Judging a book by its cover?

So there is this gang of guys standing in front of me... dressed in pathani suits and talking in loud voices. I had no intentions of mingling with them and kept my distance and tried to read my book (standing) under the tree... After some time this one lady came and she seemed pretty lost and approached the “gang” to figure out where she should go... I certainly took her for a fool to be going and asking them for help!

But before I could offer my words of wisdom, the guys, whom I took to be first rate loafers, had already directed her to the right gate and offered other information and that too very politely, I must add!

There I was with my book, pretending to belong to some so called intelligentsia and judging these people. Well I realize that now, but its hard to criticise oneself too much and I didn’t think too much of it then.

My subconscious dismissed this as a one off case and went back to the task of judging every second person..


An all too feminine shrill voice “Uff! its soo hot and bright here. Yahan to I will get skin burn!! (Thin thin.. )”.. docile/ servile male counterpart, obviously overwhelmed at having found a fair maiden like her “are aap thoda aage ho jao.. take care.. all the best.. I am waiting here”.. How I hate such people! Its like they live in their own fantasy world and I always imagine “such people” to either have negligible grey matter or they don’t know about it if they do have it!


Next, I’m inside and there are two young women (as I imagined from their voice) chit chatting behind me.. . It was right behind me and fairly loud and I didn’t really have a lot to do, so couldn’t avoid eavesdropping. Female A (I don’t intent the word “female” in a derogatory sense here, I don’t even understand whats derogatory about it.. but any way.. ) had a heavy American accent and I learnt from the conversation that she’d been to US once for 6 months.

6 months! Can you beat that! And she comes back with this heavy accent!

And this other girl, Female B, she had a Punjabi accent and was talking about shopping and malls etc . So, obviously my subconscious had gotten at work and started putting faces to the voices. The accent had biased me heavily and I expected Female A to be a prim and proper well made up young girl, who’s all about appearances! And Female B to be a wannabe Female A...

I really wanted to turn around and bask in the glory of my accurate assessment! Although Female B was a wannabe Female A (of my version). Female A was quite the opposite!


Did i learn my lesson? No! Instead I moved on to judging myself.

 

All this while I had been sitting there with my book while most of the other people were a bit anxious about what would happen or were trying to make conversation with their neighbours (like A & B) etc. But I was sitting there trying to project a cool nonchalant persona... I think for some time I did manage to actually read and not step out and look at myself and assess what image I was presenting. But not for all the time. And so in reality I was still as concerned about the environment I was in as everyone else, I was just pretending to be “oh so cool” about it.


Thankfully the visa lady had done here assessment beforehand so she did not spend a lot of time in passing down her judgment on me! And I was out of there!