The first time I got to know that story, I was ten years old. I read it in a book from the school library. It was a children’s book, so I doubt whether it even had a hundred pages. It’s easy to assume what all was written, or more importantly, not written in those books. The way those books are presented to young minds, it made me develop a very black-and-white understanding of the world. 

Though, Indian mythology had caught my interest at that point, so I decided to read more about it. I stumbled upon more books related to Mahabharata over the next few years, reading which made me visualize the complex map of the story. Each story varied in different books, they branched out, every character had a backstory which sometimes went back to generations. The layers and layers of narratives, the nuances of every story, I made me understand how linear my own way of looking at the world was. 

The way the story was first presented to me, it implemented itself at the way I perceived the world around me. People were either good or bad. Those who expressed any of the ‘negative’ emotions, like anger or dislike, were someone who you needed to be away from. A person should always be forgiving, no matter what, and be more helpful, without any boundaries. These were the ideals set into my younger self’s mind. 

Children's books are often written in the similar manner, coloring the world often in a very contrasting perspective. Then reading a story like Mahabharata further perpetuated that logic. That was how just knowing a single narrative affected me.

But it was the same story that made me look beyond that linear boundaries. After reading several takes on the same story, I realized how narrow and rigid that way of thinking was. It made me more open to people, and actually helped me grow as a person. Without judging or setting up ideals for others, I was able to interact with more people and even learn further about myself. It made me accept that there is no one thing that defines a person, but several layers of narratives and experiences that constitutes them. 

Jim Valvanno was an American basketball player and coach, who delivered this speech at the ESPYs (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly) after winning the Arthur Ashe Courage Award in 1993.

At the start of the speech, he lets the audience know about him fighting cancer during that time. Maybe, his intention to say that was just to set a premise for the speech, as it concludes with him urging the audience to help in funding the cancer research facilities, but it also creates a sort of emotional link between him and the audience. He then relays some questions he faces everyday as a person fighting cancer, letting them know the one-dimensionality of questions like, "How do you go through life?" or "How was your day?", which are asked to him all the time. His words set a feeling of uncertainty within the audience when he mentions the fact that he has little time left in the world.

Valvano then lightens the speech by talking about his personal experiences, about his first speech as a coach and reminiscing about his embarrassing moments, adding humor to his words. He then links those experiences to the "inspirational" part of the speech, talking about how one should aim to live a more fulfilling life instead of a longer one, how every experience and mistake makes you the person you are today. He urges the audience to be more vulnerable to their emotions, advising them to laugh, think and cry everyday. 

It then bleeds into him talking about how the money being donated for cancer research, though significant, is not enough. He then tells the audience the statistics of people being affected by cancer in the world, and then its mortality rate. He evokes a sense of morality within the audience when he urges them to support these research facilities more, telling them how it will save more lives, if not now, but in the future. 

Valvano holds the attention of the audience by softly overlapping the different parts of the speech, maintaining a strong and continuous rhythm throughout the speech. By his tone and speech, one can get the hint of him being a coach. He sometimes slips into his native tongue, which is Italian, making the audience laugh and relate more to his speech.

Do you all remember "The Dress"? For those who are unfamiliar with it, this picture went viral on the internet a while back, with people debating over the colors of this dress. Many saw blue and black, whereas the others saw white and gold. I was among the latter. When I saw this picture two years ago, I was at home, so I showed it to my mom and sister too, not really believing that people saw different colors. Like how? It's clearly white and gold. 

But then, both of them saw blue and black.

They thought that there was something wrong with my eyes. I thought that there was something wrong with their eyes.

Now, our own debate over the dress continued for over an hour, until I could finally see that the dress can be seen as blue and black too, which was the actual color of the dress. My mom and sister never saw white and gold though. It was the light and shadow falling over the dress that made some see it as white and gold, this was what I read when I was trying to understand why this happened. So, we can say that the experience of the colors laid in the perception of the individual. 

Here was one dress with two established colors, which were perceived differently by everyone. We named them blue and black, or white and gold.

Now without a visual sense, these names are just words made up of some letters. Then what are these colors? And how do we know that what I see as one color is the same as what the others see?

For example, I see the sky. I see that the ocean is of the same color as the sky. The Facebook logo, doraemon, dory and copper sulphate are of a similar color too. We decided to name it 'blue'. Now, wherever I, or anyone who sees that color will associate it with that word. 

But how do we know that a particular experience of the color is same for everyone? We all might be seeing tremendously different things in the same object, but since we have been calling the color with a particular name ever since we were children as we were taught to, we all assume that the experience is the same for the others. 

And we'll never truly know what the world looks like through somebody else's eyes. 

Humans have photoreceptors in their eyes called rods and cones. Most people have three types of cones, which can sense blues, greens and reds. The objects bounce off light falling on them of varying wavelengths, with violet being the shortest and red being the longest. These wavelengths are interpreted by one of the three photoreceptors, and we experience the color.

There are people with only two types of the cells, so they don't see colors the way we see them. They can live among us not even realizing that the people around them see the world differently. We call them colorblind. But are they really colorblind, when they do see colors; just not in the manner we experience them? 

Then there are also some people with four of these photoreceptors. So they experience more colors than most. So in their book, we are also colorblind.

So this theory that we all don't see the same colors really questions the linguistics and understanding of the world we've based our individual self upon. When someone says they like or dislike a particular color and the other reacts to it, they are not talking about the same thing. 

The associations of colors are made-up by us humans. My idea of white being associated with peace or death, someone else might associate those ideas with what I call red. When we associate colors with beauty, gender, culture, race, emotions or even with an individual, our entire opinions are built only through the singular lens of ourselves. So essentially, our beliefs are formed by what we're told instead of what we see and experience.

We'll never know what someone else's color of 'peaceful and calming' or 'violent and aggressive' is, and will only link our own experiences to those words. 

And it's insulting to the world we live in, when we enforce our human perceptions to something so unknown yet so visible but intangible, and it's unfair to those around us when we don't respect their way of seeing the world.