Trying to be...

Ya Ya.... Y'all heard me awright!! Chumma, that was just for effect. That was me trying to be Coooool - not the superstar way but my own, thank you! I was just plain 'trying to be' well...nice...! 'Trying to be' also has a very straight no-nonsense adjective - 'Wannabe'. Now (as I try hard to sound like a pre-interval Tom Hanks in Da Vinci code who has just laid out the mystery to whats her name?!) , arent we all wannabes? Before you raise your eyebrow and snarl your teeth at the thought, think again. Arent we all at some or various points in our lives, wanting to be something other than what/who we are? No? Think again.

At home, right from when you were told how to speak to a visiting aunt in a nice way when she had just then pulled your left cheek out of place and all you had wanted to do was to bite off her fingers, and mommy says, " ooooo&&&^^^%%$$$ (basically some endearing words which can very well be replaced with my name! But no, all 3yr olds must be addressed with munnu, babeeee, kutttyy and the worse sounding gibberish that just went by your eyes! Now back to mummy dear) ...ooo show aunty how you sing lovebirds, lovebirds....oh Lalitha, this one will even roll her eyes like Sarojadevi..! Yenga, konjam pannikaattu?!" Grrrr....!!

If this 'wannabee-ness' wasnt enough, we get into an even better zone in school. Peer pressure is one easy way to analyse why we did what we did, when we are no longer doing it. Right from a haircut, to the color of your pencilbox, to the special sticker on the schoolbag, to trying to order a new dish at a restaurant just because some friend ate it and said twas yummy, (and yes, how can I not put in the wannabe-ness of having a crush? Everyone in school had one - be it on the neighbors teenage son or a senior in school! How weird you must be if by 17 you didnt have a boyfriend...! How sad, when its the same when youre 22 and still single, when most of your friends have gone beyond the two flowers shaking their heads in front of the lead pair in Tamil movie songs...indicating that the couple have exchanged a kiss so unimaginable that they cant even show it!!) Everything that we think and do when we are growing up is an 'acquired' taste or habit and becomes our identity. It takes long and in most cases, a very hard personal life, where some kind of jolt, (usually ending in prolonged tears and a heart that remains heavy for years), to undo and break the acquired-ness of our personalities and arrive at the tip of the iceberg that we all become.

College can be even worse - but in my case, school was my zone of being like the others...of wanting to fit in. College - kind of saw me off on my own, because I dared to do things that my peer group didnt indulge in or didnt think twas cool to do. Like take part in an Editorial competition for a Tamil magazine. This, when I didnt know to read or write my mother tongue then - I learnt it completely on the job. No, not at all proud of it but as is the trademark of my generation, Im not overtly ashamed of it either. Even then, my wanting to do something different, wanting to break away from being a wannabe, was also 'wanting to be...' Right?!

My point here is that wannabe is not so bad after all. I mean, we have heard this being said about a new joint in the city or a new shopping mall - 'oh thats a boring place, only wannabes go there!' Whats wrong with a wannabe? Atleast they seem to have a purpose to be something....someone other than their existing selves. Isint that some cause for excitement, specially when we are growing up and school anyway takes a whole decade and more to finish, we have a lot of time to indulge in wannabe-ness. At its very worst, it does give us something to do with our TIME.

The one question that follows us from the minute we raise our heads from our babycribs to LKG - the one question posed by visiting aunt Lalithas, mom & dad, the one question asked by our moral science miss to Heads of Departments and Job recruiters.... WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE...?

So...being a WANNABE is not such a bad thing after all ... !???