Confessions of a Misanthrope

What Carnegie wants to turn humans into

I think Dale Carnegie started this shit with his book “How To Win Friends and Influence People”. I read it as a young man. I guess, every young man or woman reads that book. Because it’s the basic instruction manual on how to suck up to people by pretending to like them. It promises to turn you from a thinking, emotionally variable human being into a super-friendly, tail-wagging dog so that other people are forced to pet you. And this book is often lapped up (excuse the pun) by impressionable youngsters because it is assumed that making people like you is the most important prerequisite of success. They call it ‘soft skills’ in business school jargon. (And people actually pay lakhs of rupees to learn this sort of stuff in B schools. Strange are the ways of people!)

Now I have nothing against it if you wish to spend your life tail-wagging to people. I might even admire you if you become a devious, manipulative asshole who wrings the dough out of a man’s nose by claiming to devote your life to his welfare and happiness. But I can’t do this shit. Fact is: I don’t like people (except voluptuous intellectual women).

Disliking people is not something that I decided to do after performing a lengthy process of reasoning and concluding. It was always a gut feeling with me. But over the period of years (decades actually – why try to hide my fucking age?), I peered inside the murky depths of my soul and discovered the reasons for this tendency.

For one, people expect you to go out and meet them. They just don’t leave you alone. Every day someone was born a few decades back and wants to celebrate the day with everyone he/she knows. If not that, someone is getting married and wants to bribe you with dinner for giving them social sanction for copulating the brains out of each other. Or somebody has got a new car and wants to show it off because he cannot show off his dick, and in any case his dick is probably too small to show off. I mean, if you’re happy and you want to celebrate, just do it with the people you love and who care for you. I don’t care for you. So don’t invite me to your birthday bash and anniversary bash. Unless you have alcohol. Then you better invite me over. Because man is a social animal, and I take the animal part very seriously.

People have this strange concept, especially in India, that your life does not belong to you but to the society. You’re expected to be ever ready to meet people’s expectations from you. They don’t understand that I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to be of any use to society. I just wanna have my bit of the earth and the sky over it and just do my thing. I don’t want to disturb you, or harm you, or kill you (unless you’re screwing Katrina Kaif) – I just want to be left alone.

Most of all, I hate people because people have this annoying tendency to seek free medical advice. There I am in a party, enjoying chocolate pastry for dessert, when a corpulent, flatulent person saunters up to me, and without preamble, starts to discuss his morning ablutions with me. He especially emphasizes that the colour of his morning production keeps changing with amazing frequency, and that the very same morning it had been exactly the colour and consistency of the chocolate pastry I’m relishing. I feel like puking on him and telling him that if his excreta was behaving like a chameleon, then he should go to a gastroenterologist and effing pay him to listen to his…shit rather than spoiling my dessert.

Or perhaps I’m having my drink in peace, when this elderly gentleman clatters towards me, his joints clicking and clacking like a pool table, and begins pouring out his litany of aches, wheezes and shakes. He’ll be sure to give me a complete medical history starting from the time he received his first BCG vaccine as a newborn, taking me through his tonsillectomy in school, his appendicectomy in college, his hernia repair in midlife, his bypass surgery just before retirement, and his piles surgery just after retirement. All the while he takes time out to cough with commendable diligence and consistency, producing a fine mist of spittle – a lot of which lands into my drink.

Now I know that a lot of people have this picture of a doctor as someone with wings on his shoulder blades and a halo around his noggin, flitting from one suffering human to another, curing them with the magic dust of sweet words and the occasional prick in the ass (with a sterile syringe, I mean). But that’s all complete nonsense, I assure you. Medicine is a profession like any other, and doctors just do their jobs to the best of their ability – BECAUSE THEY’RE PAID FOR IT. No doctor is ever thrilled to his deepest renal papillae when called upon to give free medical advice.

Now if this article has conveyed the impression that I’m a misanthrope who hates people, then I will pat myself on my back for having successfully conveyed to my readers what I wished to convey. So it is my humble request to keep away from me (and to keep me away from you, by all means), unless one or more of the following conditions are fulfilled:

• You wish to consult me professionally (with full fee paid in advance, even if you are a distant relative)
• You ever happened to share a school, a college or a hostel room with me
• You propose to fill me with alcohol of any kind
• You wish to lend me your Mercedes
• You are a voluptuous intellectual woman

PEOPLE I LOVE TO MEET