Blind Faith

I am not sure about the rest of the world but we all know that a typical Indian blindly follows whatever he/she is asked to follow, without asking any questions. Some people reading this might not agree with me. For those people here is a recent incident from my work life.

We recently shifted to new work place and till the new automated attendance system was in place we were asked to mark our attendance in a register. The register was not kept at the entrance, it was kept in the far corner of the office where many people would not go all day if it was not only to mark the attendance. Because of this many people missed to mark their attendance in the register. Since the office was not very strict about the attendance, nobody bothered and the register was kept at that far corner for couple of months.

Later the management became very sensitive about the attendance and people started cribbing with in groups about the place where the register was kept, but nobody raised a concern. I took the initiative and placed the register at the entrance so that anyone coming to office can notice the register and mark his/her attendance. But to my surprise I noticed that next day the register was again moved to it's original place.

I decided to reason with the person who was made responsible for attendance register, and was really surprised with the reason given by that person. Before going to details of the conversation, let me tell you two things. The minimum qualification of people working in my office is graduate and since it's an analyst profile I would assume they are supposedly people with good logical reasoning ability. So following was the reason given by a highly educated person with supposedly good analytical skill.

The person in question, told me two things. One, why the register was kept at the place where it was kept and two, why it cannot be moved at the entrance. The reason for keeping the register at the far corner of the office was that the unit head used to sit there and he wanted to monitor when people are coming in. I thought that is justified, but since the unit head has moved to the cubicle close to the entrance by that logic the register should also be moved. To this the person gave me a reason which I did not understand then, he said, the register cannot be moved because now people are used to it.

Few days later I was talking to some friends about the blind faiths in India and could relate that to the above incident. What is a blind faith? We start doing something because of a reason, but keep on doing it even if the reason doesn't exist any longer. Because we are not the questioning type. The above incident is a very good example of how a blind faith is born is a period of 70 days and here we are talking about 100s and 1000s years of history and tradition.

So, people start questioning what you are doing without even knowing and understanding the reason behind that act. May be the reason doesn't exist any longer.