Saturday, April 26, 2008

Masks: The wrong kind

One noticeable advantage of maturing is: you can better modify your mask/masks to meet your needs. Now, don’t deny you don’t have one because you can deny it to me, to them…but not to yourself. We all wear our masks. That’s when we feel protected, snug and comfortable. We are at liberty to show the world what we want to show. Only when it slips and a bit of our inside is revealed that we feel the first pangs of fear.

Thing is, a lot of those masks out there are way too deceptive. There’s too much of a difference between the actual face inside and the one we see. And then the trouble starts.
I wouldn’t call them hypocrites right away. I have noticed that most commonly people get turned off by hypocrisy (courtesy: Orkut) and it makes me wonder…aren’t we all hypocrites, at some level?

Recently it’s become easy to identify the wrong type of masks in the crowd. I guess it usually depends on your interaction with the people. It’s not that difficult to look beyond the saccharine sweet smiles pasted on their faces and all those over-the-top gestures of concern. One glance at a pair of cold eyes and you never know what’s lurking behind them.

Among the wrong type of masks, there’s another quite interesting variety. These are the best. They fit well, never slip and are impossible to detect. And these can be anywhere. Your best friend, your favourite cousin, the best man at your wedding…it could be anyone. Throughout your life you depend on them, trust them, respect them and then at a point when you are leaning on them, the masks finally slip, they pull away, you lose balance and fall. Those masks can be recovered but I doubt if you will ever recover from that fall. If you do, there’s someone else to lean on, another better mask…and eventually another fall.

We seldom learn our lessons well.

3 comments:

S said...

This is good. You know I have been working on masks and have been practising 'falls' and 'getting up again' for quite some time. Interestingly, one of our next 'hand-made-books' of pictures and rhymes will be on 'Masks.' The paintings are by my mentor, the poems are mine. They are ready and I shall be able to show it to you within a couple of weeks once I finalise the layout. Waiting for more such posts to come.

my world my rules said...

why does ur mask remind me of being "still friends"!!!!!

Ritayan said...

i differ a bit with your version...i feel we are just masks there is no such thing as the real face or the real me...we are different people at different times with our lover, or parents or friends or strangers...thus we are just an assimilation of many masks depends on which one we wear when...

just an idea...wonderful style and lovely flow like the piece...keep writing