Filter Coffee #041
Dear Readers,
🔗 FC #40 made my readers chuckle after reading the April 1st pranks. This year, my granddaughter played a prank on her mother by offering beetroot juice in a wine glass. Looks like the mischievous streak runs in the family!
Serendipity was a hit. My cousin Krupa flattered me by saying “It is serendipitous that I am associated with a cerebral cousin like you!”
My fellow mason Shereyar said, “Was it written in the book of fate or was it serendipitous that I should come in contact with you?”
In letter or verse :
It is neither stupidity
nor is it an absurdity
If in any given city
Some haven’t heard of serendipity
April 13th is Gudi Padwa in Maharashtra, Ugadi in Karnataka and Telugu New Year as well.
April 14th is Vishu, the Malayalam New Year as well as Tamil New Year.
I wish all my readers a very happy new year! May it dispel the gloom cast by COVID-19 and usher in a new dawn.
😇 Pride & Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice is an 1813 romantic novel written by Jane Austen. It follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the dynamic protagonist of the book, who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness.
In this newsletter, I would like to deal with pride and prejudice as two distinct emotions that play out in our lives.
Pride refers to a sense of satisfaction, and being proud is to experience that satisfaction at an intrinsic level. Grammatically, proud is an adjective but pride can be either a noun or a verb.
If a person says “I pride myself on being part of the green brigade” he is using pride as a verb but if he said “I had too much pride in me to not accept my mistake” then pride would be a noun. Let us see how ‘proud’ alters these sentences: “I am very proud to be associated with the green brigade” and “I was too proud to have not accepted my mistake”. Clearly, one has a more positive connotation, does it not?
Let us now look at what prejudice means. Simply put it means ‘bias’, a preconceived opinion or something that may cause harm. Being prejudiced against someone or saying something that may prejudice someone usually indicates an envious disposition. Prejudice can also manifest in hasty or unprovoked conclusions about someone or something. It can also stem from a predisposition.
If one has a predisposition to behave in a particular way, one tends to behave like that because of the kind of person that he or she is or the attitudes that they may have.
One might assert one's pride unmindful of the prejudice it may cause another. Visualise a simple scenario:
A boy’s parents aren’t too happy that he has chosen a girl who does not measure up to their expectations. They sort of relent and let the son bring her to meet them over dinner. The air at the table is one of disdain fuelled by the preconceived notion that she is no match for the son. Every move that the girl makes is scrutinised. Oh! She does not know much about dinner etiquette. Her dress betrays poor taste etc. The parents probe and search for things to make her squirm. Prejudice blinds them from being able to see that she is a girl who is good looking, from a modest background and well brought up and well educated though her parents are not so well to do. They are so proud of their son’s achievements and yet they refuse to take pride in his selection of a worthy soulmate and they let their faces betray their prejudice. Interestingly, the prejudice is intense since the parents wanted their son to marry a girl they had chosen, from an affluent family. These parents ought to realise that pride comes before a fall.
How do these two emotions play out in our lives? Could pride itself be the cause for prejudice? Maybe it could. If a teacher feels proud about a student’s achievement it may give room to another student’s prejudicial conclusion that the teacher is being very partial.
Prejudice is usually negative whilst pride can be a positive emotion, provided it is used as a motivating factor.
There are achievers in this world who wear the smallest of achievement on their sleeve and there are others who underplay their achievements in a self-effacing manner. People tend to be envious of others achievements and this is no different from prejudice.
Prejudice can make a person irrational. He may say or do something harmful. And interestingly pride comes in the way if he thinks he should express regrets or apologise. Prejudicial behaviour can also be triggered if one is envious of another man’s pride. Do you remember the old Onida TV advertisement? A devilish looking character says “Neighbours’ Envy Owner’s Pride”.
In a familial or societal or political or workplace context pride and prejudice are inseparable twins. Achievements are usually the cause for feeling proud. Underplaying achievements helps not only avoid the prejudicial behaviour of your peers but also minimises the possibilities of you being ostracised by them.
It would be a befitting conclusion if I spoke about another novel of Jane Austin, Sense & Sensibility published in 1811 before the publication of Pride and Prejudice.
The meaning of ‘Sense’ means the ability to act with restraint, judgement and therefore good sense keeps prejudice at bay. Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness to the emotions of another person.
Analogously, good sense prevailing, prejudice recedes, and resonating with someone's achievement makes sensibility a perfect foil to pride. Now, let me conclude by briefly discussing the phrase used often viz ‘without prejudice’.
You may have seen the words ‘without prejudice’ right on top of a letter or email or as part of the text. Let us imagine that you have a dispute with someone and you are keen to resolve it. You then write to the other party inviting him to hold a good-faith discussion. To ensure that the letter is not seen as a weakness or an admission of any wrongdoing, you put a legend ‘without prejudice’ or make it part of the letter by saying “This invitation is without prejudice to my rights all of which remain reserved.” Interestingly, pride may come in the way of engaging with the other party. But one should not confuse pride with discretion, which is a better part of valour. Why not settle the matter instead of spending months together in a court?
Speaking of settlement, see how Brexit got settled? Many think it was a classic instance when “Pride and Prejudice defeated Sense and Sensibility.”
The recent COVID spike is disconcerting. Please be careful. Avoid gatherings. Maintain social distance and don’t let the mask slip. Take Care! See you next week!
Loved the discussion on pride and prejudice. Unfortunately nowadays prejudice can be seen in extreme forms in the global rise of all the ‘isms’ - racism, sexism, feminism, fanaticism etc
Here we see prejudice that has crossed all reason and makes no attempt to rethink or reevaluate and just marches on in it’s proud robes of righteousness.
I guess this where wonder whatever happened to sense and sensibility 😊
I am very sorry (is sorry an adjective or a noun or a verb? Guess that’s for someone like Pras) for missing out on reading FC 40 in time as I was away on tour. Anyway I enjoyed reading it, a bit late though, particularly the one on pranks and about serendipity. As for pranks, we have seen many and fallen victim to many in the past several decades that it would take more than just a comment to do justice in mentioning about it.
About serendipity all I can say is that’s what life is all about. Though I didn’t see the movie “Serendipity” yet, I must say that yes, choosing a life partner is often something that occurs more by chance and it’s often what you make of the choice that determines if it becomes fortunate or not. We choose a life partner based on the few we meet- certainly not all the possible ones that we could have got married to, Given the Indian way of choosing a life partner, there’s more chance at work and given our parents and elders involvement in the choice, more often than not, it all ends well.
Trust Pras to go into the grammaticism in the words Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility in FC 41. I for one, am a person who just goes and uses a word as it is, forgetting all the grammar behind it. But I guess, by his profession, he could not avoid mentioning about the “without prejudice” part, which he would have certainly used in many of his communication in the past. Yes, we have mostly seen it used, often enough, particularly in official communications and understand why it is used.
For some reason while reading in FC 41, about Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, and “Sense and Sensibility” my mind immediately thought of another classic by Leo Tolstoy – “War and Peace”. That is the kind of association that it brought to me, may be it was my “prejudice” at work and may be it did not make any sense or sensibility to associate that great work with Jane Austen’s equally great work but that’s the way I was wired by destiny. That to me is a form of Serendipity, though it may or may not be for a fortunate end.