Roots!

“People have more confidence and comfort to move to an unknown future when they carry forwards parts of the past”

This line stared at me from the page of an old notebook that I was sorting through today afternoon.

The line stuck!

How do people who get displaced behave? I have heard people displaced by partition keeping some relic of their past with them. People who migrate to different countries retain some relic of their past or keep on with some tradition of theirs which survives across generations and hence acts as a link to their roots. A friend once told me what he had encountered in Trinidad: 3^rd/4^th generation migrants from India who carried relics of their past (including some old and dusted photographs) and who practiced some of their old Indian traditions but who could not remember which part of India their roots lay in. He supposedly encountered similar things in Mauritius – descendants of Indian origins with French names which were pronounced like Indian names. Indian parents in Fiji supposedly call their children “putra” and “putri”.

What are the implications of this observation for change? For people to change, they should be able to carry forwards parts of the past – if you threaten to annihilate their identity (and our identities are past based) or what they identify with, in all probability they would not budge.

An example from the past comes to mind.

A year back a colleague and I were conducting a workshop. We were trying to anchor the group towards using “certain kind of situations” to make decisions (a new approach in our context). There was a section of the participants who wanted to stick on to the old approach – decisions on the basis of past behaviours. This section of participants had been practicing this old approach for a long time and it provided them comfort. They consequently resisted our efforts to introduce a new approach. They finally agreed to move when the group decided that decisions have to be taken on the basis of responses to “certain kind of situations” (the new approach) but the evaluation would have to start from analysis/understanding of “the past behaviours” (the old approach). J .. people had more confidence and comfort to move to an unknown future when they carried forward parts of the past.

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Sourav