What is the Bolti Bandh Dialogue?
Let's build a brave space for dialogue.
Dear Friends
Hope you all are doing well.
I am writing this in such a happy mood while I am listening to a podcast and also waiting for the India vs England T20 match start.
I am in Bangalore since past few days for our graduation event of the Bolti Bandh fellowship and this has been life changing experience for me to learn everything about how to have dialogue with others, conflict resolutions, art therapy, communication and more importantly communication.
I am going to share a few paragraphs from our work report which will give you an idea about the work that Bolti Bandh does and then will write my article here which was published in the book.
Letter from the Co-Founders of Bolti Bandh
Our Bolti Bandh journey began from a deeply personal space: loved-ones disagreed with us on something they viewed as ‘political’ but was, to us, deeply personal, affecting our daily lives. We could either choose to keep our hurt aside and accept what they had to say, or reject them and live our truths. It felt zero-sum. And they seemed to be grappling with the same choice.
Bolti Bandh is the result of our determined search for a third option: Loving someone and holding contradictory opinions without one opinion needing to win. Listening, especially when you feel like you can’t.
We are building a new societal muscle in people, to have a new kind of conversation that is not only about making themselves heard, but making the ‘other’ feel heard, and not about ‘what’ they believe in, but ‘why’. The human ability to do this isn’t new or unnatural; we are merely reactivating what has been educated out of us to become long-forgotten, lost tendencies. The inherent curiosity in human stories that we are born with, the inherent craving we have for making human connections.
What you’re holding in your hands right now, is our insights, learnings and impact story so far, leading us to why we are here together today.
Perhaps we live in increasingly and alarmingly divided times and face a truly unprecedented crisis of polarity and hatred, perhaps it's the anonymity and democratization-of-opinion on social media making the polarity and hate more visible. Perhaps it’s both.
The need for a large scale movement to depolarize has never felt more urgent and ready for take-off. With you.
This gathering of leaders and catalyzers around this idea is the beginning of building a robust ecosystem of action and reflection around depolarizing dialogue.
We find ourselves in more diverse societies than ever before, and as such we believe that this societal muscle is the most crucial step to making any process of social change or political reform, in today’s times, successful and sustained.
Everything is Relatively Correct - Pawan Rochwani
I have been a part of the internet for most of my adult life and the internet has been a direct part of my livelihood since 2016. My relationship with the internet and the dialogue I engage in through it has changed substantially over the period. The internet is cluttered with opinions, perspectives, thoughts, and random bullshit. It’s the greatest place to learn and explore but it is also a place filled with animosity and chaos. And in an increasingly polarised world, the last thing we need is conflict born out of miscommunication and misunderstanding. What then should be our course of action?
First, we should understand that this world is an imperfect place and so are we and our perception of this world. Everything that we strongly believe in, passionately put our faith in, is subjective. If you carefully consider, everything is relatively correct. There are not many absolute truths. In fact, our reality is mostly constructed on multiple, shifting perceptions based on relatively few scientific facts. You can test this out yourself. What is something you know to be true? You may say “I weigh 50 kgs and I can prove it”, even this statement is only relatively correct. You weigh 50 kgs on Earth, but what about on Mars or the moon? Everything, even something as objective as weight, has a context, a point of reference, a history. This stands true for any opinion we hold.
The moment we start accepting that those with different opinions than us are not objectively wrong but only subjectively different is the moment we will be able to move beyond the state of animosity and look eye to eye on matters.
Let me give you another example, Erwin Schrodinger is a Nobel prize-winning physicist and he proposed a thought experiment in which he traps a cat in a box with some radioactive substance. Eventually, as the substance decays there might be a poison explosion that can kill the cat. Now unless you open the box and know for sure whether the explosion has occurred, there are two possibilities- the cat is either dead or alive. As long as the box remains closed, both possibilities are equally true and they exist simultaneously. So there are overlapping realities. Similarly, our beliefs are not always contradictory. Two seemingly opposite things can be equally true and important at the same time. But we have a natural tendency to 'otherize' people, put them into boxes and see them as inherently opposed to who we are. As long as we have this segregational outlook we can never truly connect with people. We have to counter this instinct of othering people by engaging in conversations and dialogue.
We as a community are losing our appetite for discussion. We have a fixed set of prejudices and beliefs and we seldom try to challenge them and interact with the information at hand to evolve our thoughts. Consensus is a far-fetched dream when we fail to even acknowledge and understand each other. It is foolish and arrogant to disregard people, thinking that you know better than them. And even if we do know better, imposing that better worldview on someone won’t make much of a difference. In order to make someone empathise with our viewpoint, we have to be kinder in our approach, understand their stance sincerely, and then politely present our stance without looking down on them. We need to realize that nothing is as simple as it looks, every belief, every story, every opinion has many dimensions and a history. Nothing is better or worse on its own, everything is relatively correct.
We just have to listen to each other.
I am not adding any external links to this newsletter edition but let’s engage in the comment section if you have any questions about the concept of Bolti Bandh or you can even reply to this email if you want full access to this book where it has multiple other articles just like the above ones.
Take care and have a great week ahead.