A Monkey on Our Back

All through the vicissitudes of life there has been a moment which keeps coming around again and again. Most of the deeds or decisions which go wrong for me have one very thing in common-The assumption.

Let me call it the side effect of mathematics which made my childhood way more interesting than it would have been without sums, but has been making rest of my life painful as it has imbibed an idea of making assumptions. Its roots have grown so deep into my mind that I have been making one at almost every stage of my life.

What corruption does to the country’s health, same does the assumption to our lives. You can very easily appreciate this idea if you would have tried solving a Sudoku and somehow made an assumption. The beauty of assumption lies where it meets the reality, exactly the way we equate the LHS to the RHS in an equation. Either it is the moment of epiphany when you meet the answer or you just find out how horribly wrong you went while making the assumption.

When I look around, I see it everywhere. Give us a complex half page question and it hardly matters if the data is sufficient, most of us will reach to an answer, if we have been given four double precision answers. We tend to find the answer, no matter what. We assume that every question asked has an answer and the more unfortunate assumption is we can always find a solution. It could be as disheartening as my assumption that I can express my ideas about assumption in a lucid way, or as unfortunate as Anna Hazare’s assumption that he can actually change the system. It could be as stupid as SRK’s assumption that promotion can a movie like Ra.one work or something as romantic as Love is the panacea for all the existing problems or even worse the assumption that one is in love. As I believe Love doesn’t come with any syndrome so in 99.99% cases, you start with an assumption. I’m still leaving 0.01 % for those SRK fans who have this idea hardwired in their brain that when you would meet your love, it would rain, there would be storms or some kind of calamity warning you. And once you are married, you can actually appreciate what can it lead to, though a bit too late. For me, Love is too difficult a game to play and no wonder I retired at my debut.

Well! I assume you are still reading and I believe you won’t be able to bear this for one more paragraph. So before I lose one of my readers, let me end this with my conclusion. I don’t intend to give you any misleading/confusing   idea about assumptions. I just wanted share something directly from my life, call it an observation if not anything else. Let’s not mess things more making countless stupid and unnecessary assumptions. Let’s ensure that we live in the neighborhood of the truth, if not together. I never doubt the approach of assumption in solving algebraic equations or the problems of our life, but we often tend to mistake choosing the right variable. We assume ‘X’ when we have to find ‘Y’ and hence we end up with an equation where we have to deal with multiple unknowns with scaring powers. The bottom line has always been clear. Let avoid assuming things which are already known, though obscured at that point of time. And very importantly ,while going ahead with an assumption we must keep that in mind, and as soon as we sense something is going wrong, the first thing we should check is “if we made the assumption right”.