Character as We see It….

If beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, then why doesn’t the character lie in the eye of the one judging?

Two girls in their mid 20’s were standing aside a fast food joint located in heart of Delhi, wearing short dresses and vibrant nail polishes. There were no eyes as far as I remember that would have missed the view. But the story was something else than what it seemed at first. We, a group of friends had ordered a round of delicacies with some nuclear hot snacks and while we were waiting for the order to come across, I heard a conversation about the girls on the very next table. It was a mixed group of people from both the genders. They had laptop bags and a bunch of books on the table and were going through some sort of preparation, whether for a job, a project or a college assignment, I am not sure.
“Look at those girls”, the boy in the group said. “ Do they have any decency at all? This is the type of the people who bring shame to the society.” The girl sitting on the same desk to my amusement replied, “ I think they live away from their native place and hence, are crediting the situation to its fullest, their parents would not have allowed them to do so”. The boy jumped into the conversation again and advised the group to continue with the work they were doing as he thought such bad character-ed people were the least he was bothered about. The conversation stopped but the glares did not. And that was it, a pair of clothes with some vibrant colors were good enough for this lot to judge people’s character. Something that even the most learned of people would have taken months to estimate. But this is the truth that we live with everyday, we judge people on how they dress, what they do and how they behave in the public.
If clothes defined character, politicians would have been the best of them all. In fact, all the above traits if in case defined character politicians would have always topped the charts. But the case is completely paradox of the statement. I still can not figure the connection between the dresses the girls were wearing and their native place. All I could come up with is the assumption that the girl who commented in the first place would love to wear the same dress if she was away from her native place. The group was more interested in others than they were in their work. This is something of an identical situation for most of us. We are more into others than we are into ourselves. We find a lot of preachers who do not miss a chance when it comes to being the social police, but find it really tough when time demands to put money where their mouth is. It indeed is a human tendency to react in a negative manner at first. We do not see what is there but we see what we want to see or what the media and our leaders want us to see. If the beauty is in the eye of the beholder then why character is not in the eye of the one judging it.
I believe the character of the people commenting on the two lovely ladies was more at fault. Their eyes after regular intervals came back to one particular table. Whatever happened to the ‘see no bad, speak no bad and hear no bad’ theory given to us by the great Mahatma Gandhi. The question that I shut this post at reads If something is bad, than why do we look at it time and again? And just for the records here, India is among top countries where search for porn is the most. Guess that leaves us all bad character-ed!