'Whenever you feel like criticising anyone...'

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

- Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his vehement and intense critique of high society of the 1920s, and for which his The Great Gatsby stands a powerful testimony!

It’s quite surprising that, even way back in the 1920s, Fitzgerald’s focus is more on a technologically-driven, consumer-fixated, ‘leisure-class’ society which is beautifully brought to life in this novel.

The impact and the influence of this technocentrism is exemplified in many instances throughout the novel.

Sample this –

There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb!

Renowned critic Jennifer McClinton-Temple remarks on the novel that,

The modern world Fitzgerald depicts in The Great Gatsby - with its artificial distinctions between West Egg and East Egg; its social caste system that leads Myrtle Wilson to have no more value than an animal; and its monumental Valley of Ashes, an artificial barrier separating the rich and the poor, brought about by capitalism and industrialization - suggests a world that will eventually alienate us all from one another by replacing honesty and emotion with facade and ambition.

An intense observation at that!

Well, the quote that opens this blog-post, forms the very opening lines to the novel.

Chapter One begins thus –

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

He didn't say any more!

How much they make sense to us!

Let’s together take a mindful resolve to encourage and to motivate others as much as possible, and also take an equal resolve to stay far away from people who have made it their life’s only ambition to indulge in ‘negative criticism’ all of the time on all of the people that come under their ‘watchful eyes’!

As Jidduji has rightly observed, ‘To observe without evaluating or passing judgment is the highest form of intelligence’!

Let’s get ourselves this ‘highest form of intelligence’ from today on, rightaway at that!