Fortress of solitude

A lot of people around me get freaked out by my silence. I guess, They often think what is wrong with this "lone lonely loner"! Some around me ask me to be more expressive. I get tired of people asking me - "Why are you so much quiet?" whenever I try to mix with people in a group. But very close friends of mine tell me not to change and be just the way you are!

I am happy not being a very social animal. Even being put in a big social group at family wedding/some party I feel a lot deserted! I will have very short replies for people's (irritating) questions and do enjoy killing time in analyzing everyone's reaction and body language. Social contact seems like burden to me most of the times. Majority of the society is too loud and outgoing.

I am totally bad in front of a crowd. I have my own fears to talk to a bunch of people. It would be much easier to give a technical talk than general talk as analytical part of your brain filters out any impractical words come out of your mouth! Sometimes I go blank in talking what is expected out of me, sometimes I even stammer with all the nervousness. It all depends on the exposure of the world around that I got when I was young. Well, I face my fears till today every time I am being laughed at and made fun. I fight my own fears only by facing them regularly.

Being an introvert loner is not so bad at all. It's cool when I don't attract much attention. I feel that I'm on my own and I'm free. I don't have to care about what people will think about me. I don't have to be the "life" of the party to enjoy all the action going around. I have a lot of time to spend for myself and most importantly it helps me to work independently as a individual contributor even though I work in a team. I don't make enemies with anyone. I am good at burying a lot of secrets within myself. I get to go for solo bullet rides exploring around which helps me to get along with nature more closely. When people get my trust they have a real friend in making.

The bad thing about being a loner is that when you are tested with a lot of emotional turbulence you tend to easily lose yourself! One has to be strong not to let it overcome and become a phobia or a disorder of any kind.

I dedicate this random thought to millions of people around who live(or agree to) in their fortress of solitude. :)

Lineage, Lifestyle and Learnings

We as students read history right from our school days to get to know of all the irrelevant facts about who did what, when and where and how! I am not a historian but I believe in saying that "history repeats" because anything and everything I am currently experiencing in this world has been experienced by a lots of others somewhere in the time-line. We study to learn from past mistakes, gather data for prediction of life events, know about cultures but the history itself looks and probably is so much biased if we go only by the available writings.

Coming to a very small scale of geological time frame, If you ask me a simple question of what my great grandfather did for a living and his story of life. I have no clue! We do not know much more than our grandparents in our lineage. As a parent, does one really give knowledge of how social and financial life earlier was to his/her child? We are afraid that the youngster might develop some kind of impression over the family, relatives and hide some of the facts as we bury them deep down within ourselves. We are afraid to expose our problems in front of our children and make them understand the reality of life.

Today, we live in the era of technology, booming shopping malls, hyper-markets and multi-national business enterprises. The lifestyle of people, a generation earlier, were lot different from what we are going through now. Even the morals and values are not remaining the same. The attitude and pace over which we are leading life is changing very fast.
A simple instance: Nowadays, If a grandfather tells his grandson that he didn't have something called TV at his time to watch the kid shouts back to him saying that you are cooking-this-story-up for making me not watch the TV! Having the company of upper class society friends in junior school, the kid even comes and asks the parent if we are poor in just owning a Maruti Alto while his friends travel around in Honda city.

I have several open questions on my mind on my above bizarre random thoughts:
Why is society failing to learn from past and teach next generation? Is it the high rate of inflation over decades? Ever increase in economical gap between upper and middle class? Is it that we have lost the habit of reading Indian novels which expose rural side of our country to relate to our ancestor's life? Is it that we are losing something in over protecting our kids so that he never sees what actual suffering is? Are we shedding moral values down the drain in our pace of earning money and make a grand living?