Fear the Pain

- Akash Pattanayak

He looks around and sees different kinds of people around him. There are the academic whiz kids whose worlds seem to stay balanced just as long as they can score full marks and even missing out on that one mark is as if the Mayan prophecy is about to come true and we’re all going to die by 2012. Then you have your athletes who win and lose by a millisecond and he wonders why nobody remembers the guy who came second (who knows who lost to Michael Phelps by one hundredth of a second?).  And then there are the slackers who waste their lives smoking up and drinking. Now in this sea of diversity where you have the nerds, the jocks, the dopes, the other stereotypes, why does he feel like a fish out of water? He doesn't fall into any of these categories. The reason is two simple words that we all know but don’t truly understand- pain and fear.

Pain and fear are more often than not interrelated. We fear pain. We end up realizing that the fear was uncalled for (maybe that vaccination wasn't so painful after all.). Pain, now is it as simple as a bee stinging you on your bum or is it maybe something more complex, something that has far more intangible effects than being hit by a car and breaking each and every bone in your body? Well that does sound pretty painful to me. Maybe that last breakup or not making it to that IIT can be as painful as that car running you over. I’d take that breakup any day of the week but you never know with the “emo” teenagers these days. No kidding. Some people enjoy pain but that’s kind of messed up so we’ll ignore both the sadistic and masochistic weirdos and focus on the weirdo that doesn't fit in for now. So the only thing we know is that pain is subjective. It differs from person to person in intensity, toleration, and expression.

So let’s come to fear. I know we've left the story hanging but it’s kind of important to explain these two abnormal things before we can get back to this poor outcast, I’m sure he can hang in there a little longer. So let’s start with the clichés- “The only thing we must fear is fear itself”. Yeah, tell that to the little kids in Uganda who know Kony is still alive or maybe those kids in America who went to Michael Jackson’s house in the summer. But yeah fear is something that makes us human. Each and every human being has felt this and it is something that we can’t ignore. Unless you’re Evil Kanevil. It would've been great if we were Vulcans and couldn't compute emotions like fear. But we forget that fear is the most powerful motivator. It drives us unlike anything else;you run 10 times faster knowing a dog is chasing you. Now moving on to the next cliché – The fear of the unknown, we fear what we don’t understand. This one actually explains human behavior to a large extent and is visible in our evolution. We feared the unfathomable to the extent that we began worshiping these things. It is a function of our insatiable desire to rationalize (irrationalize?) everything. 

 Pain and fear therefore become the deciding factors in the decision-making process. Now when you think of that orange light, it makes you think of all those decisions. It takes you back to that time when everything stopped and it seems that the whole world was waiting on you to make that decision. Somehow that scares you because you’re afraid of getting hurt. Is it because you've experienced the pain or because you fear the idea of not knowing what lies ahead and are hence happy to stick to your comfort zone that you've carved out for yourself?

So let’s take all this philosophical cocktail party mumbo jumbo back into the life of the social pariah that we left hanging in the story.  Now when he was younger he was usually willing to take the leap. He went for the Olympiads, the sports meets and the parties. At the Olympiads he became the academically weak kid, which in the Indian scenario would probably mean he became the embarrassment of the family. Either IIT or idiot. In sports he sadly ended up becoming the last guy who got picked in the team or worse became the umpire. Finally at the parties he realized that he’s the socially awkward kid who nobody wants to hang out with anymore because let’s face it nobody likes a buzz kill.  I guess if you get burned that many times you’re bound to be a little apprehensive.  Now every time he’s faced with an opportunity he ends up being either too indecisive or too afraid to give it a shot. I guess at the end of the day all that pain made him fear that choice in itself. So it’s not really the holding back or taking off at the Orange light that he fears more than the light individually. That’s what sets him apart from the high school ecosystem. He’s kind of an alien, but not the fun type like ET or Jadoo that everyone wants to play with, and more like the ones who are out to kill humans like the ones in “War of the Worlds” or something even more ridiculous like “Independence Day.”

Maybe he would be better off not putting himself in that position or maybe if he is strong enough he’ll continue to take that risk. And after all the failure he will have that Eureka moment and will end up getting a Nobel Prize or something. That day he’ll remember all those things he failed at and realize that he made the right choice by ignoring all the jocks, nerds and losers who were honking at him at that metaphorical Orange light.  If not I guess the Darwinian realm comes into play and too bad because it’s the survival of the fittest and with the kind of road rage you see around the world, if you wait too long you’ll probably get shot by some trigger happy redneck.