Other Tongue Blues

I’m always rather stumped when I have to fill out a form which asks me for my “mother tongue”. I have to resist writing “overworked” there. I also reflect fondly back on the boy in school who earnestly wrote “pink”.

Perhaps his confusion is quite reflective of what a handful of us feel. India with its gazillion languages, dialects and sub-dialects is mind-boggling to the unfamiliar ear. We drove the British out, kept their trousers, massacred their language and cried with indignation when they put tomato ketchup in Chicken Tikka Masala and called it their national dish.

And yet, in that melee, there were a few who chose to retain the English language as it was meant to be. A small motley group of people who know English to be their “mother tongue” – Wikipedia numbers this group to be about 225,000.

I’m one. I’m related to about 5 others and friends with a couple more. I don’t know where the rest have hidden themselves. A smart move since times are tough and circumstances are unwelcoming for Anglophones.

It’s equally frustrating to have to explain to an astonished foreigner and a gawping Indian that you've grown up speaking only English, your family communicates only in English (yes, even the grandparents and so on), you think in English and you struggle with vernacular languages because your brain is far slower than Google Translate on Internet Explorer on a dial-up internet connection. Yes, people like us exist. Yes, we’re Indian. Yes, this is our normal. And no, we do not think we’re better than everyone else.

An ex, an Englishman, was awestruck that I spoke as fluently as I did.

“Your vocabulary is even better than mine,” he exclaimed rather patronizingly.

“Why shouldn't it be?” I shot back. “My family is great with language, I went to a good school and I read a whole lot more than you do.”

“Well, yeah,” he acknowledged, “but, you know, you’re Indian.”

When he emailed a friend of his back in the UK telling him about his Indian girlfriend and that she “speaks only English”, the friend replied: “Did you mean she speaks no English?”

Say, how do you tell someone to fuck off in smoke signals? Or should I just tom-tom that on my Indian drum?

While travelling overseas, it’s somewhat insulting to be told I don’t sound like an Indian. Who are these Indians they've heard before? Ranjeet Singh in “Mind Your Language”? Call centre employees?

It’s no easier back home. My dad often tells of the times he and his brother were mockingly called “East India Company” for conversing fluently in English. My other ex - the loser Ducky - and his family tried to enforce their mother tongue on me and then rolled over and played the damaged victims when I dared voice my protest (yes, in English). A friend was told by a stranger to “Go back to England” when she got into a fender bender and tried to sort the matter out in English rather than the local language.

Anglophones are always given a really hard time. If you speak in English, they'll accuse you of being supercilious. If you try to speak a vernacular, they’ll mimic and mock your “anglicised accent”. If you shut up entirely, the men will call you shy and the women will label you snooty.

You can’t apply for several English-based teaching/writing jobs abroad because being Indian means you’re automatically not a “native speaker of English”. Even China’s “White is Right” policy means it prefers English teachers who are blond-haired, blue-eyed Westerners, particularly Americans, with pitiable grammar. We can’t seem to catch a break and it’s only getting worse.

There’s this sudden upsurge in enforcing the local language of the state on everybody. Our Prime Minister insists he will speak only Hindi while our state Chief Minister insists he will not look at any official documentation unless it is in Kannada. How they will ever work together is beyond me. But then, they’re politicians. Politicians don’t make anything work. They’re fluent in Stupidity.

There’s this ad on television currently which has a bunch of people lowering flags with English alphabets on them and raising flags with various alphabets in vernacular languages on them. Wouldn't it just be simpler to put in additional flagpoles instead and let the little English alphabets be? It’s sad. It’s very representative of what is happening in the country today.

We brag about our all-encompassing culture and yet curb one language for the sake of the other. We boast of a Constitution that grants citizens the freedom of speech but impose language restrictions on that speech. Hypocrisy is an unofficial language here and we're freakishly fluent in it.

We need to stop thinking of English as a foreign language. It may not be as old as some of our other Indian languages. But it still has considerable historical significance and has even evolved to include several words of Indian origin. English isn't foreign anymore. It was planted along with tea and coffee by the British. Yet we rant against this "foreign language", abhorring it over steaming cups of "chai" and "kaapi" and hailing our PM's humble origins as a "chai wallah".

That's something our pro-Hindi PM and mother-tongue enforcing politicians should think about as they slip into their trousers, don their foreign sunglasses and scoot off in their Morris-inspired cars to lecture people on language.

I’m all for preserving ancient languages and all that, but when you shove your mother tongue down my throat, I gag. In English.

Words Unspoken

"In the world of diplomacy, some things are better left unsaid." Luckily, I can blog them.

I’d like to think that I have the gift of the gab. I certainly hope to God I do because I haven’t much else. (I have whined about this before. *Click*) To put it mildly: When talent was being distributed, I completely missed the memo and was most likely doing something pointless like foraging for goji berries.

Therefore, to bolster some semblance of self-worth, I tell myself I possess a glib tongue. Of course, this is a pretty useless thing to possess and has, on occasion upon joyous occasion, utterly failed me. I was afflicted by social paralysis. It is possible that my heightened sense of diplomacy and love for keeping the peace overrides what I ought to have said in response to certain obnoxious individuals I have had the misfortune to encounter.

So, without further ado, I present my shortlist of unfounded accusations hurled at me by half-wits and the responses I wish I’d mustered enough courage to actually give:

"You're shallow."

Na-ah! I’m not shallow. On a scale of bottle cap to Indian Ocean, I’d rank around the depth of a hospital bed pan. I’d say that's pretty good considering the amount of poop I to have to put up with.

"People hesitate to approach you."

Hell, yeah, if they’re selling weed or their grandsons, sometimes their weed-smoking grandsons. People may hesitate to approach me but they sure as hell have no problems in reproaching me. Isn't that a good thing…for them?

"You hate our parties."

That’s because you use the term "party" loosely. What you should aptly be calling it is a "coma inducing night of Bingo/Tambola with a crowd of septuagenarians". Then I wouldn't hate your parties. I'd simply avoid them. Oh, wait. I did!

"There’s no such thing as a 50-50 relationship. It’s 60-40 at best. Women must compromise 200%." 

Ooh, look who finally woke up! Rip Van Winkle. You've been asleep the last couple of centuries. Not to worry, you didn't miss much. Just a couple of tiny, insignificant things like the atom bomb, a vaccine for small pox and, oh, yeah, WOMEN'S LIB.

"Your blog has no journalistic excellence."

That’s why it's a blog, not The Wall Street Journal. Duh.

"You suck."

Yeah, you’re right. Glad we can agree on something.

Okay, so that last one I might have actually said. And it isn't even clever. Sigh. Yep, I suck.

Rape Isn't a Sport

To people who use "rape" to describe a cricket performance:

There is nothing even remotely funny about rape. If you think it is a clever word to describe the utter decimation of a cricket team by another, think again.

You are on Facebook. You are actively vocal about your opinions thanks to its Status Update feature. That makes you tech-savvy and educated. Wait, did I say educated? I take that back. I’ll go with "literate". You are literate enough to voice your opinion about a cricket match, but when you say things like "XYZ raped the ABC team" or "XYZ was gang-raped by 11 men", you prove you are far from educated.

We live in India during a time when no other word is more commonly splashed around in the media than "rape". We have the dubious distinction of nurturing a "rape culture".

Rape culture does not just begin and end with the men who think that women are mere objects for them to violate. Rape culture includes the society that encourages it. A society that is insensitive to the plight of thousands of women and young girls who are brutalized.

That society includes you. You who so callously bandies around words like "rape" and "gang rape" to describe a cricket performance.

Think about the young woman who was gang raped by six men on a bus, who screamed for help even as the brutes gouged out her innards with an iron rod. Think about a five-year-old girl who lies in a hospital, traumatized after being gang raped by two men – men who did things so terrible to her tiny body, it makes me sick to even mention here. Think about the six-year-old girl who was found in a public toilet, raped and left for dead, her throat slit.

That is RAPE. Is that what you equate with the blistering knock of Chris Gayle? Is that the word you want to use to describe the complete annihilation of PWI or RCB?

Are you that insensitive? Or is it simply apathy? Are you so smug and content in the belief that it couldn't happen to you or to someone you love? That rape only happens to someone else – some nameless faceless stranger whose ordeal earns her a two-column piece on the front page, an hour’s debate on the 9:00 news and a candle light vigil at the India Gate.

What if (God forbid) it did happen to you or someone close to you? Would you still use "rape" or "gang rape" to describe a spectacular performance?

Open the dictionary. You will find it to be a wonderful book. There are words like "decimate", "obliterate", "annihilate", "drubbing", "defeat", "vanquish", "expunge" and more. Or is your brain, much like your petty insensitive mind, so tiny that it can only grasp completely inappropriate four-letter words?

The Doorable Blah Vocabulary

I have more or less established by now (assuming you’ve been reading my blog for a while) that my family is just a little bit cuckoo. And by family, I mean my immediate family – not including the likes of an aunt by marriage, who dreamt one night that her husband had swallowed their wind chime. She awoke in the middle of the night and attempted to push her hand down his throat to rescue her beloved wind chime, while he, rudely awoken from a deep slumber, gurgled for help. There’s a fine line between stark raving mad and quirky and we, the Blahs, have yet to cross it.

If a Blah were convinced of a prized possession being down a man’s gullet, he/she would tell him he had sheer “gumption” sending “bumf” down his throat. Now, while the dictionary shows “gumption” to mean “the quality of being sensible and brave enough to do the right thing in a difficult situation”, the Blah dictionary holds that it is the “quality of being cheeky, brazen and having the sheer gall to do the wrong thing in any situation.”

My mother’s vocabulary would be down to 50% if the word gumption were taken away from her. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gumption, and the Word was Gumption. A phone call from my mother is filled with anecdotes about the sheer gumption of the drunken woman labourer who ran amuck in the nude, the gumption of my boisterous dog who gave her a black eye and the gumption of the person who left a single slipper on the road and disappeared.

“Bumf” in a normal (archaic) dictionary refers to unwanted or uninteresting printed matter such as governmental forms, legal documents, The Times of India, junk mail, promotional pamphlets, Bangalore Mirror's Sexpert column etc. The Blahs have adapted the word to explain away any otherwise inexplicable junk. Bumf is a very handy term. It saves you the time and energy of having to supply long explanations about say, the contents of a drawer. “What’s in the drawer? Oh, just some bumf.” Nobody ever attempts to question any more. You never question bumf. You just accept it. “Some bumf” is good enough. It effectively qualifies everything from a speckle of food on someone’s chin to the putrid carcass the dog dragged in to the strange greeny-grey mold on an abandoned vegetable in the refrigerator.

Bumf is not to be confused with another Blah word “bum fluff”. Bum fluff refers to a scraggly pre-pubescent-type mustache. This word belongs to my maternal uncle, who maintains that such weak attempts at a mustache resemble the “hair on a bum”. I have never worked up the courage to ask anything further.

And if you happen to touch some bumf (or bum fluff for that matter), make sure you wash your hands with the “bum soap”. That’s right. The bum soap – the bar of soap placed on/near the wash basin meant for washing of hands. I’m not sure just how it came to be referred to as “bum soap”. I suspect my father coined the term and we children, thoroughly amused, adopted it. My mum faced the embarrassing consequences of such learning when my brother Scion once hollered from one end of the supermarket, “Hey, Ma! Do we need bum soap?” He remained oblivious to the stunned expressions of fellow shoppers while my mother tried unsuccessfully to bury herself in a sack of wheat flour while muttering something about God smiting firstborns. When he, convinced his mother was hard of hearing, shouted again about the lack of enough bum soap in the house, my mother responded with “Grr Wolf! I heard you the first time.”

“Grr Wolf!” for the Blahs is an expression of extreme exasperation. Attaching a growling animal to the otherwise meek and mild “Grr” sort of drives home the point apparently. No vulgar expletives for us Blahs. Grr Wolf usually works for just about any sort of aggravating situation. The need for stronger or cruder cuss words or commonplace vulgar expressions does not arise. However, for a particularly sticky situation, we do resort to the much harder hitting expletive “Shit ‘n molasses”.

Now, I am not sure how exactly this expression came about. But I suppose having shit in your molasses or shit and molasses are both bad things. “Shit ‘n molasses” is a Blah Code Red.

A “shit ‘n molasses” moment would be the opposite of a Blah “door you” moment. “Door you” is an expression of affection. Now, we aren’t exactly the most emotionally expressive family. Everyone keeps a stiff upper lip during any sort of upheaval, which would leave normal families blubbering a bit like the ones in Indian television soaps. However, as a kid, this was the one expression of affection we resorted to. When I was four, I would exchange “Good nights” and “Door Yous” with my folks last thing at night and then spend the next few minutes staring at the door, wondering what that plank of wood had to do with anything. It took me a few years to realise it was just a Blah way of saying “I adore you”.

The expression works for us. In fact, they all do – all these somewhat unique expressions. I door them all and no one can tell me any differently.

Blundering Through the Punder Years

An old windbag, after waxing on about what a genius at embroidery her daughter was, once asked me what my talent was. I blinked, stuttered a bit, and then weakly said, “I like writing”. She snorted. “No, don’t you have any real talent?”

No. I don’t actually, coming to think of it.

I could sketch decently once. That is now limited to doodling during telecons or drawing boxes for KO. My singing attracts amorous camels. I’ve done one stint of Salsa fairly recently, but my dancing isn’t going to be impressing any rain gods any time soon.

I am not really musically challenged, seeing as I can tell an A Minor from a G-string, but I have never really taken to a musical instrument. Some people are born to play, and others are born to be played for. I can cook and bake in a non-Michelin-starred-chef kind of way. That’s more likely to add weight to a matrimonial resumé.

I can bring my feet up to my face. But I don’t think that qualifies as a talent. Anyway, it’s not as cool as Bunny’s ability to skip using his arms. He once asked me what I thought he could do with it; I suggested he do it at the traffic lights to make some money. May be I’m good at making nonsense suggestions. Does that qualify as a talent? I morph and create rude pictures of BC to be sent out on every festive occasion. That’s nonsense again.

The written word. It’s pretty much all I’ve really got. I think.

As I think back over the years, my attempts at writing have always gotten me into trouble. Well, trouble with the wrong sort, anyway – the sort without a sense of humour. The kind of people not really worth knowing or tolerating as far as I am concerned.

Writing and trouble – oh, yes, we go back a long way.

Reading just sort of goes hand-in-hand with writing. And so I learned of the birds and the bees slightly earlier than those around me. Consequently, at around the age of 7 or 8, I found myself being chased around the playground by an incensed Fightercock Lakshmi, who was yelling, “You said babies come from the bottom!” “Not bottom,” I shot back over my shoulder as I scooted ahead, “I said ******, stupid!” “You called me a stupid!”, she squealed still galloping behind me. “No, I said ‘stop it’, you idiot!” I shouted back as I tried to put more distance between us while avoiding an obstacle course some kindly diarrheic cow had laid out earlier that day.

Then there was that matter of that Garden of Eden depiction with my pal Mushroom a while later.

When I was all of 10 or 11, a handful of us were hauled up for penning fake letters to a classmate as a joke. Well, the rest were contributors while I did the actual penning. Unfortunately, the said victim did not have a sense of humour. She ratted us out to the Maths teacher, who took it upon herself to lecture us on immorality, the wages of sin being death, the “foolishness of virgins” and how she would like to “hung her head in shame” for our wicked deed. It’s a different matter that I might have wanted to “hung my head” at the grammar.

Nonetheless, she must have been fairly convincing. For she had me praying fervently to the Lord for forgiveness when I was beckoned to the principal’s office soon after. I was certain I would be expelled. As it turned out, it had nothing to do with those letters. Oo, KO’s sister who now traipses around Ireland with a butterfly net trying to catch leprechauns, had chosen that week to faint at the breakfast table. I was the sole witness when she flopped face-first into a bowl of icky wheat porridge. I can’t really blame her. You should have seen that cess-pool matter they called porridge. The principal, for reasons best known to her, simply wanted to know how long Oo had been comatose. She’d regained conscious right about the time I yanked her head out of the bowl. I left the office with a commendation for having saved Oo from drowning in porridge.

Anyhow, I digress. Again.

Cut to 2010. I was in trouble again. This time for penning a post that supposedly showed my community in a bad light and insulted Ducky’s “lineage” in front of “the whole world” (I love that they thought my readership was that huge). A post that most people chuckled at. Except the ones that lacked a sense of humour and figured the piece was all about them. I was given lectures on tradition, “respecting elders”, how no Brits would touch me with a barge pole (which would prove a tad ironic later), how I churned out no material of “journalistic excellence” (who’s going for a Pulitzer anyway?) and so forth. Plenty of drama that would put an Indian soap opera to shame later, the offending post stayed. The non-funny-boned, sons-of-our-soil, last-standing-bastions-of-tradition people did not. Nonetheless, when people are more hypocritical than they are critical, it’s easy to cut your so-called losses and blog on.

So, yes. You can take the blah out of my writing. But you cannot take writing out of Blah.

What absolute piffle. It sounded a tad better in my head. Then again, this is my blog. I can put whatever the hell I want in here.

That’s right. For the whole world to see.

The Multiple Worgasm

I love words. It is as simple as that. Words have been a passion, a refuge, an icebreaker, a relationship maker, a relationship breaker, a reputation creator and wrecker, a way to wheedle my way through life. I take to words in every form; be it a book, a blog, the back of a toothpaste tube, the back of an autorickshaw, rude graffiti on the door of a public toilet or even a well-spoken person.

There are the word bores and the word whores. I loathe them and love them, respectively.

Then there’s that lot of people who automatically assume that if they throw a whole lot of pseudo-intellectual psycho babble at me, it’s going to open doors… in more ways than one. NF, the pompous so-n-so from oh-so-many years ago, springs to mind. He waxed on about the umbra and penumbra of the moon in some kind of poetic verse, oblivious to the fact that my eyes had rolled back into my head. He didn’t even stop when I began to gnaw my way through the plaster on the wall in a desperate bid to get away (or at least imbibe some turpentine to ease the pain). He didn’t even stop when I had left. He probably noticed my empty seat three hours later when a bit of wall plaster fell into his eye and blocked his view of the blasted penumbra or whatever.

“You should find out whether a guy reads PG Wodehouse first before anything else, “ advised Terror #1 as I stifled a guffaw and decided I’d give the young fellow, still green behind the ears et al, a patient listen – if only to humour him.

A few days later, whilst KO, BC and I satisfied a craving for gelato and froyo, we spied a chap seated alone at a neighbouring table reading – you guessed right – PG Wodehouse. KO, who is always ready to pimp her friends out just so that she can have her cheap entertainment (what with the price of movie tickets in this city), began goading me. “Go on,” she whispered with her trademark evil gleam in the eye. I actually considered it for a second.

“KO,” I said pensively, rolling a bit of froyo around in my mouth, taking in the young fella’s ill-fitting beige-and-brown checked bermudas, bright green t-shirt with something that looked suspiciously like Tweety on crack printed on it under a lint-infested cardigan.

“Yes, child?”

“He is terribly chappal-party,” I said, uncharacteristically resorting to a more vulgar vernacular expression as words had suddenly failed me.

For there, peering cheekily at us from under the table, were his horrendous pair of leather flip-flops. You know. The kind that men here seem to embrace with great enthusiasm when they turn 50. Replete with that gargantuan ring custom-made for a gorilla’s big toe.

So much for Wodehouse.

If you’re thinking, “Gee! Judgmental b*!@#”, you’re probably right. But is there any other way to be?

However, Krazy Frog probably described best how I take to words. Although I must caution here that Krazy Frog is terribly prone to exaggeration. He needs to learn to put that bottle of Black Dog down at some point.

I yammered on excitedly about a word someone, who may or may not have caught my fancy, had used. A word long since forgotten by a world that thinks “awesome” and “kewlness” are the only words one needs to know to get by.

“Oh, my god! He used the word ********. Who even uses that nowadays?” I gushed. “Hmm,” said KF, before adding, “You know what?”

“What?”

“A man does not have to physically pleasure you. All he has to do is keep throwing fancy words at you and you’re done.”

And that, folks, is a “worgasm”.

The War Against Wassup

“Wassup?”

Or other variations of that irritating word.

Nothing can be more annoying than that single word popping up on my cellphone. Is it a greeting? An expression of concern for my well-being, perhaps?

For the most part, it appears to be a handy substitute for all those who have trouble making any semblance of decent conversation – and there are plenty of that sort out there as I’m beginning to find out all over again.

“I would like to lynch the next person who sends me that singularly most annoying word again as a text message”, I cribbed to Terror#1 this afternoon. “What is with the word anyway? What is one expected to say in response?”, I spat.

Terror#1, who often shares my sentiments on a lot of things like this – blame it on our “hilly-billy” backgrounds (as BC puts it) – reasoned that it probably stemmed from people being in AIESEC, where it is supposedly a way of greeting. He then went on to explain that since the word is used in Budweiser advertisements, the “Wassupers” were probably hoping to star in the brewer’s next commercial. I suspect Terror#1 might have had one too many Buds to come up with that explanation!

I would even venture that one’s usage of “wassup” is a keen indicator of one’s social prowess. Take for instance the little episode the other day as BC and I shared a couple of laughs and a chinwag over some fruity cocktails and chicken wings.

Well into the pleasant evening (pleasant up to that point at least, eh, BC?), a waiter came up and looking rather apologetic told me, “Ma’am, your bill has been paid already”. “What?”, I asked feeling rather stupid. “That guy at the bar insisted on paying the bill”, the waiter replied sheepishly as BC and I exchanged slightly alarmed but flummoxed glances.

“Can we reverse that?”, we pleaded, sneaking a peek at our benevolent benefactor, who leaned against the bar watching us expressionlessly. The waiter shook his head, his face mirroring our confusion and angst. I considered giving him an earful for not having checked with us before being a total pushover and acceding to the man’s demand.

My inner bitch grappled with my inner goody-two-shoes – should we ignore the bill payer or go over and say thank you? The Pushover brought us a note from the guy, who continued eyeing us uncertainly. The note said something to the effect of “Could I join you guys? I only want some conversation.” We gave it the once-over, noting the bad handwriting, awkward sentence construction but decent grammar and perfect spelling. We nodded our approval to the Pushover, who then plonked another chair next to BC and not me. Was I ever glad! (Guess who was in line for a fat tip that night?)

For the next what-seemed-to-be-eternity, our benefactor waxed on about social media and made some polite chit-chat – the major part of which I refused to contribute to, opting instead to feign deafness as the music was “too loud”. In doing so, I put BC in a spot – she took it upon herself to act as an interpreter of sorts until I told her to give it up. Each time he asked me something, I would signal “Loud music, I cannot hear! Forget it!” BC has yet to forgive me but loves me still, bless her good little heart.

To his credit, Social Media Bloke was decent and had played his cards well up until then – our basic courteousness compelling us to give the man and his near-monologue on social media a patient listen. We are nice like that. It could have continued to be that way. However, he made one catastrophic mistake – he sent us both a few text messages with that singularly annoying word – “Wassup”.

Almost needless to say, Social Media Bloke has never seen or heard from us since. Yes, my inner bitch won – and after some wrestling with her conscience, so did BC’s.

Death to all Wassupers is all I can say at this point – and no prizes for guessing what their one-word epitaph will read.

Mind Your Language

Having put myself through the paces of a community social gathering, I thought I left with my sanity and dignity intact.

Until I received “feedback”.

All golden (*preen*)…

Friendly? Check.

Of fair countenance? Check.

Linguistic abilities? N/A

Huh?

Oh, yes, that’s right; I do not converse in my native tongue.

How terrible, and that coming from someone who has ne’er said anything beyond “hello” before proceeding to nestle up with the cronies and reminisce about the good old days when they used to live by a river bed, cross a paddy field and enjoy somebody’s spinach crop (or something like that - I have long since stopped paying attention).

Having been born and brought up outside of the confines of my community well, I have long since come to terms with the fact that I am a social outcast of sorts when it comes to hobnobbing with my country cousins. Any non-conformist accusations were really just water off a duck’s backside.

Until now.

Suddenly, it has become of paramount importance to speak in my native tongue - something that could do, but opt not to simply because a. I’d actually have to think before I speak - something that I am not used to since I can rattle off like 300,000 words per minute without stressing the old bean out too much and b. I’m not really into paddy fields and munching spinach if you get my drift.

So, that imperfect score card kicked off “Operation Force-Her-To-Blah-In-Native-Tongue-Or-Else”. I had about much enthusiasm about the whole thing as a prospective visit to the dentist would evoke. If anything, it only awakened my inner rebel who was now determined not to do anybody's biding!

When my own flesh and blood never had issues with it, must society now force me to conform simply to please everybody?

What makes people think they have the right to go around clamping down on others’ freedom of expression (in whatever language that might be)? And don’t even get me started on this being a nationwide phenomenon. I am limiting my rant to the confines of my immediate society only.

Personality and virtue be damned, society says. What matters is that you uphold tradition. True enough, but does that mean it must be imposed on one such that it breeds resentment to the point of revulsion almost?

At the end of the day, the sad thing is that such imposition has only served to make me believe that the people who can make me feel most like an alien are my so-called community by birth.

Live and let live: is that such a bad thing and is that too much to ask?!