It's a small world after all...

In an increasingly globalizing world, we often need to interact with people who hold a completely different world view, often diametrically opposed to ours in specific respects. Differences of such nature often lead to misunderstandings and traumatic situations. One such issue is this elusive thing called strength of character . Almost every culture agrees that as people, we need to develop a "strength of character" as part of our growing up. And as the saying goes, "the devil lies in the details" it is only when we get to definitions, there are serious differences. Often these differences are conflicting, but not contradictory to one another. It is hence important to understand such differences and reconcile conflicts in order to develop a better understanding of other cultures and mutual respect. Here are some specific cases where I've seen conflicts emerge because of differing world views in my setting, (which basically is a place where what is termed as ...

Synergistic thinking - I Synergistic thinking - II Synergistic thinking - III Synergistic thinking - IV Synergistic thinking - V Synergistic thinking - VI In this post, I'll not repeat myself and define synergistic thinking and contrast it with imperative thinking again.. Please read the earlier posts in this series for my theory of synergistic thinking. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~ As a teacher, one of the very common traits I see among students is what I call "resistance to depth." This is the mental reluctance to explore deeper in a given topic and instead, try to want to move sideways and work on several diverse projects -- albeit in a superficial manner. There is nothing "morally" wrong about resistance to depth and it should not be treated as such, whenever I urge students to dig deeper. It is a very human tendency -- I display the very same resistance myself; and I'm sure most others do as well. Resistance to depth is a fundamental survival tactic as I will explain ...