The Weird Kind of Rude

The awkward kind of rude, the weird kind of rude or the very totally majorly kind of rude. Some people are rude in just the weirdest way possible. Sometimes the weirdness gets borderline dumb, makes you want to go facepalm right there and then. Well this world will always be full of really rude people, dumb people and weird people, so why not have the really dumb and weird type of rude people? Very recently I had dinned out on a weeknight evening with a friend of mine at one of my favorite restaurants in the city by the sea and I had encountered a slightly bitter experience, not with respect to the restaurant itself but as a result of some other patrons confidentially not just present at the same time but occupying a neighboring table. It is one of the higher end establishments in this city, and by design it is a beautiful restaurant with a brilliant outdoor court yard for those wishing to enjoy the gentle sea breeze of the city by the sea. The staff at the establishment are brilliant full kudos to them for taking excellent care of their customers. For foreigners reading this blog, my nick names for home town 'Karachi' are City by the Sea or Shehr e Quaid, the latter if I am feeling very Urdu-ish. Just so you know, Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is one of the official languages of India.

This particular experience with respect to other people was not happening as an occurrence in my life for the first time, it has happened fairly frequent. One thing is very common to the people that display such gestures of awkward rudeness. Their casual acquaintances in most circumstances, having met me just once or twice or max a handful of times in life. They do not know me on a personal or social capacity, which is what is the optimal required level of interaction required in order to form an objective opinion about another person. The behavior in Question I am about to describe is something not just myself, millions of us growing up have experienced it as some stage in life or the other. Very high likelihood of it happening while we were in high school of in the early years of our adulthood at University. This is when you as an individual walk into a place, you spot some one whose presence makes you uncomfortable, even though you mind your own business and go about your way, those very people can not keep a lid or check on their emotions and engage in rude, childish, immature and anti social behavior of certain sorts. For example if they are accompanied by other people who are strangers to you, they would start whispering about you using negative references to their peers and friends.



Now generally I am not some one who is bothered by what the individual ONE person thinks about me, it is a reality of life I can not be liked by everyone, though I try my best to like people, I can not like everyone either. My cause of concern arises when those that dislike me can not shut the fuck up with respect to how they feel about me or how they see me, they just feel too compelled to spread their opinions with respect to myself onto complete strangers who until that moment had no idea who I was, I was a complete stranger to them. Unnecessarily attention has been brought into my direction, people who are complete strangers to me now have some attention focused in my direction and not in the best of ways. Them being complete strangers having never met them I am unlikely to pay attention to their faces, let alone remember them, but since wrong attention has been brought to them about me, if I am ever in life to meet such people (strangers) in the near future, very high probability of them having already biased opinions and might act socially inappropriate towards me. At the time they might indirectly influence others accompany or those present at the venue or whatever in those circumstances with respect to who I am as an individual.

Such experience is not unique to me, what I am writing every single one of you reading this has probably experienced this at some point or the other in their lives. Let me share an interesting example of how people exchanging dislike for a person can translate into cyberspace and take the form of cyber bullying even. Last year when I was a graduate student in the United Kingdom, this Pakistani chap, I am guessing from his Facebook profile he was 20 at the time, he went by the name of Khizer which is a common Pakistani first name and was an undergraduate student at one of the universities in London. That fellow picked fights me on chat groups, Facebook fan pages, groups and even started to message me direct to my inbox of threatening to cause me physical harm also. His only argument for such behavior was that so and so person and so and so person 2 have said such and such about me, why would they lie, you must be this kind of person. My immediate reaction was ''how much free time does this weirdo have?'' and ''haven't his parents taught him that you respect elders? But then again kids these days, those born 89 and beyond, their a whole different generation from those born 83 to 85, hard to predict their behavior. One thing is certain though my generation at least respected their seniors and elders regardless of how much we hated them. I say this behavior constitutes as a kind of social bullying without a doubt. What makes this one interesting is that the person who was referenced as making a strong claim about me had only met me once or twice before. Back in 2008, i had experienced a huge difference of opinion with a friend in similar circumstances, in that case individuals referenced i had never heard off. It is also a very small world, so that does not help.

I would like to conclude by encouraging socially responsible behavior and etiquette but I suppose that is pointless in a world, where people are too judgmental and are continuously looking for reasons to hate one another . So I guess it is like talking to a thick brick wall, even after reading this blog, unlikely that people will change their behavior, change their mood, change their attitude and become more open minded. Some people will always be narrow minded and will always want to demolish people in their minds for a personal ego boost. For the time being I can choose to keep ignoring such people and hope bad word of mouth doesn't cost me or any of us when it really matters.