‘East is East’ & Emotional Intelligence
That powerful 1999 film East is East was shown on UK TV the other day: I’ve just watched it. Stunned. Timely.
Timely because I’m in the throes of developing my approach
to Emotional Intelligence (EI) and this painful story of deep cultural clashes
highlights many of the issues prevalent in describing and improving our EI: our
ability (or not) to relate to others at a deep and meaningful level.
I’m reminded, for example, of This Be The Verse http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178055
):
They fuck you up, your mum and
dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
Our
East is East dad, George Khan, played
so realistically by Om Puri, cannot help his behaviour. His views on respect,
marriage and many other things are part of who and what he is: his cultural
heritage. Long suffering wife, Ella (Linda Bassett,
current starring in the BBC’s Call the
Midwife) knows this only too well. We see how much they love each other,
beneath the cultural divides, and how Khan really believes that what he is
doing is for the best for his children. No matter what anyone else says or
does, he cannot see it any other way.
We, from the outside, can see, only too clearly, that he is
in denial about how the rest of his family thinks and feels. Such is the nature
of denial: when beliefs and conditioning (cultural or otherwise) blind us to
the reality around.
And that, in my personal and professional experience,
observed and felt from many perspectives, is also at the heart of the lack of
Emotional Intelligence: we fail to respond to the emotional needs of others by
being blinkered in our thinking. It’s nobody’s fault; no one in particular is
to blame: but millions, as Philip Larkin so ably highlights, are fucked up by
it.
But what can be done about it? As Ella and her sons found
out to their cost, standing up to a closed mind, fighting it, merely results in
getting seriously hurt: resisting denial usually makes it even firmer. So is it
fight or flight? Or perhaps strategic withdrawal. Elder son, Nazir, denied
totally by Khan manages to make a new a new life for himself away from the situation:
he had the courage to leave.
But wherever one sits in such situations, the first step is awareness,
as to what is really happening. Perhaps there is a spectrum: from total denial
to total awareness, the light slowly dawns
. . .
For more on the link between EI
and awareness, and suggestions on how to become more aware, see my
free webinar.
