Blind men and the elephant

I read this story in a book. A father once gave his son a telescope. One day the boy was using the telescope, he was little disappointed with the performance, he went to his father and said “father it is useless, I can see better without it. Everything is too small.” Father smiled, the boy was looking from the wrong side, he was not getting the BIG PICTURE at all. The boy had a narrow outlook through the glass. The father turned the little telescope around.

The father had widened the son’s outlook. The boy grew up and improved the primitive telescope and with it discovered the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn and the Mountains on our moon. The boy was Galileo.

What is important is seeing things in proper perspective and we must widen our outlook. So it is generally about the perspective, outlook and the way we look at things on which I wrote earlier. Similarly, there is a story about blind men and the Elephant. I took it from Wikipedia for the blog, however this story is very famous in India and we learnt this as kids. The story goes like this…

A king has the blind men of the capital brought to the palace, where an elephant is brought in and they are asked to describe it.”When the blind men had each felt a part of the elephant, the king went to each of them and said to each: ‘Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?” The men assert the elephant is either like a pot (the blind man who felt the elephants’ head), a winnowing basket (ear), a plowshare (tusk), a plow (trunk), a granary (body), a pillar (foot), a mortar (back), a pestle (tail) or a brush (tip of the tail).

I searched for books on blind men and the Elephant and found out that there are many books with this title for professionals are –
Blind Men And The Elephant : Demystifying The Global It Services Industry
The Blind Men And The Elephant: Mastering Project Work and
on spirituality The Elephant And The Blind Men, Finding The Oneness Of God And Man you can check these books if you want to read them.

Image source – http://history.cultural-china.com/en/38History960.html