I think Dale Carnegie started this shit with his book 'How To Win Friends and Influence People'. I read it very late fortunately and by the time i had overgrown my desires to seek approval from others, atleast consciously. I guess, every modern young man or woman reads that book partially or fully some time in their late teens or young adulthood because it’s the basic instruction manual on how to suck up to people by pretending to like them. It promises to turn you from a thinking, emotionally variable, evolving (or devolving) LIVE human being into a super-friendly, tail-wagging dog so that other people are forced to pet you. And this book is lapped up by impressionable youngsters because it is assumed that making people like you is the most important prerequisite of a 'bone' called success and bone is after all what dogs are after unlike human beings who have a certain enigma called consciousness . They call it ‘soft skills’ in business schools. (And people actually pay lakhs of rupees to learn this sort of stuff in B schools.)
Now I have nothing against it if you wish to spend your life tail-wagging to people. I might even admire you if you become a devious, manipulative asshole who wrings the dough out of a man’s nose by claiming to devote your life to his welfare and happiness. But I can’t do this shit. Fact is: I don’t like people, not that I hate them but still, you know, i will be very happy left to myself.
Disliking people is not something that I decided to do after performing a lengthy process of reasoning and concluding. It was always a gut feeling with me. But over a period of years (decades actually – why try to hide my age ?), I peered inside the murky depths of my own soul and discovered the reasons for this tendency.
For one, people expect you to go out and meet them. They just don’t leave you alone. Every day someone was born a few decades back and wants to celebrate the day with everyone he/she knows. If not that, someone is getting married and wants to bribe you with dinner for giving them social sanction for fornicating the brains out of each other. Or somebody has got a new car and wants to show it off because he cannot show off his, you know what... And in any case, his is probably too small . I mean, if you’re happy and you want to celebrate, just do it with the people you love and who care for you. I don’t care for you. Don't you get it by now bhai !!
People have this strange concept, especially in India, that your life does not belong to you but to the society. You’re expected to be ever ready to meet people’s expectations from you. They don’t understand that I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to be of any use to society. I just wanna have my bit of the earth and the sky over it and just do my thing. I don’t want to disturb you, or harm you, or kill you unless you come in my way. I just want to be left alone.
Here I am in a party sitting in a corner enjoying my beer and lost in the world of my own ideas and thoughts and suddenly an uncle would come up unannounced and start asking me about the latest interest rates and all the rubbish that I left behind to get back to my life. Arre uncle! Only if you would remember that being a banker, 'my interest' only awakens when and if, is there something accruing to me and here, at this place, you thought that you would catch me off guard just because I had a couple of beers! Huh! Boy you should sometime come over to my pad!! I will get you there...
Then at other times, people would fawn on you for all kinds of loans & kiss your ass when they get it , they would go on cribbing for their entire life that they were fleeced & nobody listens to them now that I'm not there. What dya' think man ? Is it that when I was there, I embossed their names in silver in Chairman's 'bootlick list'?.
Now if this article has conveyed the impression that I’m a misanthrope who hates people, then I will pat myself on my back for having successfully conveyed to my readers what I wished to convey. So don’t invite me to your birthday bash and anniversary bash. Unless you have alcohol . Then you better invite me over. Because man is a social animal, and I take the animal part very seriously ;)
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