motive

i sat down to write this something about motive and then it became a little foggy but i hope it comes back as i go clickety clack...
i'm a fan of legal shows on TV like Law & Order...Court TV...i like John Grisham...you get the drift. and the one thing i really appreciate is how the Assistant District Attorney always asks...ok...you got the evidence, but you still got to give me the motive...
and its interesting because i grew up on hindi cinema and zee & sony tv shows where you were guilty if the evidence was unimpeachable...or close enough...all right! at least admissible...
i say its interesting not because jurisprudence (i love this word by the way) seems more complete and more logical...'guilty beyond doubt' seems more right this way, but because its so much more vital i would think in the little wrongs and mistakes that happen on the mondays and tuesdays and the rest of the everydays...

a wrong and a mistake...one sparks off misgivings, the other sympathy...empathy. but how much of a difference does really exist between the two ? i could run over someone (touchwood!) round a blind corner someday or i could take a howitzer and fire it at some despicable politician i know from about six feet away (its funny how politicians are a really handy metaphor for just about every sleazy bad thing you want to describe)...the point is in both cases the 'victim' is probably grievously injured or (heaven help!) dead (in at least one of the cases i would fire the howitzer again) AND if you roll the whole thing back in ultra slow motion flashback with the action and resultant reaction, tell me what is it that you will find different? nothing! nothing observable to the naked eye that is, but most of us also instinctively realize that there IS a difference between an 'accident' and 'premeditated harm'...

that was the preamble. my point or the point of what i was thinking before i lost it for a while back there is that in the everyday mistakes and wrongs that we do and have done to us, 'motive' is so supremely important in all the ways it affects us. no one will sentence me to do time in ultra security because i told a lie or because i betrayed someone's trust but the knowledge of why i did what i did will decide whether i keep or lose that someone's trust. Genuine mistakes, and mind you most of us have a primeval atavistic instinct for what is genuine and what is not, may find forgiveness in time. However, deliberate 'motivated' wrongs seldom dispel the pall of mistrust and wronged indignance through life (the american penal description of it as opposed to the indian penal one)

which is also why in my mind it is really really important to understand why someone does that to you in the times that you are at the receiving end. how many mistakes are strewn across the history of our own lives which we carried with us as wrongs? how many times we have rebuffed genuine attempts to explain because we stood overwhelmed with the 'evidence' we could SEE or HEAR? if these were 'small' incidents, then sometimes...sometimes we would forget and even possibly forgive but even then things are never the same again.
my last thought on 'motive' is its weave with 'context'. the relativity of time..culture..geography, even the secure wrap of different childhoods creates so many different planes of 'context' that motives acquire very different hues...

is that getting back to sqaure one? i do not know...but maybe if i or you just pause a moment to ponder this before we judge an action next time then we are already doing better...aren't we?