Of old lenses and new visions

I recently came across a Linkedin profile of a person who was my UG Batchmate. He had tagged himself as an App Guru and others, that sounded borderline pompous but definitely not short on confidence. For a second I had a recollection of who he was during the college days and judged his status message. He was never shy of calling out his achievements even then and it was not a surprise to see him retaining that belief decades after as well. I’ven’t much followed his career and had little clue from his career history as to how it related to his tags. I then realized, I’ve been making prejudiced judgements based on how he was several years back as to who he is at present!!  The realization struck even more severe when i applied how others from my own past will be perceiving me based on what I am now as against how I was then!! Rather than blaming myself for such thoughts, wanted to make it as a generalized thought process and hence the post 😊 

I can take cushion from the fact that, I am not alone in making such judgements, having seen people making similar comments on others. After a bit of introspection and analysis, it may even be jealousy, that makes people think this way or their own inadequateness or inability to shine up to their own expectations, which cause them to vent on others, whom they might’ve perceived to be lesser of an equal. It might be the single longest sentence containing the most number of negative points I’ve ever posted, but sad reality and bitter truth. I know of a colleague of mine from a company where we worked together almost 10 years back. He was the most funny, jovial person I’ve ever worked along with and whenever he is around, laughter is guaranteed. He was very helpful as well and would be picture perfect with his adherence to processes. There was an impression about him that he was easy going, simply because of the fun element he always brought along and because of which his productivity and professional capability was overlooked. Even now, when people discuss about him, his accomplishments, they often feel he doesn’t deserve them and wonder how he could be sincere to the post. They always bad mouth about him and for a fact it had hurt his career and opportunities more than once, because of the perception people carried, especially those on power who could actually make or break someone’s career. I used to vociferously defend him and take up fights on his behalf whenever I encounter such conversation and soon realized it was a futile attempt as their opinions were set in stone. The best I could do was to warn that colleague and make him aware. Coming back to that Linkedin profile tag, I felt I was almost doing the very same thing which these guys did for my ex-colleague. Someone who might’ve been a last ranker kid in school days being a top level professional on his org, someone who might’ve failed multiple times in his secondary school years being VP level person, someone who still couldn’t write a complete sentence without spelling mistakes or grammatical errors being head of comms, are all common utterances that I hear on regular basis. The only common factor being that “someone” is no longer the “same one” they might’ve encountered and there is a small thing called life, that happens on a continuous basis, not just stunted/rooted to the time we knew each other. For someone who has been on both sides of the table, I feel this would be a post I may revisit regularly down the line!!!