Everyone wants to be a bad ass!

Everyone wants to be a bad ass! Probably because they think it’d be cool to be one. Thanks to the ubiquitous sharing channels that Facebook, & Twitter has created, I constantly encounter at least one incident per day where one is very proud about his failures, or the fact that he/she broke rules. So, I here I go with yet another complaint of my comrades!

This post is not about people who genuinely kick asses in their lives (there are few rare specimens amongst us who are just cool – thanks to their DNAs; when I’m jealous, I always blame it on their heredity factors). Instead, this post is about who wants to be those daring cool types, but haven’t the slightest traces of guts to do so.

Most people have the tendency to glorify their past acts. If one says “I always slept right in the front row of the class” don’t go all wide-eyed; the truth could very well be otherwise where he was slammed by the professor for the lack of attention in the class and our hero would have sheepishly left the class to get his face splashed with water. Now that’s not a daring act is it?

Beware of people who always exaggerate their rule-breaking behavior with seen-it-all-done-it-all attitude - “I’ve always jumped the compound walls of the hostel after night to go for a drink”, “Jumping traffic signals is like a cakewalk to me”, “We partied all round the night, drove the car drunk and no cops could catch us”. History books would show that they would have actually committed the act only once and was so paranoid after committing it that they probably would have sworn that not to repeat that daring act again. (The most exciting breaking-the-rule act I did is smuggling my own phone into a cricket stadium. It was exciting, but the next time I went to the same stadium, I hadn’t carried my phone)

Analyzing the status messages of your friends during the times of examinations or on the dates of the results would show you that an alarming number of people take pride in mentioning that they under-performed in their academics. They project it as though it was their choice to give a damn about the academics. What they don’t understand is that they were forced to give up on the academics because they subconsciously know that they can’t be good at it. Yes, it takes some heart to accept that we are bad at a lot of things. But glorifying our inabilities as something cool is just lame and stupid.

We all want to have those memorable experiences that are worthy enough to be narrated to other people. But the truth is there is a high possibility that there might be few such instances. It’s fine as long as you had enjoyed your past. Yes, I never sound cool when I say to people that “My roommates and I were obsessed with Harry Potter books and discussed them every evening at our house”. But the point is, I enjoyed those discussions, I’m very proud about it and those will remain as some of my best memories.

One can safely conclude that such behavior is forced by the urge to be “cool”. When people realize that their coolness factor is as good as the Chennai winter, they resort to “I’d at least like to sound cool” - an easy way out. Coolness has got nothing to do with happy-go-lucky or don’t-give-a-shit attitude. It’s all about being yourself. Thanks to our society’s commonplace attitude - ‘Cool’ is not a tag we would associate with 9 pointers and the studious personalities. Instead someone who never studies and scores a 7/10 is certified ‘cool’. Narayana Moorthy is not cool, but Vijay Mallya is? Screw the system!

You might be one of those persons who is hell bent on excelling in academics, who is a nerd with computers, who is thoroughly professional or in general, you may possess the qualities that are usually miles away from the society’s definition of coolness. But as long as you like doing whatever you are doing, nobody is cooler than thyself. I find it cool when my friend can recite a complicated Tamil poem that he learnt a decade ago. I find it cool when my friend builds a iGoogle like dashboard in less than an hour. I find it cool that my friend can’t dance. Yes, all my friends are cool, because they never pretended to be one.