I Dream of Hobbit!

When I work up I was still in shock! What a horrible dream it was. I checked the date on my phone and then felt the relief. I still had a little more than two months on hand. What did I dream you ask? I know, I know it’s in the title, but I can still pretend that you guys don’t know the subject of my dream right?

Okay, I dreamt that I woke up and found out that The Hobbit – The Battle of The Five Armies had already been released…. A month ago! And here I was with all the world talking about how great the movie was and how touching was its ending and so on. And everybody was sporting some or the other The Hobbit merchandise and people everywhere were quoting dialogues from the movie! Amidst all of it I was the only person who hadn’t seen the movie. I felt so devastated. I went online to book a movie ticket, but the movie was already gone from the theaters. There was a worldwide Hobbit mania going on and I was the only one who had been living under a rock!

Waking up is the best thing that happened to me. Upon waking there were two things I realized. First that I am a major Tolkien fan (duh!), and another that like everyone else I too do not like it when left out of something. It feels bad when a group of people know something that you don’t. And it is nothing short of a blow to the confidence when all the people everywhere around you are in on a joke and you just stand there not knowing what happened. This inherent need of the human mind to know or have what everyone else does is what makes each and everyone of us to be a part of the ‘herd’.

We all claim to be wanting to be different, but we still want a group of people who are as different (or as similar) as we are. We all  preach that just because the rest are doing it doesn't mean we too must, but we still feel bad when we are the last person to know the latest Bollywood hit song. This need to be able to identify with the rest of the crowd makes us not only 'social animals' but also 'jealous animals'. Because when I don't have something that everyone else seems to have, I feel its unfair and my anger is mingled with jealousy. So often we confuse feeling of jealousy as a feeling of being treated with partiality. When we see a classmate receiving a higher paycheck we call life unfair, and when we see our neighbors driving a better car, we say its too much of a good thing and the neighbors will come to a bitter end.

Most of us assume and even fool ourselves as trying to be better at something, when all we are trying to do is be better than someone else. What we fail to realize in this endless game of bettering someone else is that its a never ending cycle. However fair you get, there will always be someone who's got skin lighter than you, however thin you get there will always be someone thinner than you. You get the best car in the world, next year they will come out with a newer and better model.

I'm not saying ambition is bad, but if it involves being better than everybody, all you'll get is disappointment. Because even if I see The Hobbit in first day first show, there will always be someone who's seen it before me!

Do let me know below in the comments, do you feel bad when you are left out? Are you jealous when all your friends have the latest smart phone and you don't? Oh and also let me whether you are counting down for the next Hobbit movie!