Believe it or not, the caste system in India which everybody in the civilized world loves to condemn exists everywhere in the world, but under various nomenclatures. The most convenient name for hiding or disguising this system is social class.

But for the purpose of this write up, I will be using caste and bubble interchangeably because they mean relatively the same.

The reality is that most times, our knowledge is limited to the information that is available within our caste or bubble. I make bold to say that most people hardly grow beyond their caste; they live and die in it.

Every caste has its own demands and expectations, and immediately you fail to meet the demands of your caste, you become an outcast(e) and because you have been made to believe that every other caste out there is evil, you would not want to try to see if you can fit into another caste. You would begin to see yourself, as a failure, good for nothing or a total failure. This is one of the reasons why people suffer low self-esteem or inferiority complex.

This is the trouble with the world. We all are entangled in one bubble or the other and the problem here is that not many are making serious effort to burst their bubbles so as to hear the stories of the people in the other bubbles or to look at things from the perspective of the people in the other bubbles.

Objectivity and balance have gone with the wind. There is hardly anybody we can pat on the back for being knowledgeable through and through, because we all are wallowing in our partial knowledge, if not ignorance. The reason being that everything we think we know, everything we believe in, all our `truths` are not only coloured, they are also flavoured, tainted and tilted to favour our individual caste.

That is the reason why the Palestinian is right, the Israeli is also right. The Christian is right, the Muslim is also right. The Sunni is right, the Shi’ite is also right. The Right wing is right; the Left wing is also right. The Conservative is right, the Progressive is also right. White people are right, people of colour are also right. In fact, everybody is right, therefore, nobody is wrong.

Lives are being shaped. Opinions are being molded along this our 'individual right lines.' This is the reason why world peace has become a fleeting illusion because, we all would continue to be reasoning and seeing everything from our partial perspective and would continue to wallow in our partial knowledge until the end of time, unless miracle happens.

What worries me stiff is that everybody seems to be contented or has been compelled or brainwashed to be contented with the stories in his or her own bubble. This could be as a result of the myths that have been built over time in the bubbles that everybody now believed it to be true, that my own bubble is the best and your own, the worst or that your bubble is the best and mine is the worst or the dire consequences of becoming adventurous and bursting the bubble to hear the other side of the story. Even Vladmir Putin of Russia boasted that Russia has the best prostitutes in the world. Just imagine a compliment from a Prime Minister of a country.

The truth is that no matter the fear they have put in us, no matter the stories of hate and condemnation that have been passed down to us from one generation to another, there are exciting and very wonderful people in all the corners of the world, but you cannot know this until you burst your bubble and interact with people in the other bubbles.

Variety, they say is the spice of life. But I know as a human being, there is always this fear of the unknown, the more reason a lot of people want to stick around familiar territories and familiar faces. This has become more difficult when we have been made to believe that no other people can love or care for us more than our own people. When we have been made to believe that other people would always hate us and hate everything we stand for or represent

However, if you can be a bit adventurous and courageous to go against some of the things you have been made to believe in your bubble, you could discover that your soul mate, happiness and even true love is not in your own bubble but in another bubble. When you interact with people from different backgrounds, when you interact with people from different cultures and world views, you would realise truly why variety is the spice of life.

Gustave Fraubert said: “Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” For you to realise this, you have to first of all flush out a lot of things that you have been made to believe in your bubble down the drain. You have to be open-minded while interacting with people from the other bubbles or backgrounds. You must not be quick at jumping to conclusions or holding tight to already formed opinions.

One of the things that is hindering a lot of people from getting ahead in life is believing in the myths that have been handed over to them by those before them, may be their fathers, grand fathers and even great grandfather, people whose views and ideas are obsolete as far as the present world is concerned. Some people in the present hold on tight to those views without even bothering to verify their sources or to check the circumstances that made what happened to happen.

This people don’t want to believe that we are in a fast changing world, that the reality of 400 years ago or even 50 years ago is no longer the reality today.

They don’t want to believe that human actions and judgments are most of the time caused by prevailing circumstances. That is why it is very wrong for some people to insist that children should inherit their fathers, grandfathers and even great grandfathers’ enemies.

Well as far as I am concerned, most things in the world are `to whom it may concern` or the choices that we decide to make. If I am not fortunate to have a good man, a man of peace as a father, there is no way I would have inherited my father`s enemies, let alone that of my grandfather because as a human being who makes mistakes, I would definitely make my own enemies. It would therefore, be overwhelming if I should combine my own enemies with that of my father. It would be too big a load for me to carry. But unfortunately, a lot of people have chosen to be carrying these unwarranted loads up and down in the world today.

As I said that I would not inherit my father’s enemies if he had some, I would also not want my children to inherit my own enemies because we as different individuals have our own different lives to live.

Nobody should live his own and that of another person. Again, there is no way my children would sojourn on earth without making their own enemies. To put it mildly, there is no way they would live on earth without having people who would disagree with them and it would be foolishness on their part to try to please everybody.

Even Jesus Christ who went about doing good still had enemies, let alone fallible mortals like us. So, no matter how much they love me as their father, it would be foolishness for them to try to inherit my enemies because it would not be in their best interest and wellbeing. Hate is heavy and dragging all that weight about would not give them good health.

Therefore, in life we should learn to be looking forward and moving forward and even when we are to fall, we should always try to fall forward instead of backward. Leaning backwards and inheriting the things that would not help us to get ahead in life is not right. Some people in the world today are not moving forward because of the load of the enemies they inherited from their past.

What these people don’t know is that their fathers’ enemies are not their enemies, no matter how close they are with their fathers or how much they love their fathers. Their fathers’ stories are not their stories. They should make their own enemies and also tell their own stories. If they want to fight their fathers’ wars, it means they have to ask God for another life so they can fight their own wars because every day of our lives, once we are making progress, we would knowingly and unknowingly be making enemies.

There would always be people who would not like us. There would always be people who would be jealous of us. There would always be people who would disagree with us. There would always be people who would want to tear us down. So, everybody in the world has a lifetime battle in his hand to fight, it would therefore, be catastrophic to combine it with that of another person.

It always wound my soul whenever I hear young people say things like “our people and their people are enemies or his father and my father were enemies even before I was born.” The question here is, why should what happened before you were born, be your headache? Have you not reasoned that God probably does not want it to concern you, that was why He decided to keep you out of the way until it happened, but now you want to force yourself to move the motion for the adoption of the minutes of a meeting which you were not part of. This is what normally lead to stagnation in life or untimely death, making what is not supposed to be your business, your business.

Culled from one of my books entitled Look Forward and Lean less On Your Past.

ABOUT THE COLUMNIST

Peter Anosike is a well-known journalist and development economist.

His book, Dangote’s Ten Commandments on Money (Lessons on How to Make Money from One of the World’s Richest Men), was rated as one of the best development books in the world by Wall Street Journal and FORBES. The book has been adopted as a workbook for grooming entrepreneurs by the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN). Anosike’s other of his books include, How To Be The Best You Can Be and Look Forward and Lean Less On Your Past – all trending in Smashwords along with Dangote’s Ten Commandment on Money and How To Be The Best You Can Be. You can follow him on Facebook and Linkedin.

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