Statutory Warning

Preface:

Although I believe blog posts should not be personal messages written for a select group of people, this is a post that I’ve been planning to write for quite some time now. I hope it will serve 3 purposes:

1. Silence the people who say “Ganguly can’t play on the leg side” kind of stuff about my writing. Not that somebody has actually said that, but why take chances?
2. Prove to a certain person (I’ve been threatened with dire consequences by another individual if I divulge the name of the person) that writing styles can be changed or imitated. To extend the parallel drawn in point 1, I can say that if Ganguly wants, he can in fact play in a style that is very different from his own and similar to another player, say Rahul Dravid for example.
3. Remove some misconceptions from the minds of people with whom I have to interact daily. Lately I’ve been told that I haven’t come up to their expectations. I can’t bear to disappoint them and so must make sure that they reduce their expectations accordingly.

Hence this post.

It's my life
It's now or never
I ain't gonna live forever
I just want to live while I'm alive
(It's my life)

~Song by Bon Jovi

Beware of me. I’m selfish, dictatorial and rude. Don’t try to be my friend; I’ll hurt you beyond repair.

I’m an egoist if there ever was one, or an “I specialist” as my flatmate puts it. How else can you explain the fact that I have my own photo in my wallet instead of my girlfriend’s? Ok, I don’t have a girlfriend, but I could put somebody else’s photo there other than mine, right? What’s worse, I have put my photo in my website, my blogger profile, my Orkut profile, Orkut album and even my cell phone. What’s wrong with relatives, cricket players, movie stars, cartoon characters, gods and goddesses, cute unknown babies, flowers or even or even toffees? But I won’t use their photos, simply because I feel that I’m the only person in the whole wide world whose face is worth looking at. It is of course an entirely different matter that when I go to some new place or a party with the camera there are hardly any photographs showing me. That’s because I don’t give the camera to others (for taking my photo) due to two reasons: firstly I don’t think anyone else has enough brains to use a camera, and secondly I don’t want to share the credit of taking all the photographs.

I’m a perfect tyrant when it comes to taking decisions. I can go to any length to enforce my decisions to those around me. Anybody can verify this fact by asking my companions. It is true that I have often ended up following their wrong decisions (like coming out of Salar Jung after half day because they wanted to eat out and see a movie, which they eventually didn’t see), but that is only when I felt like experimenting. The worst part is, I like to act, to leap and then look. Thus when I see a long and fast growing serpentine queue for meals at the office cafeteria, I stand in the queue first and then think whether to eat there or not. Not like my colleagues, who think about whether to join the queue until it’s too long, and then they go and take hamburgers or pizzas from a shorter queue. Being an autocrat, I always try to convince the others that my approach is better. Now consider this: the time I take to eventually get the meal is actually shorter than or equal to the time they take to think, act and get the hamburger. And the food I get is healthy whereas theirs is… See, I’ve started enforcing my decision on the readers as well. But then, my point of view is the right one, isn’t it? I have proved it in so many arguments, yet they say I argue only to prove myself right even when I’m wrong.

Coming to rudeness, I’m impertinence personified. I often embarrass my co-workers by arguing with them in public, or calling them names. So what if they do the same to me? I ought not to do it. According to some, it is an unforgivable offence (Ms. Rowling, if you are reading this, please forgive me for using that adjective) on my part, and they have stopped all communication with me due to this bad habit. But I’m incorrigible. I prefer to call a spade a spade, and if necessary, in public.

I’ve never helped anybody in my life, other than “helping myself” at the buffet. From time to time I try to show off a little helpful behaviour, of course, but my acquaintances are so familiar with my character that they see through my ploy at once. So when I sit up till nine in the office to write somebody else’s program, they can tell at once that I did it only because I wanted to prove myself good at programming. When I explain a concept to someone, it’s only to improve my own understanding. When I wake up early and cook something and take it for my colleagues in office, it’s just to show off my culinary abilities. At this rate, it is becoming more and more difficult every day to find new and innovative ways to appear helpful while nurturing a hidden motive behind it.

No wonder I don’t have any friend at work. I have a lot of colleagues, co-workers and companions, but no friends. And I prefer not to have any. Friends are a lot of trouble… they borrow money, want help with work and studies and expect me to accompany them to tea and lunch, to teach them Origami, to call them when they get bored on weekends. Moreover, they get hurt if I say something wrong, and I get hurt when they retaliate. It has happened in the past, and if I’m not careful, it may happen in the future too. So I avoid making friends (except on Orkut). Don’t try to become my friend unless you are ready to run away cut and bleeding soon. As some of my previous ‘friends’ put it, “I have so many friends, but you are the worst one that I have ever met.” One even went on to add that “Looking at your face in the morning spoils my whole day!”

Of course, if you are a former Miss India or something, you can be my friend without any worries. I think the only kind of girls that are worth being friendly with are the beautiful ones. I stay away from all girls that are not good looking (by my definition). After all, if a girl does not have looks, why should I care about her mind? It is true that I have befriended several girls in the past who were not exactly breathtakingly beautiful, but to err is human… I was young and foolish then. I did not consider looks before making friends (though I must confess that all my female friends used to look beautiful in their own way in those days). Not any more. I have learnt from my mistakes now. I’ll not make those again.

I hope this post has made it clear to the readers and especially those around me what kind of a person I am and what to expect from me. This should reduce the number of misunderstandings in the future. After all, though I pretend to be a tough guy, those misunderstandings hurt me as much as, and sometimes even more than, the other person. Better not to have them at all.

Now, coming to the end of this post, I suddenly realize that I have failed to achieve objective 2: the style of this post, though unlike mine, is not a bit like that of the person whose style I set out to copy in the first place. I don’t care. In any case, mine is the only style that is worth copying.

A friend in need is a great nuisance.
Help a person when he is in trouble and he will never forget you, especially the next time he is in trouble.