Your whole life, I believe is being spent in striving to impress somebody or the other, other than your own self.
When you are a toddler, you try to stand up so that when you do so your parents become elated and applaud. You crave for their attention. You strive to make a positive impression. As you grow up, when you start talking, when the first syllable props out of your mouth, again you do so to impress the people around you. This time you are more popular, for you can walk around, hence your neighbours join your parents to become the audience whom you strive to impress.
Then one fine day your parents decide that it’s the time to admit you in a school. In days of severe competition as today, you have an interview and some schools also have a written test – an entrance test to be precise, for a 3 year old. In 1989, I had an interview myself to get into my school. My school was an esteemed one in Chennai and that was the first and the last interview of my life that I successfully cracked. For at that time you do not think much, you behave in the best possible way so as to impress the interviewer (a teacher or principal in this case). As you grow old, your thought patterns are marred by logic, and you do not dance to the interviewer’s tunes and hence, fail to impress him. Anyway that’s a different story altogether. Now let’s move on.
Now you are 3-4 years old, your parents have got bored of you, and they decide to have another kid. In marketing terms, they are trying out a new product. When customer switches a brand the earlier brand tries to retain the customer. This gives way to competition. And hence arise a series of customer retention strategies, road shows etc. to impress the customer and enhance his brand loyalty. So on similar lines, you as a 3-4 year old throw tantrums and try to catch your parents’ attention which seems to be going towards your new born bro/ sis. In case you are a single son, do not worry, you invariably have a smarter neighbor who impresses your parents better than you are able to. And you again strive to get their attention and do everything possible to impress them.
Now that you have grown older – say around 10-12, and have succeeded in getting equal attention as your sibling, you try to expand your business. You venture into foreign markets i.e. your school. Your new customers are your teachers. Whoaa!!! This time you have as many as 40 odd competitors from diverse backgrounds. Only the topper is acknowledged and the rest are in the also ranked category. So you along with the other 40 products in the market, compete to get that one medal from the principal by impressing him. It’s not just a onetime affair during the exams. At every class, you raise your hands and try to answer the maximum number of questions your teacher asks, so that she is impressed by your studiousness and appreciates you. You feel elated for you have been singled out and appreciated from the rest of the class. You strive hard to top in every possible activity. You slog and take part in all the quizzes, elocution competitions, recitation competitions, speech competitions; some even manage to excel in sports; all so that someone will come and give a pat on your back and tell you –“You are amazing, intelligent, hardworking and talented”. And you feel – “Wow!!”.
This continuous till you reach your 10th and 12th standard, you have played your cards well so far and have strived to impress everybody you have met in your life so far. Now suddenly you are writing the board exam and you have competitors from the entire school (200 students for school 1st) and sometimes the entire country for board level ranking. You strive harder for minimizing the margin between the total marks and the marks you score.
Now that you have 17 years of experience in impressing the smaller sections of the society – home, neighbors and school; you are prepared for the next stage of college. All this seasoning so far is not without a reason – they are to prepare you to make the ultimate impression. You give the entrance exams to get into the supposedly the best colleges of the country. Some prepare for over 2 years to get into the premiere institutes, so that they, their family members and in future may be his wife and kids can brag that – I am/ my son is / my hubby is/ my dad is/ from XYZ College. In an Indian scenario, the XYZ considered worth bragging is invariably an IIT.
At this stage you can fall into one of the 2 categories – succeeded to impress/ failed to impress your family, friends and relatives. This depends on the kind of college you get in and the kind of college your near and dear are impressed with. Whether you manage to impress or not, you are ready to make your next positive impression on someone.
At this stage it’s the seemingly most beautiful girl of your class. The entire college of 500 odd people in your batch is trying to woo her. Now who among you is going to impress her is the game. So you be good at studies, so that you may get an opportunity to teach her or study with her; you try to be chivalrous so that she turns back gives you a secret glance during the lectures which sets your friends stomachs on fire; you try to become the head of all the committees possible in the college so that you can allot her a task where she can work only with you etc. All so that someone may come to you and say – “You are very good man, that’s why she is impressed with you, none of us stand near you”. [I don’t have a girl’s version of this, for I have never been a girl.]
Then finally one day you succeed to impress her and she agrees to a committed relationship with you. And you find there is a never ending list of Dos that you gotto do to impress her more. So you sacrifice all your time with friends, your games, you change the way you think (or some forget to do a sane thinking) all to impress her. And at this stage when you have fully changed yourself to impress her, you start preparing her to impress your parents.
Now that you have committed a sin (I mean a kin), you have to impress your people back home in a big way with your career, so that they will marry you to the girl of your dreams as compensation. Why a compensation? Of course right! All life you have strived to impress them and you need a reward for yourself.
So now you have a new set of people to impress upon. Those whom you now impress would get you an impressive career. I have always wondered why carrier and career have almost similar pronunciations but different spellings. It’s now that I realized that a career doesn’t carry you anywhere. A miscarriage is inevitable in ones career. Hence the different spelling is rightly justified. Anyway, back to career, you strive to impress the job interviewers and at some stage you manage to impress someone who gets you a job. And every day in job, you work hard to impress your boss and you have a 1000 co-workers competing for the same. You can simply do your job and get your salary; but NO; because your target audience thinks you have to climb up the corporate ladder. Hence you try to impress your seniors so that you are promoted so that you impress your target audience (this has become too large now – family, friends, friends of friends, families of friends, friends of friends of friends etc.)
But somewhere when you were trying to impress so many people the girl whom you managed to impress has changed her impression about you. Is this fair? Of course it is. Come on this is perfectly justified. Dint you do the same when you had a new born sibling? Were you not angry with your parents because they gave more attention to the infant? After all, your parents were also trying to impress the new born so that it would try to impress them all its life. So when you were trying to impress your large target audience, your girl felt left out and got her a new attention giving machine – I mean another boy friend.
I know you are tired now. You try to think if all this striving to impress somebody is worth it at all. You wanna break free. But you can’t. Because, if you break free, the society will call you a coward, and all those whom you managed to impress all these 25 odd years will give up on you. People will think you have become insane and pity you for the same. So now you decide to show them that you are a fighter. You strive harder than ever and get promoted in your firm; manage to get a fatter pay.
Now all those whom you have impressed try to get you an impressive girl. You have an impressive job and an impressive pay. You meet the girl’s dad and try to impress him that you would be the best son-in-law he would ever get. You try to so the same with the wife would be. And finally you manage to impress somebody and tie the knot.
You think it’s all over. But it’s your turn as a parent now. You fall into this unimpressive cycle of making an impression. There is no redemption from the same.
Having seen everything from the son’s or daughter’s or student’s or boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s perspective; you get to see a new perspective - a parent’s perspective.
You give birth to a kid and have the pressure to make him most impressive. You put him in the most impressive school so that you can tell your colleague – “My son studies in the PQR School”. You prepare him and make him stand first in the class, so that you can tell your colleague –“My son is the 1st rank in his class”.
The cycle continuous till your son reaches 25 odd and starts thinking what he has been doing. At this stage you start impressing your son. You do that so that your son can tell his friends – “My dad is the best in the world, he is chill”. You wear a new face and tolerate everything he does so that he can come to you and say – “Dad I love you, you are the best”. When he gets married your target audience increases. You have multiple reasons to impress your son now. You are partially scared he might take his wife’s side. So you play safe and also start working towards impressing your daughter-in-law; so that when you grow older she doesn’t conspire to throw you out of home. Then you have a grandson, you call him all pet names and try to impress him so that he may play a few games with you and be with you.
Finally you are old now. You know you have a little time left. So go to scriptures and start reading them. It is because you now think God is your next customer. So you prepare to impress him.
Now let’s make 3 columns. Column 1 contains all the work you have actually done in your life. Column 2 contains all the work you should have done in your life so as to impress all the people around you. Column 3 contains all the work you would have wanted to do in your life to impress your own self. Column 3 is optional – you might or might not have figured out what to have in that column. At times in your efforts to make Column 1 à Column 2, you would never have thought about a Column 3. But some people do succeed in finding their Column 3, at some point in their life. Whether they work towards it or not is a different issue altogether. Let’s find the Karl Pearson’s co-efficient of correlation between the data of Column 1 and Column 2; Column 1 and Column 3; Column 2 and Column 3. In most cases the value would be between -0.5 to -1, indicating a negative correlation.
Okay, these are my thoughts. But why the hell should I publish this in my blog? It’s because a couple of my friends would appreciate me for what I have written. I would succeed in impressing a few of them.
Now when am I going to break free?
