Eureka?  I Reka....

Funny how our mind works.  Also funny is what we find funny and what we pretend to find funny and unfunny, but that’s a boring blog for another day.   We create, basic, organic hurdles for ourselves so that we have the illusion of feeling challenged.

   Some of us may like to be challenged.  But almost all of us love the idea of being challenged and beating it.  Even when our minds know it is a farce, a charade, we like to feel proud.  Don’t give us the answer.  But don’t hold us in the dark.  Lead us there.  Drop hints and clues.  Our minds will take care of the rest.  We will pretend that we never needed the hinds, the guidance.  That we could’ve arrived at the answer by our own selves.  And that is something that effective marketers often exploit.  They will tease you.  They will make a children’s colouring book puzzle out to be a veritable Gordian Knot.  And then they will lead you to the answer.  An answer that works out in their favour.  And you will crown yourself the champion and your mind releases feel good hormones and voila, they have a willing customer.  That’s how successful thrillers work too.  They lead you on just enough to challenge you a little bit.  And in the end, even when your prediction goes wrong, the outcome was one of the alternatives you thought possible and you get to say “I knew it”.  That’s how you get commercially successful thrillers of course, not necessarily good ones.  Hell, that’s how T shirt one liners work too.  The ones where you figure out the meaning or get the joke in just the right time.  Nothing too obvious, but nothing that needs to be explained. 

We would rather appear smart in a world where everyone appears to be equally smart than actually try and find out.  The thing about IQ is, it’s made out to be everything.  Maturity, EQ, wit rarely counts for anything officially speaking.  Anyway, SNAPPY NEW YEAR Everyone…..

            Dirty Little Secret

We often happen to stumble upon lesser known or obscure things.  A beautiful song that people around you don’t know of, an astounding little movie, maybe foreign language, maybe an indie flick that you happen to tumble across while WebHiking (A silly term I coined for randomly cliking links on a page and then links of those pages and so on….for all I know there may actually be a technical term for it), or a mindblowing/numbing book that you feel is a must read.  And often we immediately go and show it to other people and share it with them.  And at other times, we just don’t.  We keep it to ourselves, as our special secret that only we can enjoy.  It’s like Alice’s entrance to the wonderland, a special secret she had among her friends and family that made her mundane, dreary life a little more bearable.

   The same things get shared on the social networking sites.  The same meme, the same joke, the same dumb video, the same nonsensical, nasal twanged, irritating song (wha?? Kolaveri? What’s that?).  Everyone is talking about the same things, liking and discussing and sharing the same stuff.  That’s why we like to hold onto our little discoveries, our little secrets that we begin to hold dear.

We often even tend to lose sight of what are our original tastes.  Our actual likes and dislikes.  Whatever happens to be different and hitherto undiscovered, it becomes dear to us.  We may not actually even like it.  But we hold it dear all the same only because it creates a delusional, ectoplasmic curtain that separates us from the others.  In averting an identity crisis, we slip into any available identity that is outwardly unique.  And that, I believe, is the fatal mistake.  Because not being influenced by others also means not being negatively influenced.  If apathy is bad, overreacting is equally dangerous.