TED journal

Devdutt Pattanail: East vs. West - the myths that mystify

To begin his talk, Pattanaik tells an Indian myth of Ganesha, the elephant headed god, the scribe of story tellers, and his brother Kartikeya, the worload of the gods. One day the brothers went on a race, three times around the world. Whereas Kartikeya took the words literally and flew around the world three times, Ganesha just went around his parents three times and claimed that he won the race. When Kartikeya asked his brother why, Ganesha answered "You went around "the" world but I went around "my" world - and what matters more?" Pattanaik introduced the story in order to explain the difference between the two worlds, one is "the" world, which is the world as it is and "my" world, the world which one perceives. "The" world is objective, logical, factual and scientific. It asnwers questions of "how", such as how we are born and how the sun rises. "My" world on the other hand, is subjective and emotional. It is the world based on perception, belief and myth, telling people "why" we are born and "why" the sun rises. Every culture tries to answer the questionof "why" on its own way and it comes up with its own understanding of life. This subjective way of thinking descends to generation to generation, in the form of mythology, such as rituals, symbols and stories. Therefore, by looking at myth, we could have good understanding of different culture, in other words, different behaviours of people. For example, in western myth, it is believed that everything has one and only life and this belief creates the tendency of making specific goal or objective in one's life. It leads Westerners to be in favor of linier thinking, binary logic, standardization and search for absolute truth. In Eastern myth, on the contrary, the main belief is "what goes around comes around". Life is considered to be infinite and cyclical, and people feel comfortable with contextual and curvaceous thinking, fuzzy logic, descision making based on opinions. As a former businessman, Pattanail considers that the lack of understanding these differences creates many problems in business fields. When doing business, Westerners look for logic and strategy, formula to apply for certain situations. However, Easterners, particularly Indians, rely mainly on their intuition when doing business. Since one's intuition cannot be put in to a formula, Westerners feel great stress when doing business in India. To make the situation worse, it is usually "my" world that is better than "your" world because one considers its own world to be the most rational and others to be irrational, not realizing the fact that people from other cultures are thinking exactly the same thing. I enjoyed listening to the talk because after having read "Geography of Thoughts", I have been interested in the topic of cultural difference between East and West and I wanted to know more about how the differences affect to real world, which was little discussed in the book. Also, one thing that I thought to be surprising was how quickly people in field of business adopt themselves to the situation of rapidly changing world. Pattanaik is currently working at Future Group in Mumbai, as the chief belief officer. His job is to help managers understand their emloyees, comanies and customers by teaching them local mythology. The need for such position was founded by the CEO of the Future Group, who intuitively noticed that his business will never be successful in India without understanding between Eastern and Western cultures. I agree with Pattanik's oppinion that in today's world, where people and information moves rapidly one place to other, it is inevitable that we face crush of civilization. However, I also believe that if we look carefully at a culture we are going to face and try to understand it , we will be able to cope with problems that arise from our differences.