Being Nice or Being Real?
2018. Another year. There is always so much hype about the new year among the plebeians. They believe it is a perfect time to start something, or change something, or for a fresh beginning. Well, I think it is as good as any time to do anything you want. But people are growing up, and I think that the general awareness has maybe slightly increased about the fact that the celebration of the new year's day is nothing but a giant and successful marketing policy of the corporates to make you feel all good about everything when it most certainly is not.
And, this is what I want to talk about here in this post. I want to address the real problems that are hidden behind the veil of the niceties; the problems everyone knows exist but they do not talk about because it is not nice to do so. Real and Nice. This is what we are going to talk about and I am going to use these two words a lot hereafter.
As a child, we are raised by our parents to be good, to be nice. We are trained to say nice things to people we meet, behave nicely in front of the strangers we do not even know, and in no case, we are allowed to say what we really felt. When a kid says something real, something he or she is actually feeling, they are rebuked by their parents often enough and are commanded to apologize to the person so less of mettle that he got offended by a kid just being real. And that is exactly when a kid in all innocence realizes that being real is wrong and instead he becomes nice and wins all the praises of the world, and that makes the sweet little thing happy. This is our first lesson in cloaking the real and becoming nice. And then later on, when the same kid is met by someone who is not afraid of being real, this same kid terms the latter as mean and gets offended by the truth.
Even our language developed around being nice. Let us take English etiquettes for example. If you need a moment alone from a group of people, you ask them would they excuse you for a moment. And the general reply is always positive to that question. But, why do you need the permission of someone you owe nothing to be with yourself. Also, since you have asked a question, the other person can always reply negatively to it. You will say that the other person was not being nice, which is true as he was being real.
Let us take one more example to solidify the point I am trying to make. A few years back, the official term in India for the physically disabled people was changed to 'differently abled' or 'divyang'. I personally believe that this was nothing but a big insult to all the people out there with certain physical shortcomings. Your calling them 'differently abled' does not mitigate their disableness in any manner. They fight the same struggle every day and your changing of the way you address them is definitely not going to make any difference to them. However, all it can do is to make you feel better or feel nice about it and yourself. And now I ask you a question. Have we become so incapable and morally intolerant that all we can think of to help someone in need is to change how we call them? And if yes, then shame on us, for your 'differently abled' are better off without your help.
The recent times are critical from a moral point of view. The mutual tolerance of each other has gone down the drain. Everyone takes offense at everything. And in times of such crisis, instead of addressing the problem, we are busy being nice. We are not even able to acknowledge that we are facing a problem, let alone addressing it, and to think of actually dealing with it is something unfathomable for me right now. We are often times told to concentrate on the positive instead of negative, but that does not obliterate the negative of its existence. It is present right there, but we are trained to ignore it, just like we learn to ignore everything that may cause trouble. We kept running away from things that haunted us for so long, so much consumed by the niceties of the life, that now we cannot remember how far have we come. We find ourselves in the middle of nowhere, totally lost, and instead of finding a way out of it, we once again busy ourselves in being nice and keep running.
And, this is what I want to talk about here in this post. I want to address the real problems that are hidden behind the veil of the niceties; the problems everyone knows exist but they do not talk about because it is not nice to do so. Real and Nice. This is what we are going to talk about and I am going to use these two words a lot hereafter.
As a child, we are raised by our parents to be good, to be nice. We are trained to say nice things to people we meet, behave nicely in front of the strangers we do not even know, and in no case, we are allowed to say what we really felt. When a kid says something real, something he or she is actually feeling, they are rebuked by their parents often enough and are commanded to apologize to the person so less of mettle that he got offended by a kid just being real. And that is exactly when a kid in all innocence realizes that being real is wrong and instead he becomes nice and wins all the praises of the world, and that makes the sweet little thing happy. This is our first lesson in cloaking the real and becoming nice. And then later on, when the same kid is met by someone who is not afraid of being real, this same kid terms the latter as mean and gets offended by the truth.
Even our language developed around being nice. Let us take English etiquettes for example. If you need a moment alone from a group of people, you ask them would they excuse you for a moment. And the general reply is always positive to that question. But, why do you need the permission of someone you owe nothing to be with yourself. Also, since you have asked a question, the other person can always reply negatively to it. You will say that the other person was not being nice, which is true as he was being real.
Let us take one more example to solidify the point I am trying to make. A few years back, the official term in India for the physically disabled people was changed to 'differently abled' or 'divyang'. I personally believe that this was nothing but a big insult to all the people out there with certain physical shortcomings. Your calling them 'differently abled' does not mitigate their disableness in any manner. They fight the same struggle every day and your changing of the way you address them is definitely not going to make any difference to them. However, all it can do is to make you feel better or feel nice about it and yourself. And now I ask you a question. Have we become so incapable and morally intolerant that all we can think of to help someone in need is to change how we call them? And if yes, then shame on us, for your 'differently abled' are better off without your help.
The recent times are critical from a moral point of view. The mutual tolerance of each other has gone down the drain. Everyone takes offense at everything. And in times of such crisis, instead of addressing the problem, we are busy being nice. We are not even able to acknowledge that we are facing a problem, let alone addressing it, and to think of actually dealing with it is something unfathomable for me right now. We are often times told to concentrate on the positive instead of negative, but that does not obliterate the negative of its existence. It is present right there, but we are trained to ignore it, just like we learn to ignore everything that may cause trouble. We kept running away from things that haunted us for so long, so much consumed by the niceties of the life, that now we cannot remember how far have we come. We find ourselves in the middle of nowhere, totally lost, and instead of finding a way out of it, we once again busy ourselves in being nice and keep running.
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