Cute but stupid

Damn it feels like moving a block to come out of hibernation and post. For some days I feared this blog might turn out to be one of those things you start with enthusiasm and then gradually the fad goes away. But lets hope not. To all my readers and friends, Happy Dusshera and Subho Bijoya as the case be!
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As a kid, you can get away with a lot. Especially since you get to play the part of the cute and innocent kid, you can act stupid and do silly things, speak your mind out and act out the part of the chubby-faced angel and still be cuddled by everyone but without being chided for being so. For some people, including me, it took some time to realize that I was not a 'cute kid' any more --- that I had grown up.

I used to play the part of the cute guy many-a-times... the one who seems so innocent that he can't possibly be scheming against you. Many people believed me, a small fraction did not. And I knew inside that this small fraction was right: I just pretended to be so. So every time when I let that ice cream remain on my cheeks and 'unmindfully' keep trying to lick it off, or maybe every time when I sounded like a hurt child when someone refused me something, they fell for it. They fell for it when they saw the childish spring in my steps, the crazy talk in front of the movie theatre, and when I was playing the part of the court jester in the company of my friends --- male and female. I admit, they did not want me to be this way: they looked at my opinion with enough respect. But gradually I had made a fool of myself, playing the un-serious, frivolous kind even when the situation demanded something else. It got me attention, and that was enough for me. I thought I was getting liked, I thought I was getting attention, and that had me in the clouds for so long.

The illusion shattered, however, when I gradually looked at myself as a detached alter ego. I often wondered, why didn't people pay attention to things when I was serious? What was I lacking? And more importantly, why was I trying to place the blame on someone else? It was me who was responsible, all along, for making a clown of myself. Yes I had been cute, but I had also been stupid. And the more I reflected, the more I was disillusioned. "Look", I thought, "here I was, like a doormat for everyone else: and others used me for exactly that purpose: trampling on and wiping their feet on me". It wasn't their blame... it had been me. And the last nail in the coffin was when I met someone like me: the frivolous, enthusiastic kind. I saw in him a reflection of myself, and saw what was wrong. The Scorpio male in me reacted violently, and I recovered.

This was during the time I was in high school... when I let myself be this in the very short time be littled and clowned in whatever company. Plus I suppose the nerdy image I grew helped that anyway. But thankfully the revelation happened right before I went to my engineering college. I consciously tried to change my image. Not to be the nerd, the fool and the cute but stupid guy you can walk all over and he'll go in a corner and hang his head. I learnt to fight back, to love as an equal and to nurture the geekiness to the right things and not to being the jester. Humour, I realized, does not need to make a clown of yourself at every time --- there can be other subjects. And I don't need to play the innocent one at every confrontation: I had my parents earlier to protect me when I was a kid, but now I must stand up for myself. I have written earlier about this, and I write again --- my engineering college friends would laugh out wildly if they knew about me from my 11-12 friends, and vice versa, definitely. But thankfully I think that now I am what I have always wanted to be: an equal with that extra spark in the eye. I have learnt not to trade my self esteem for a joke, and also not to over-react to harmless banter. I'm still learning, but I'm closer to the goal than earlier, definitely.