic mindset is fixed. Now, this again depends on what the parents and the people surrounding the child talk, do or teach. Then the kid enters to the world of adolescence. This is when he or she does maximum mistakes and learn from them. Here, they directly take the outcome of a situation into their subconscious, then thinking about all possible outcomes. Rest of the life he or she remain clueless of the things happening but they feel they know everything as they are old enough and then they start judging everyone.

This is the exact stage when our thoughts become “Distorted”! I term this as the “Perceptive Distortion of our Neurons”. The reason is simple, we all feel we have learnt enough in life, but the most important thing is that we forget that life as a whole is a school and learning is an eternal journey.

The neurons in our brains are like sponges. They soak everything they see, hear and feel, but not everything is saved. It is volatile like RAM, only few important things are saved in the backend that is our subconscious. In deep learning we say, the model learns maximum and predicts more accurately only if the input data size is huge! Similarly, our brain is like a model and the information we provide every day is the input data. If we don’t see from different perspectives’ then how can we make wise decisions? We will always end up judging others instead of seeing the same situation from their perspective.

Well, life is an unpredictable journey. Today we might see someone and laugh, tomorrow we might be that someone! Instead, let’s avoid this distortion of our perspectives and see the world through each other’s eyes and create a better world for the future generations to see and learn from our shoes.