Yes, sir! You are right.

One man meets his friend after a long time. The friend conforming to the directives of a polite society asked the man how he was. The man replied that he was alive. Hearing this deviation from the usual hi, how are you routine the friend was surprised and thus asked what the man meant by that. What the man said next is the reason why I am writing this post.

The man said that murder is illegal otherwise someone would have definitely killed him.

Read the letters in bold a second time. Pause. Think. Read the line again. Pause again. Think again.

Now this exchange is fictitious, I read it a long time ago in all those obscure comics and books that I frequently refer to. Then, why this trivial and fictitious thing is so important, that it warrants a thought?

The reason is that circumstances that brought this to back to the front of my mind are not fictitious. What actually happened was that I was with one of my friends. He has this annoying technique of reading newspapers. He removes each page individually, reads it and then bunches all the pages together screwing up the order and the newspaper. So he and I both went to meet a senior.

Now somehow during our discussions we digressed to the subject of newspapers, from there to that habit. So the senior says that he doesn’t like people who read newspaper in such manner.  My friend also joined in and starting criticising the guys. He said that it was childish to do so, the newspaper was not a collection of parts it was more than that yada yada yada.  Naturally I was surprised, at that stand but since we were in the senior’s room I left the topic. When I asked why he lied, he replied that he lied because he didn’t want to contradict the senior. So I asked why say anything at all? To this he replied that in a group you have to change your opinions, this is called diplomacy.

Do you know what this guy would do if another senior says that he likes to read newspaper by taking out individual pages? He will probably say that reading newspaper like this provides comfort; you can concentrate on one article individually etc. etc. etc. He will do this because in a group you have to change your opinions as this is called diplomacy.

This set me thinking, and I remembered one of Satyajit ray’s story that I read a long time back. That story was about one person who was fed up with the world because no one understood him. Now this person meets someone who looked like him. So naturally they start hanging together. Gradually he discovers that not only they look same but they have same interests, opinions, aspirations and desire. Basically they were same person but in different bodies. Naturally he should have been happy, and to tell you the truth he was. But suddenly he started feeling smothered by his duplicate. As he was not able to have a debate with him, he was not able to talk with him as he instinctively knew what that person was going to say. He was so pissed off that he threw him off a bridge on to the railway tracks. The story doesn’t end there, but the part that is relevant to our discussion does.

This brings us back to the fake exchange in the beginning of this post. I meant to say that stop saying yes to any and every one;  So stop being diplomatic; Take a stand as whatever you do you will still be pissing people off.

Adios