Friday, March 10, 2006

An Introvert's Version

Amit points us to this brilliant article by Jonathan Rauch, a complete WOW-WOW-WOW material (as I had put it here in a fellow-introvert's post on the same :P) that left me with a very strong connection, absolute delight, and an immediate thrust to read it all over again and muse over it. Do read; and read over again. Also, read this interview. Oh, thanks so much Amit.
I know. My name is Zero, and I am an introvert; irrefutably so. I guess everybody I acquainted all my life would vouch[1] for that. Though, eventually for some of them, the perception blurs out (perhaps, they were misled by the “more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined and more sensitive” persona) and they seem to think otherwise. But, I digress.
I was telling you that I was very much that thing, an introvert. Couple this with the extreme cynicism[2] that sits on my head and you will get a fair picture of how I stood holding[3] the much-coveted shield that we won during the all-important inter-departmental cultural festival back during my college days. Well if you weren’t imaginative enough (or couldn’t just connect to the introvert-in-a-party situation), I was holding it like how one would hold a bag stuffed with the day’s shopping (a little exaggerated actually, but you get the idea). Of course, I was much delighted. But, my idea of celebration wasn't doing gung-ho jumps or making loud victory gestures.
Here’s another extrovert-introvert write-up that I had read sometime back, which observed, among other things, that I won’t be a popular blogger; something which I knew pretty much myself. {Comrades alert: it does have some unsavory things to say about us like that we are “incapable of making [our] point and [we] would be at a disadvantage passing on the revolutionary new idea that [we] had” and things like that. (Note to self: From when did you start getting revolutionary ideas anyway?)}

[1] - I didn’t conduct any survey asking if I was an introvert or extrovert. (We will leave that to the “people persons”, shall we?) It’s a thing that you can easily know.
[2] - While Jonathan Rauch in his excellent piece decouples a lot of qualities from introversion, I want to know how well introversion and cynicism couple with each other.
[3] - It just so happened that I was the department team coordinator (by default and by default only; but still beats me how I did that!) as all others interested folks had something worthy to do, like actually participating in the events; and I did a little bit of participation too, but that was well-spaced between the moments of deep personal reflection.

7 comments:

  1. Brilliant article?! Anyways,I think he justifies introversion. The point is introverts never care.Atleast, I dont.

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  2. inlivenout,
    IMO the article was mostly tongue-in-cheek (in sync with the fact that we really don't care) about introversion and hence I liked it; immensely.
    In fact, if it was really justifying introversion, it would have tried to prove introverts are similar (in human emotional terms) to others and so on by quoting various examples and just that we don't exhibit them and so on (the kind we might have heard in the past). But, it highlighted how different we are in a funny yet undeniable manner.

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  3. It was tongue-in-cheek, but I thought it tried a little too hard.

    And you come across as a Good Boy. Maybe you should explore your wicked side.

    J.A.P.

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  4. JAP sir,
    Welcome! You made my day and all that.

    yeah I come across as this doomed good boy. But, the evil within me is so much Lynch'eqsque that it's heavily hypocritic from my side to declare it in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.
    And it's also evident that you haven't read my old posts (good old days when I used to be anonymous and a good friend of Satan); and *why* would you (or anybody else for that matter), anyway?

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