Type type

Recently, a friend insisted that I visit a blog on a claim that the posts on the before-mentioned did not make any sense to him. I did grace the blog with my presence shortly afterwards, expecting at most a gigantic chaotic pile of complex lexical convolutions. But fortunately or otherwise, that wasn’t the case. I chanced upon this post whose words though making sense individually, well pretty much *sense*, seemed to be carefully constructed in such a way that a normal human being, well versed in the ways of the English language would find himself despondently hopelessly and downright miserably lost in the mother of all preposterous ludicrous labyrinths. That is mildly putting it, of course.

Well, moving on. While reading a couple of other equally entertaining posts, we decided to read the comments, the numerical count of which seemed always to belittle Abraham Lincoln’s oft-repeated figure. Relieved was I as there were many a spam comment dancing away to glory, probably a just commentary to the essay. But there was one statement in which a person took offense to the blogger’s stereotyping a set of people for doing something; the contents of the actual observation elude me. But then my friend asked me, “What’s wrong in stereotypes?” I replied, nonchalantly, “People don’t like to be stereotyped”, as I continued to read through the rest of the junk comments, which by the way, are sometimes very funny and at times even interesting. My friend still not satisfied with my indifferent answer, persists, “But kyun? What’s wrong with being a stereotype?”

Is there anything wrong with being a stereotype? Being typecast as the studious type? As the athlete? As the intellectual idealistic hypocrite? As the single-digit IQed American President? Is there anything wrong with being labeled anything?

Without going into the morality and ethics of the whole pigeonholing concept, an honest attempt to understand why, if actually empirically or factually genuine, do people not want to be stereotyped. What happens when you associate someone with a particular set of people is that they start feeling that they are no longer unique. Absolutely necessary. Of divine cosmic importance. Or something like that. For since they are now of a particular collection of individuals, they can be replaced! Their existence is no longer barterable. Blackmailable. Life will carry on, for the better part, as always without them. That’s taking it too far sometimes, but hey, I’m just trying to don the psychologist’s cap.

My friend’s repartee was “In a colony of ants, all the worker ants are undistinguishable and yet without the ants, the colony can’t survive.” True. But this isn’t contradictory to what I said. My parallel to this situation would mean that assuming ants have human feelings and weaknesses, all the obsequious worker ants would be suffering from a titanic mental depression since as an individual, no ant can go on strike and refuse to work for he can be replaced without much hue and cry.

And to think I would make a good psychiatrist ;).

Thinking about it, this reasonably explains the blog which started the whole issue. A way to stand apart. Writing things far beyond an average human’s capacity? Beyond or below is debatable but with due respect to all that is unknown, I shall just say that known is a drop. It’s like how all girls love to flaunt the books that they are ostensibly reading or have read. If by some miraculous inexplicable circumstances, you need a random sampling on the most arbitrary books ever written whose very title sounds cerebrally challenging, all you have to do is to obtain the names of the favourite works of “literature” from females in the age-group 17-23. Well, the age part was kind of made up, but the rest of the information is remarkable precise, subject of course to market fluctuations. : ) .

All said and done, stereotyping is something we all do, subconsciously at best. Take even me for example. When I come across a girl whose presence makes my heart skip a beat (yes, there are some of them like that), there are usually three categories into which I classify her.

Type 1: Beautiful. Having qualities that delight the sense of sight. Not just good-looking. Not just pretty. There is only one word for this type and I reiterate, beautiful. There is a difference between this adjective and the other nearly synonymous ones. Beauty is permanent.

Type 2: Sexy. Hot. Having qualities that delight you to a euphoric feeling of bliss. In whose presence, you are unable to hold a single thought other than about the person herself.

Type 3: (My favourite) This type deserves special mention because of the scarcity with which they exist. And because they are most difficult to describe. Sometimes, and I do not shirk to repeat, however rare that sometimes is, you meet someone and on meeting that person your whole behaviour changes. Some well-known symptoms include speechlessness and/or uttering of nonsensical word-like sounds, endless staring and/or gawking with mouth open with helpful doses of drooling, etc. You just wish to put your hands together and pray to this Goddess. Yes, I guess the best word to sum up this category would be Goddess.

There you go, deep psychological bullshit from yours truly. Chicken soup for the nearly sane soul. Whatever.

And yes, any female hoping to get typified into 1,2,3, drop in your details. With 2 passport size photographs. And contact number. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.