Denial of a self.

Back when my world was white, it felt good to be accepted and acknowledged. I also felt good when I could go through the same pain that everyone went through just to know that they aren’t the evil Satans that religions portray them to be. Everybody were human at some point of time, they don’t succumb to the demons outside but the demons within.

I clearly remember these lines that happened in the seventh standard of my school life. Back then I had a subject called moral science. I still don’t know why they had given such a complex concept on a seventh standard textbook, but I am glad they did or else I would have stayed ignorant. It was about a man who spoke on the stage about how smoking is injurious to health and that people should give up smoking. But then he goes back behind the stage and smokes a cigarette himself. People call him an hypocrite and then stone him. That was probably my first encounter with the word hypocrite, and later I learnt the proverb that ‘People who live in glass houses should not fling stones at others’. But as age passes by, my concept of the word hypocrite deepens. In that textbook, they were talking about how that man, who talked about other people to give up a health hazard as an unforgivable crime and such people should never exist. But what struck me was, that person knew, that person knew his problem, he knew what he could not give up, and he wanted others to give it up, because he knows what problems being addicted to it might cause him. He wanted others to be better while he himself rots. To a wannabe hero back then, being a hypocrite seemed like the greatest martyr that this world could ever produce. Hypocrites are like the batman without the mask and the money. I wanted to be a hypocrite. Perish while the world lives on.

But then later I realise that humans only needed an excuse to forgive themselves for their inability. You find a reason, you find an excuse, you can easily go back to being who you are. You just need to find a good reason. And a blame is an easy but a very very sufficient excuse. I can always blame my leader, i can always blame existence itself.

Years pass, I was still not convinced about the manner with which they portrayed that human. Because to me, he seemed like every great leader that India has had. Every Gandhi, every Nehru, every Kamaraj had his/her flaw. And I felt that all he did was be an hypocrite that I was at that time. And to acknowledge that that man is as evil as the textbook portrays would be to acknowledge myself as a very villainous person which I was not prepared to do back then. i was one, because on many occasions as a child I felt I had made people do what was right, while I very easily did the opposite. And the war waged on for 10 years.

I don’t want to be an hypocrite anymore.

A single thought can ruin your whole life. Work it out, talk it out, think about it. Find a friend. No thought is necessarily evil. I still blame my moral science book for such negative portrayal of a character. That harsh condoning took me 10 years to recover from.

Negative reinforcement never helps, realise that.

Credits: google images.