Rants: Perks of Being a Geek

Life is not a fairy tale, and it will never be.

And I learned it the hard way.

Yeah, don’t tell me that you haven’t read a fairy tale. Please, that is a blatant lie, and you are a bad bad liar. Either you have read it, or your mom has read it to you to put that seemingly hyperactive brains of yours to rest. Now if we analyze and dissect a fairy tale and look at the fairy Godmotherly ingredients, it is all kind of the same potion of bare necessities blended with the granny formula of yore. Throw in a prince, a seemingly evil villain who converts to another prince/handsome hunk, an old wise seer (very strong chances of this being a long lost relative/ another prince/ a god or the one with capital G), some good-for-nothing young men who come seeking the princess’ hand in marriage and always manage to lose the tourneys, a sometimes-happy-but-mostly-depressed Princess, preferably with long hair and no Netflix, a worried King, and maybe a Dug or Maximus and wham! Congratulations Kids, you have a bestselling fairy tale in your kitty.

But our lives! More than light years away from it, drifting in a realm of otherworldly fluids that know the answer of 42  but not the query, and no Millenium Falcon in sight. No one comes up to us and says, “Hey man, we gonna hop in a ginormous spaceship and escape. You wanna come?”

We are like the evil villains who cannot go all guns blazing and morph into a superhero (*one with a cape) because of some technical snag, and are sucker punched forever into the Villain wormhole. We are like a glorified sidekick in a fairy tale with no end.

Welcome to the secret life of clueless Geeks.

We are often confused with Nerds, Nah-uh. That’s like calling a Stormtrooper a cyborg. Nerds are a different species, and they specialize in areas we can only think of comprehending. In case you are wondering who we are, well, imagine that guy you had last encountered in the metro, who was so absorbed in his book that he’d probably missed his stop. Remember the girl who was frantically running around in the park, eyes glued to the phone- she was probably after a Bulbasur, who knows. Remember that kid in school who sat on the bench just before you and filled most of his notebooks with doodles rather than notes? Yup, we are geeks, and break your myth, not all of us are introverts.

Perks:

#1 You are actually in touch with great stuff, and not just the cliched TV shows, Animes, and books that seem to hold sway over the popular opinion. We are the ones who overlap Lord Huron with Imagine Dragons, who go gaga over Kimi no Na Wa AND The Simpsons, who dress up as Arya Stark on cosplays and try out Silmarillion.

#2 You are one of your kind and a melting pot of all things funky and weird, and in a good way. You are probably one of the fewer ones to still act like a kid and not get all carried away by the apparent freedom of growing up. You still frequent the bookshop in your locality and spend hours absorbed in your latest fetish read.

#3 You cry about Pokemon, and really it’s okay to feel nostalgic. It’s a sign that you are not discarding your past to become a completely new persona. Sometimes, this is what we all need.

We are different, quite a fair bit from the crowd. But not necessarily someone one should steer clear of. If you see us reading an interesting book, or doodling something you like, feel free to hop over and chat. Yes, Don’t be creepy. And to break one of the most common misconceptions, No we are not oozing geekiness to look “apparently cool”. Everyone wants to be “Cool”! But hey, what is “cool”? Is it having a boyfriend/girlfriend, or being a stud, or quoting Byron in your Bio thinking it to be Shakespeare? Or is it flaunting a flower crown that does not exist and captioning it with “Drunk AF”?

To all those who feel our lives are one helluva joyride, here’s a tip, Be friends with a geek. Our lives are as messy and unpredictable as our rooms, and we like it that way. We like the feeling of not knowing, of wandering in the Road not taken, of life taking us wherever it will. Because you know, at the end of the day, before doing anything for your life, before trying to achieve anything great, you NEED to be happy. You need to be in that space of mind where you go all guns blazing, and that does not come from a pretentious show of make-believe happiness.

Remember Raymond Carver-

“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”