The A**hole

I stepped back, looked towards both sides, trying to figure out not which is the smallest queue – as most of the queues had 3-4 people in it – but which is bound to make me reach the counter the fastest. Now there are a lot of factors which are required to be considered for this – i) the amount of stuff people in the queue ahead of you have accumulated in their shopping baskets, as this is directly proportional to the amount of scanning time for that individual, hence increasing the waiting time of that particular queue, ii) the apparent quickness of the guy/girl at the counter – to be judged in not more than 3 seconds, iii) the queues nearer to you are of higher priority as you don’t want to criss-cross between so many queues of people to reach the row at the other end, and moreover, you don’t know how well do that factors i) and ii) above apply to the queues farther away, and iv) other miscellaneous subtle factors like the anxiousness of the people waiting in queue, as it is directly proportional to their desperateness to get the billing done quickly, which may be important.

So as I stepped back, I made a quick judgement about the smallest queue and joined it. That’s when I saw the gigantic guy. He was not very tall, though definitely at 6 feet. He seemed shorter because of his enormous circumference around the waist. He was bulging from every end you can possible call a corner in the human body. If you could pump air into a huge piece of ginger, it would look like him. Though I did not have enough time to analyse all this before I saw what he was buying. There in his basket I saw three jars of Organic India Green Tea! Hello! No way was he going to lose any apparent weight by drinking Green Tea! For heaven’s sake! He needs to stop with all the namkeen packets he had stacked up in his basket, waiting to be billed. He needed to move around a little to lose weight, not have Green Tea! I mean goodness! I almost laughed out loud!

Then with a jolt, I got the answer to the question - What is the easiest thing for us humans to be? It’s being an asshole. I was passing judgement on that person without knowing an ounce of information about him. I was showing a typical conceited attitude that constitutes a typical asshole. And I caught myself in the act. All this happened within 15 seconds, but those 15 seconds shook me back to reality, brought me back to the ground. We do not know what goes on in the lives of others, we don’t know what compromises they have made, how much hard work they have put in, how much adversity they have faced in life. We don’t know jack about anything for that matter, yet we strut around, handing out judgements to people like candy to children on Christmas. To top it all, we have the smugness to be defensive about it if someone else points it out to us. Truth is hard, but so is an asshole. So everyone, I would suggest whenever you find yourself making an opinion about someone, any opinion whether big or small, turn the mirror towards yourself and just see the look on your face while you are at it. It may not shame the piss out of you, but it’ll at least wipe that smirk off your face.