A disturbed dissection of one of the many qualities I loathe about my society.
by Tishma Rhine Joarder
The holy trinity of inquiries by relatives you never knew existed till date at any daawat are: “Amake chinecho baba?”, “Ki poro tumi?” and “Boro hoye ki hobe?” This is going to happen regardless of your age, gender or complexion. Undeniably one of the primordial soldiers in battle against bigotry in our ornate, rainbow-hued culture, if you ask me.
If you pay attention to these encounters, you will notice a pattern regarding the third question. Toddlers simply babble no matter what the question, to which all the guests gush about in their adaptation of the squeakiest baby-voices. It really does turn into a contest at one point. Next in order, are the kids. These are the either exceptionally well-behaved children, or, briefly put, Lucifer’s progenies. Now, you cannot actually have a conversation with the latter. That is, without bearing the risk of becoming bald or being signed up for an anger management class due to a sudden outrage so ruthless, hell’s fire will applaud you, at your niece’s 8th birthday party. The other usually presents two possibilities: her father or mother’s profession or an acutely unrealistic one that presumably does not exist.
Moving on to the exceedingly dreaded ones whose mere existence reverberates the notion of society’s greatest adversary: juveniles. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the teenagers! You see, this is where it all goes wrong. As adolescence claws its way into the naïve minds of youngsters, so does the excruciating experience of living in a world so atrocious, no savvy use of a thesaurus will do it the minimum extent of justice. The constant pressure to hustle towards academic elitism, the need to wear an orna being more prioritised than standing up for yourself and the various, lofty social standards that today’s youth refuses to abide by. As a result, two things happen: the previously mentioned well-behaved kids develop a bipolarity. They present an utterly fictitious version of themselves that this scourged spirits of society feed on. You can always spot them by the visibly ginormous but counterfeit smile on their face. The only reply you will hear from them forms the other holy trinity I have had the displeasure of being introduced to: doctor, engineer and lawyer. The latter, on the other hand, rebel. You know, the… FASHION DESIGNERS AND MUSICIANS?!?!!! Much like finding my place in this colossal cosmos, I have been in search for finding a balance between the two. So far, the farthest I have come is developing an extremely passive-aggressive animosity against; simply put, my society. However, more importantly, I have never found the obsession behind correlating the ‘What you want to be when you grow up?’ to a specific profession. Are our lives meant for something as mundane as nursing the gargantuan powers of capitalism to greater heights through these nine-to-five jobs?
Consequently, when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grow up, I replied with,
“A good person.”
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