What if?

"What if" is a nice sentence. Personally its one of my favs. So many times during so many situations we follow our sanity based on the knowledge and experience acquired over a period of years and we make judgments. Now the knowledge and experiences that we have accumulated have in turn been culled from a series of experiences and learning. There are very few people who suffer (read blessed) from "what if" syndrome. For e.g. when I am in a quandary I might take a set of actions and just get over with the itch. But what if I think to myself "what if". What if I did this or what if I visualized the situation from a different perspective? Believe you me you would be amazed at the results! Now due to paucity of time we might not be able to incorporate this line of reasoning but you would agree with me that even if we can't practice it per se, we can at least think about it and flex our gray muscles into analyzing the “what if’s”. A simple analogy comes to my mind: Imagine your mind as an old TV set where the edges of the picture are not visible because of the curvature. Now this "curvature" is not inherent but has been the result of years of "constrained" thinking. The greater is the amount of "constrained" thinking, greater is the curvature of your mind’s screen and lesser is the view you get. By applying the "what if" mantra we can make the screen of our mind, a splendid FLAT screen with unhindered view. Now God made us all with this flat screen, but years of sheer languid attitude and "what the heck" philosophy gave us the blinding curvature. During school days my Science teacher Ms. Ramamurthy, used to engage us in a strange game. We all were shown an old newspaper's cutting depicting a scene. It could be two persons passing by, scenes of pandemonium during a natural calamity etc. Now she always used to show us half the cutting and then asked us "what do you think is happening here?" We all would write whatever came to our mind and at the end of the session we had around 20-30 point of views. A picture of a man with contorted facial features would be construed by some as a guy in pain, a man being stabbed, a man making faces etc. Then she would unfold the paper and we all would see what it was all about. And then she would show us a man playing around with his kid. I really couldn't understand the rationale behind this whole exercise. I mean there was no right or wrong. She used to say "look there are so many ways in which you can see this”. Now I know how true all that was. She was making us see things not the way they are, but the way they could be. If only we can push ourselves into thinking "what if" we would be exploring a new world a new dimension hitherto unknown to us.