Masks are fascinating. PERIOD!! I was hooked when I was a kid, growing up to Batman and other masked Heroes on TV or comic books. It was probably too much for my feeble mind then to comprehend the “MASK” that transformed a seemingly ordinary individual in to a super hero. Growing up, I grew out of it involuntarily I might add. That is why I want to grow ‘young’ as opposed to this other mundane thing we do!! In any case I believed that the Magic of the Mask was over for me till when my uncle reestablished its existence. It was on a taxi going to school. I was telling him how I get bored with small talk or people pulling my cheeks on the commute. He recommended that I always take the seat by the window and look at the passers by. He said if I look closely I can see the mask that people had on from the various interactions. That was it….. I still can’t get myself to stop!
At 25, I am still amazed at the way each one of us has different masks and how effortlessly we transform. Take an average day from the time we wake up, the face we put on to our family, the paperboy, the milk man, the watchman, colleagues and friends. It can be simple facial gestures, personal gazes, change in tone or out right pronounced change in body language. Which ever one of these it is, it has been done perfectly for so long that one almost forgets that it was arrived at consciously. We didn’t just decide that we will smile more among our friends than we will when among strangers. Somewhere along the line we have categorized the people around us and our reaction to them is hence dictated by this categorization. More often than not; being individualistic, we structure our reactions depending on how we want to be perceived. Once this is achieved the journey is downhill. We pick and choose the traits which we believe acceptable to a category and muffle the rest with our masks.
We realize the importance of these masks all too well. Can you imagine the catastrophe of being caught with a mask that doesn’t fit the category? This would be worse than stepping out of the shower in to the middle of a crowded Mambalam railway station at peak hour. Imagine being the way you are with your drinking buddies at your mom’s prayer group meet; worse yet imagine showing your true face to a ‘HIGHER UP’ while trying to sell something that you have lost all faith in, knowing your life depended on it. The numbers of times we have found ourselves in similar fix or the fear of the disaster that happened to those who have experienced the same teach us to pick our masks wisely.
I have witnessed at times when the masked ones are totally compromised unknowingly by their audience, mostly brought about by a drastic change in circumstance like grief, illness and surprise. We juggle so many masks these days that we have forgotten that we even choose. Some people wear a mask when feeling restricted to be who they really are; some wear it to fit in, some for protection. Whatever the case most people have worn it for so long that they have become the mask. We have gone so far as to assume that the mask we are shown is the entirety of a person’s character. I am of the belief that we are so lost in what we show to others that we have quit asking why we show it.
So I end this post asking all the readers to go out of your categories and ask yourself why and if you are showing the people around you the face you want to show. To mask or unmask, you choose but at least this way you will know why.
