POV

The other day I was scrolling LinkedIn and noticed something interesting. Even the C-suite senior leaders, the kind of people corporate expects to have “the answers”, were involved in debates where no single argument clearly stood out as the winner. The arguments were convincing, and they seemed valid from different points of view.

It made me wonder whether disagreements like these happen not because people are wrong, but because people are seeing the same thing from different angles.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, the ideas of Anekantavada and Syadvada resurfaced.

Anekantavada says that reality has many aspects and viewpoints. When we describe something, we usually describe only a few aspects of it. No single description can capture the whole truth.

Consider a glass of water.
We might describe it in terms of how much water it contains.
Or in terms of the temperature of the water.
Or in terms of how heavy or light the glass feels.
Or even on the material of the glass.

Each description may be correct, but each captures only one aspect of the same thing. This is what it means to say that truth is multifaceted.

Note that Anekantavada does not mean that everyone is right in their own way or from their own perspective. A glass of water remains a glass of water, calling it milk does not make it milk.

Syadvada builds upon Anekantavada. Because reality is multifaceted, every statement is made from a particular point of view (apeksha).

Coming from the software world, I relate to this through a software analogy: every piece of data is always associated with some metadata (some context). No raw data exists by itself. Only context-bound data exists.

No perspective exists without context, even when that context is not stated explicitly.

Truth is rarely one-sided, and most disagreements begin when we mistake one viewpoint for the whole.