Monday, December 09, 2002

Social Behaviour

The social behaviour of our contemporaries and younger ones are in a pretty bad state. I had an experience recently to come to this conclusion. It was a gathering at my mother’s home. We had a lot of young people aged between 10 and 30 years. I was really surprised at the pigheadedness with which these people interacted with each other. The main problem was that each one of them fancied himself / herself as a genius and the only person worthy of living on this planet. Like everything was spread out in front of him for his choosing.

Then I heard them discussing the stupidities of their parents and grandparents. Hey Clement, we know about the shortcomings of our parents. We know how bad a job they have done as parents or grandparents. But talking about them like discussing rat infestation is not my style. Let them call me any name they like, I don’t give a damn.

Later during dinner someone introduced me as a painter and a writer and blah, blah, blah.... Suddenly all the antennae in the room focussed on me. I had this terrible feeling of being burned and killed by the powerful laser beams, ready to shoot from their highly charged and super-intelligent foreheads. Now the aliens started to come towards me and started asking me questions. Then the girl who introduced me said that I am planning to have my debut exhibition on a pavement. ‘How stupid that is!’—one exclaimed. I asked him why. ‘Why??!! Man, when you can hire a gallery and do the exhibition like everybody else and sell your damn work and make money—instead you are thinking of hanging your paintings along our dirty footpaths. That is stupid.’ Then I made a terrible mistake, of explaining my idea of art and its place in society. That is the last thing I remember from that evening. From the things they taught me that day I don’t remember much, because what they said was way above my level of intelligence and reasoning.

Now I would sadly say that the social commitment of a male of our generation ends at the tip of his pretty, piggish nose and of a female at the tip of her hormone-rich boobs. In the case of females with a pair of silicone-filled melonotits, this rule doesn’t apply.slcw

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