Tag Archives: Society

The case of sunglasses

Life etc., Theories, , , ,

This is a story about sunglasses, and their high profile life in the Indian society.

Now seriously!
Sunglasses have a very high importance in India. They are regarded as the ultimate level of machismo in Indian circles. At least that’s what I have figured. I will attempt to present my point with some events, during the course of which I may refer to some anonymous faces, which may be recognizable by at least a few people reading this. I will not tell the names here.

I have owned sunglasses for quite some time, but rarely used them in India because of two reasons primarily, the more important one of which I will talk about later. The lesser of the reasons is that I started wearing contact lens only 2 years back, while I have worn glasses since my 4th. I thought of it as rather a nuisance to carry two pair of glasses, and switching back and forth whenever I was outside or inside a building.

A few weeks after I came to NCSU for my studies, a friend told me, “Every Tom, Dick and Harry wears a sunglass here”. I mean, what’s the big deal? Why does someone wearing a sunglass stand out in the eyes of an Indian? I am at a loss to answer why. But I think I know how.

I consider sunglasses more as a convenience than a style statement. The vast majority of Indians think exactly the other way around. What they don’t understand, is the very fact that it is an useful item. I wear sunglasses when it is sunny, because that’s what sunglasses are for. I wear sunglasses when it is snowing, because studies have shown that a great deal of UV is reflected off the snow, and it is always a good idea to wear sunglasses.

A friend of mine once asked whether I was wearing sunglasses to show off.
When I gave my reasoning, he mocked me in the typical style only a Malayalee can talk in, “As if you wore sunglasses your whole life. You didn’t bother about UV and dust and other stuff while you were in India. You started wearing only after coming to US.” Most Malayalees have this bad habit of making fun of people who break convention. I remember another guy asking me to pick up littered newspapers on the road after I wrote this. Being a Malayalee myself, it is sad to see that most are a bunch of hypocritical 2 year olds who refuse to grow up.

Coming back to the case of sunglasses, the answer for that is the bigger, more important reason. It is better explained by the fact that even in US, when I freely wear sunglasses whenever it is bright outside, any known Indian face I meet on the way will make a comment about my sunglasses. “Bada cool dikh raha hai yaar”
Why don’t they leave my poor sunglasses alone? They are a pair of dilapidated old glasses, which have been mutilated more than once, including me sitting on a bag with them inside, and then having to bend the frame back to its normal shape. It is not worth $5 in craigslist. I don’t wear them because I want to look cool. I wear them because I don’t want to squint. I would have worn it in India too, if not for the reason that there would be 100 Indians instead of 10 that I would meet in the course of a day. It once even went to the point that a girl who was introduced to me one evening identified me. She said, “I saw you today morning, wearing sunglasses and all.” Believe me, at the very second, I was like “Why am I even talking to her?”, not because she made fun of me, but because of the hint that I was being pompous.

Now, imagine the horror of wearing sunglasses in India, if this was the case with a handful of Indian diaspora in US. You will have a hundred eyes thrust upon you wherever you go. And hundred is not an exaggeration because India is so populous, it is not difficult to find hundred people in a course of 1 mile.

My thesis that most Indians wear sunglasses only when they have to show off is cemented by a fact which you can notice if you are an Indian. I have seen countless Indians take out their precious Ray Ban from the closet, and polish them spick-and-span, whenever they are going on a vacation. In short, for them, they are meant to be worn only when you are going on a holiday. This has happened in my trip with my friends in US last summer too. I have never seen them wear sunglasses otherwise. Heck, I have even seen one photo in Facebook, where there was a guy who put his normal glasses on his head, then put on a pair of sunglasses on his eyes.. all just to pose for a holiday photo. (Deductive reasoning.. The fact that there are two glasses on his head suggests that it was an impromptu decision.)

To conclude, I will mention a funny incident that Kunal told us. He was talking about the accent of some people in Delhi. You will be standing by the roadside. They come with leather jacket and expensive aviator sunglasses. Then they ask in unrefined Hindi, “Bhaisaab. Tame kya hua?” (Sir, what’s the time? And he *does* say “tame” for “time”) You will literally be shocked if you weren’t from Delhi. That is because seeing the sunglasses, you would not have expected crass language from him. That’s how stereotyped sunglasses are.

The fact is that if you wear sunglasses, it will attract the attention of every single Indian in sight, whether you want it or not. Whether it is a constructive one or a destructive one, is completely out of your hands. The only choice you have is whether to be a robot or an alien.

It is one of the idiosyncrasies of an Indian.
Welcome to Incredible India!

Like it… and not

Just Rambling, Life etc., , ,

I like…

  1. cracking really good (or bad?) PJs (poor jokes a.k.a. pun)
  2. people who really make some impact in the world whether in a large scale, or in grassroot level
  3. talking to people
  4. listening to people who talk and are ready to listen back
  5. the fact that I never hold grudges
  6. when I always give people a second chance to be good
  7. people who are open to the possibility that their religious principles may be imperfect and needs constant tuning
  8. smell of fresh rain
  9. free hugs (or “Jadoo Ki Chappi”)
  10. to wear seatbelts
  11. to drive fast and safe
  12. cryptic crosswords
  13. Jennifer Aniston
  14. anything made of potatoes
  15. spirituality
  16. knowing more about cultures around the world
  17. movies
  18. the sheer beauty of life

I hate…

  1. when someone asks, “So why don’t you tell me a PJ?” PJs have to come spontaneously
  2. candlelight protests which don’t seem to convey anything useful to anyone
  3. introverts who don’t open up even after I try hard to include them in a conversation
  4. people who boast
  5. when I have sudden bursts of anger
  6. when people don’t give me a second chance to show that the angry me is not the real me
  7. people who are narrow-minded with respect to religion
  8. smell of Chinese soy sauce
  9. any kind of formality at my home
  10. when people break traffic rules
  11. sitting on the other front seat when someone else is driving
  12. riddles
  13. Aiswarya Rai
  14. anything with Coriander/Cilantro added in it
  15. materialism
  16. when people have a very cliched view of my culture
  17. killing sentient animals for food, sport and vanity
  18. Cricket
  19. people who don’t know how to value life

This list will keep growing.

The freak of nature

Hallucinations, Life etc.,

There I was again, all by myself, out in the scorching sun. There was no one by my side. Of course, that was not new. I can’t remember a time when people actually understood me.

Few liked me, because I was not like most. I didn’t know all the intricately false formalities. I was the freak of nature. But was it so wrong to be like that? I asked, what is the relevance of pretense in social life? The same people who talked about “being yourself”, were so fake. I was just walking the talking. Was that so wrong?

I got no answer.

I craved social life. I just didn’t know how to get it. Did I need to change myself? Did I have to snatch friendliness from people? I didn’t know if I could.

Could people actually look past all these shells of pretense? I found out the answer the hard way. No one does initially. You have to condition them to look past the shells, and see the real you.

This is my internal struggle. I don’t know when I can win it. But if you read this, please know that there is more to freaks than meets the eye.

Delusions of grandeur

Hallucinations, Think about it, , ,

As kids, we used to imagine ourselves as some superhero and savior of the world. As we grow up, the situation doesn’t change much. The only difference would be that we dream of ourselves as someone who does something extraordinary, but still real, instead of flying or spinning webs or crawling through rooftops.

The following is a real-life incident which occurred to me recently. But it turned into a daydream midway through the incident. Curiously enough, I didn’t do it in reality; I just imagined doing that. Now, that was something which required some mulling over. This is no fiction.

Scene: National Games Village, Bangalore

I go to NGV for an hour of Badminton every weekend. That one evening was sunny and warm. I had just finished my game and was exiting the Builder’s club with AM. So were 4 other people who were playing in an adjacent court. Three guys and a girl. One of the guys was drinking water from a PET bottle as they were chatting. He finished the water, and he casually threw the bottle under a tree. I looked at the bottle for a few seconds, then noticed that he was busy talking to others.

A sudden rage started erupting in my mind. How could a person, who looked educated enough to me, be such an imbecile? The other part of me said… Curb your anger, but don’t leave this case as it is. Teach him a lesson. Teach him the right thing to do.

Deciding to teach that guy a lesson, I slowly went near the tree, took the bottle from the ground, and looked at the person who threw it. He had noticed me taking the bottle. He was looking at me, completely puzzled. His friends were alternately looking at him and me in disbelief, possibly because I didn’t even remotely look like a tramp. I just smirked at him and started walking.

“What are you doing?”, the guy apparently decided to go ahead and ask me the reason for my irrational behavior, as I strode past him.
“Putting this thing in its rightful place”, I said, pointing to a waste bin which was about 20 feet away.
The guy was blushing red by this time. He mustered whatever dignity was left in him and said, “Please. Let me do that. It was really stupid of me to litter, and I want to correct my error.”

I gave the bottle to him. His friends were nodding at me approvingly. I smiled vaguely.

“What are you staring at?”, asked AM.
I was still looking at the tree trunk. The bottle was still there. I turned around to see the guy still in conversation with his partner, the girl.
That was just a daydream. But I still had a chance to actualize it. Instead, I chose to wait for them to leave before picking up the bottle.
“We’ll just go for a walk before we return home”, said AM.
And as it happened, by the time we returned, the group of 4 had gone and a cleaner was already clearing the litter.

I went home and pondered over this for quite some time.
Many of us want to do something extraordinary for the society. To do that extraordinary thing, we need a lot of kindness and altruism, and from what I learned through the above incident, a hell lot of courage.
Now, many people are good and altruistic, but I think that they are not really courageous.

That singular act in my hallucination carried a very strong message. We can only stagnate the process of societal degradation, but never revert it, unless we spread awareness in others also. The hero in my dream (Ahem..that would be the “surreal me”) was courageous enough to insult a stranger, because he had done something which I thought was wrong.

But even stronger was the message that my realization carried. That we are all robots, but our subconscious mind is not. The real me didn’t do it. I just didn’t have the courage to do it to a stranger. I didn’t have the courage to stand out in the crowd; be an oddball.
We always want to be in the zone that we consider to be safe. It would have been a different ball game if someone asked me to do something which deviates from what I believe. Because the doer in that case would be me, and I would strongly resist.
But in this case, I was weighing the consequences of confronting a stranger for a matter that had no direct impact on me, with what I believed to be just. Of course, the first plate weighed more, because our society has degraded to such an insolent level of courtesy, which makes any mildly offensive gesture indistinguishable from disrespect.

There are a lot of do-gooders around. But an improvement in the society will be expedited if they teach others a lesson or two about their misdemeanors. But very few people dare to go that extra mile, because it is a murky forest full of hostile creatures out there. I realized that I’m definitely not among those courageous ones, although my daydream suggests that I want to be. But what good are thoughts or words, if they are not enforced by deeds?