Context is Everything

My first year course at IITK, MBA611: Organisational Theory& Structure, introduced me to a saying by my professor which by far is my favorite of the several that I have heard from him. He said(not once but several times), Context is Everything. Several cases, several pieces of literature & many practical life situations thereafter went to bolster what he said. However, today I experienced something which made me add to this. Apart from the context, it is also composition of a person that defines his reaction to a certain situation. Infact, if we look at these two words deeply, we can easily relate the fact that somewhere both- context & composition can be traced back to the same meaning. Here, I am not eliciting the redundancy of the length of English vocabulary. Rather I am trying to drive to the fact that what a person is made up of (his composition), often becomes a part of the 'context' when it comes to dealing with him/her. There could be more to the context when you meet/interact or whatever with him/her, but one cannot deny that his/her composition is a subset of the context in which one lands up with him/her.
Where I am coming from is, a lot of times I rebuke people who are weak, I rebuke them for not standing up for what they believe they want. I think they are worthless, useless fellows because they just cant chase things with the same passion as I do. What I often forget is that my definition of 'wothlessness'or 'uselessness' is derived from what I think I am worthy of or what I think I am useful for. I think I am a strong woman, who has the desire & ability to chase her dreams, she can stand up for her ideas, her beliefs, and thats it!! In extreme times, I think everyone should be like this. What I dont realise is that these things are sure my strengths, but that doesnt mean that every strong person, every determined individual is worthy of life on earth; whereas every weak and not-so-determined person is worthless. We humans often, have the tendency of defining all good words in our dictionary in the same tone & magnitude of our personal nature/behavior - our composition, while all the negative words are meant for the things from which we are poles apart.

I came across someone who after having gone steady with a girl for two-long-years is soon getting into an arranged marraige. I always doubted if he had a real interest in the girl whom he was dating, but after having spoken to him I realised that perhaps it was love. What surprises me however is that, instead of standing up for his love and fighting it out to marry the girl whom he loves, he has chosen to live in remembering her every day of his life (I dont know for how long, though). He prefers to survive in a guilt of unfulfilled promises & anguish of unrealised dreams rather than come out in the open and say that he really wants to get married to her. I guess some people are just good guilt-managers than belligerent-social-fighters. How much i would have loved to tell that guy, "boss...u r wrong!...u must come out and fight for what you want". But just when I wanted to tell him that today, I realised that not everyone in this world is composed of the same ingredients, he & I for sure are not!! If I were him I would have handled this otherwise, but then I am me & he is he...and thats where the compositions play role in setting the context of a situation.
The intersting point here is however, how is life different for fighters like me and guilt-bearers like him in the long run. I am too naive to understand & assess if guilt is just a coward mechanism of avoiding social confrontation for him, for all you know things actually fall in place after some time. Also i fail to justify whether fighters like me screw up relations & good will for something that may recede & mitigate with the tide of time. The answer to this ambiguity lies in the adage 'wait & watch'...how long 'I dont know'.
However, without having to wait to watch, I can give a fictional example of what eventually happens... I read this book called 'Kite Runner' by Khaled Hosseini; he had these two characters Hassan- the fighter & Aamir- the guilt-bearer. Both were best friends. Hassan being the servant boy of Aamir was bound not only by duty to serve Aamir but also by desire. He would fight to the cost of small promises made to Aamir. And Aamir would not even come to his rescue, even if he were the silent spectator of sexual abuse on his friend. In due course of time, Hassan- the fighter owing to his low status is left to fight the trying conditions of a disturbed country while Aamir owing to his power & status flees to a life of comforts. Even as Aamir flees, he carries with him a baggage of guilt, to a new land where no one other than his own solitude could even have a whisp of what went wrong between Aamir & Hassan. But guilt accompanied Aamir all the way, to the extent of bringing him back to his home-land for what the writer claims is 'Redemption'. This is fiction however, where the guilt-bearer is designed to get an opportunity for redemption, and the fighter fights with valor all that he could.
They say, life goes a full circle, and as I see the real-life situation, the guy is still designing only a point and measuring its distance from the centre. His choice of surviving in the guilt of unfulfilled promises, looks like a dream of making several more equidistant points from the centre. Whether his life goes a full-circle or not, I dont know, what I know for sure is that people in this world have variagated compositions & assuming that you would bump into one of your kind is indeed a mistake. Thoguh we cannot bring everyone to a homogenous comosition, what we must learn & appreciate is the existence of the heterogenity. Just as each one of us is composed of different ingredients, we will all create different contexts of the same situation. Yes, Prof. Rahul Varman summed it right 'Context is everything!!'