What if you are not the object of dreams?

About the time that Dream Girl was released was also when I started looking at the world that eventually has brought me to where I am now.

No, I don't mean to suggest in any way that I owe my American life to Hema Malini; be patient and read on!

It was back in my early teenage years, which now seems like it was a previous birth, that I was, as a classmate described much later in life, "besotted" with a girl.  No, not with Hema Malini, dammit!  Why are you so obsessed with Hema Malini? ;)

My feelings were directed towards a smart and beautiful classmate of mine.

It was also about the same time that I started thinking about life in ways that made me question a number of different of things all around me.  Discussing love and life cemented my friendship with a classmate, who later became a wandering Indian in his one way.

One of the challenging questions that we could not understand was why we felt attracted to whoever it was.  And, therefore, the other side of the coin, as far as I was concerned: What if I were nothing but an ugly pile who could not, and would not, attract anyone?

Think about the old historical paintings and sculptures and stories.  Do the wealthy ever pay good money for paintings of unattractive people?  Wait, are there any old portraits of unattractive people?  Full disclosure: No artist or photographer as ever asked me to be a model! ;)

So obsessed we humans are that we make fun of the unattractive!  Like how American comedians routinely joked, and continue to joke, about British teeth.  If you have been to California and looked at all those beautiful men and women with their perfect teeth that are sparkling white, you know why the jokes are always about the Brits.

If all that was back then, the pressure is even worse now in the age of Instagram.

 Plenty of Indian women, and men too, vigorously scrub themselves with creams and lotions that are marketed to make them supposedly beautiful from their less attractive dark selves.  There are hair transplants for us bald and balding men because bald is ugly. We short people are ugly.

We ugly people are then forever trying to fit in, it seems like.

I have always wondered if whether it was  bunch of unattractive people like me, but fortunately endowed with thinking brains, who came up with platitudes like "beauty is skin deep" or "what's is inside is what really matters."  Keep in mind that the patron-saint for us ugly but thinking people--Socrates--was not handsome by any means ;)

Socrates, my man!