SPEAKING OF WORLD VIEW AND CONTEXTS..................

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/music/a/violinist_metro.htm

Good morning India.........

Dressed in jeans and a baseball cap, a 39 year-old ‘fiddler’stood against a wall next to a trash can at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington D.C. He looked like any other street musician trying to make a buck.

During the 43 minutes that he played his violin, researchers watched 1,097 people pass by during the morning rush hour. It took 3 minutes before someone even gazed in his direction, and even longer before any money was thrown into his violin case.

Most people did not notice the musician. Some were talking on cell phones, others listened to iPods. Masterful pieces such as Bach’s “Chaconne”, Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria”, and Manuel Ponce’s “Estrellita”, were passed off as nothing more than “generic classical music”. (Weingarten, 2007)That day, the fiddler made $32.17, or 75 cents a minute.

When situated within an upscale concert hall dressed in black, the same 39 year-old ‘fiddler’, Joshua Bell, on the same $3.5 million Stradivari violin, commands up to $1,000 a minute playing the exact same masterpieces. This elite musician is said to be “one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.” (Weingarten, 2007).

Within the context of a subway street musician, a measly seven people were moved to stop and listen before walking by. Within the context of a famous concert hall musician, thousands of listeners invest significant money to hear and be moved by Bell’s music, often with standing room only.

Often times during my counseling sessions with my students and their parents, I come across huge generation gaps and acute misunderstandings between the two. "Misunderstandings" is a mild word I use.
I think let the new generation have a free hand once a “Vision” is created. Let them be the designers of a new foundation along with the new buildings. Let them learn from old mistakes and their own. Let them close gaps to the front and not to their rear. Let us not keep making them look into rear view mirrors all the time in terms of our righteousness, vanity, cultural, social and religious bindings. Which often times my generation mistakes for "Values".

I think the first step would be recognizing the fact, that “What was good for us in our times may not be good for them in theirs”. After all how the world occurs to us, make our contexts and these contexts drive us.
(Precisely why I have reproduced the story of Joshua Bell).

Similar is the case with the new generation. Let us not make their contexts. It would be the same as creating new buildings on old foundations, howsoever much we may feel that our foundations are the strongest and the best. That is because over time our beliefs become our absolute truths and finally our so called values. We forget that values are only those which are universally accepted and not by isolated societies. 

Therefore it is time that the older generation learnt to understand that the next generation might see the poor fiddler as Joshua Bell on the subway and make their contexts accordingly.

The context uses you in that it shapes your way of being, which includes your perceptions, imagination, emotions, and thinking, and as a consequence the context shapes your actions. Can you really domesticate the next generation as per your perceptions and contexts? Like you train your dog not to pee on the carpet, to indicate with his tail when he requires to be let into the garden for his poop or not put his loving paws on the baby?
Food for thought is it not?