Our fragile egos

The other day, I was out with a few friends and as the nature of many such “outings” go, the group got bigger and more acquaintances joined with time.
After suffering some, I have long set up a rule of thumb as far as “meeting new people” goes. I avoid this game as much as I can, unless the new people are somewhat vetted by a friend I genuinely like to spend time with.
The rule has served me well—I no longer spend time trying to make nice with people I couldn't care less about, I save others the same trauma and most importantly, I am not stuck in the middle of boring conversations any more. If I am, I leave.
But no man is an island and I have a lot of work to do before I get an Iron Will, so sometimes, the group gets bigger and if it is not a mortifying experience, I play along.  
And sometimes, it pays to stick around; because you learn interesting lessons.
So in this motley group was a girl who walked up to me and said “you were so much fun the other day, you should hang out with us more.”
It took me 2 minutes to figure out she had me mixed up with another Indian girl. It was a casual conversation, so I playfully retorted with “It’s OK, we all look the same, don’t we” and got on with it, never giving it a second thought till my friend came up to apologize to me, dragging said offender with him.
And then there was a barrage of apologies about her being ignorant, his being mortified and so on till I had to tell them it was really OK, sometimes white men and women look the same to me too.
Then I started getting accolades about “being a sport” and I realized, that I was not offended or was not making it into a big racial discrimination issue was so new that I was being looked at as a novelty.
“Thanks so much for not letting her offend you!”
I was about to protest against the ridiculousness of it all when I realized it was true: we get “offended” too easily these days and we give too little thought to whether we should be, or are even entitled to be.
So it does not matter that a kid is 15 and cannot still spell basic words correctly- a teacher has to weigh her words while talking to her parents so as not to cause any offence. It does not matter that a man is totally uncouth and upsetting your dinner table, if you are the host you have to be careful not offend him by asking him to shut up.  It does not matter most people don’t know what they are talking about when they call for bans on books, but because they are still “offended” by what is in them,  governments and publishing houses have to destroy or ban them.
So how did our egos get so fragile that we are not able to distinguish between genuine offence, honest mistakes and plain non-issues? Why has it come to this that a teacher who fails a kid because she has done miserably or says “your child is a brat” with good reason is answerable to parents and school board; that you cannot tell a mother that dancing is not something she should push her daughter towards; that an author cannot write a book of honest discourse without running the risk of “offending” political activists?
And no, I am not mixing little instances with big ones, because think about it. It is the same gloated and friable ego that makes a child howl "injustice" when a teacher fails it, that makes angry mobs scream "murder" when an author questions them. The basic sense is not that different, is it?
"How can s/he challenge me?. How can they think I am not as invincible as I think I am? I have a right to be angry, so I will make sure the entire world knows I am!"
Does it draw directly from that massive sense of self importance that I wrote about last time?  That we are all so important in our little heads that any word of criticism, anyone challenging our thoughts or any small sign of unpredictability gets us unsettled to such an extent, we start taking things personally.  We get offended.
We rally our friends and look for support, we decide to wall out the guilty or go after them with our pitchforks and then, when the adrenaline runs out we retract into the pathetic little worlds we build for ourselves, feeling good about our non-existent victories.
Parents justify this by saying they are protecting their kids. Are they really, though?
I see a world where kids are increasingly growing up to think they can get what they want, when they want, lack manners and sulk all the time.
I see fragile young girls “going into depression” because a boss or a friend has been rude, or not given them as much attention as they thought they deserved.
I see a world where teachers (not just school, any kind. Think art, games, music) are increasingly afraid to give honest feedback, lest they hurt someone’s ego.
I see a world where grown-ups cannot talk to each other without sounding like corporate jargon machines, because hey, you never know what upsets the other person. So it's safer to pepper sentences with the insipid "that is interesting, but...",  "we should touch base" (this one really annoys me. When I was a teenager, 'touching base' was not something you wanted to do with every Tom, Dick and Harry you met. Why can't we just say "I'll get in touch with you"? Maybe I'll write about these phrases the next time) and other mind numbingly dull expressions that'll make any reasonably sensible person want to flee.
And worse, we sometimes don’t even pause to reconsider if something even merits our getting so upset. Take for example my experience with the girl I mentioned in the beginning.
I know of other Indians who got upset about it when I shared the story, ones who have otherwise happily shortened their surnames so they go easy on Western tongues. That does not dilute their sense of identity, but if someone mixes me up for another person (and also apologises for it), it’s a problem.
And I wonder how this case of fragile egos is ever going to serve us well, if it is true that all great ideas and movements in this world have been a result of honest and enlightening discussions. That criticism is necessary; it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
We all want to live in a free society, and yet somehow we have decided we’ll only account for the good of that arrangement without being responsible for the bad.
That because we live in a free world, we will say it is our right to blast music at 3 am in the morning and blame our neighbour if he complains about disturbance. And yet, when he wakes up early at 6 am and turns on the lawn mower/ says his prayers loud, he is the insufferable one.
We think because we live in a free world where we have a right to be heard, we can call for the banishment of an artist, can call someone we don’t like evil names, can kill people and burn communities because what they did “offended” us.
Like one of my favourite authors famously reminded us, no one in this world has the right not to be offended. That right simply does not exist. It is then, on us to decide and differentiate between what we take as offence and what is criticism, what is a challenge, what is an honest mistake, what is a question and what is a crime.
We live in a big world, my dad is fond of reminding my mom. It is full of things that can upset us, but it makes sense to deal with them with what I thought was common sense.  If you think your neighbour is being too prying, ask her to stop, don’t build a wall so high that no one else can get in.
If you think you have overstepped a mark with a friend, apologize and don’t do it again. At least, try. If you don’t like a movie, a painting, a boss, a teacher, book, talk about why not, instead of burning and banishing. Or move away.
But more than anything isn’t it important we think before we decide to get upset? What is it that is upsetting us so much, so frequently? Does it even merit that much heart burn? Or are you simply being silly because you think your ego has been hurt.
There are real issues in this world that merit our getting offended and upset. When someone shoots a young girl because she dared to go to school, it merits our being upset. When kids drop out of school because they can’t pay for tuition, it merits our being upset. When a deserving candidate is passed over because of blatant favoritism, even that merits our being upset. And in all those cases, we need to do more than just be offended. We need to do what we can to stop the offenders.
But if  we keep mixing criticism with offense, if we cannot handle a contrarian view, if we do not know self importance from a worthy cause, we are going to keep getting offended over little things that do not count, and we’ll keep living in that little sad world we build inside our heads.
This would be fine, except that the real world, the one which does not really care about your fragile ego, will not make an exception when you’re the one who “gives offence.” And you never know when you do.