'Shady' Characters - A Little Ranting, Theorising and Conjecture

We all have come across them sometime or the other, some of us may have joined their 'shady' ranks for a bit in between, some people you know are perhaps part of this 'elite' gang yet none of this makes them as less of a mystery to us good old regular kids. Who am I talking about? Well, none other than the 'coolest' crowd ever: Those who wear shades... indoors!

This elite crowd is one that I have never fully understood, but recently, armed with my half-baked knowledge of psychology and philosophy, thanks to the half-read books on Freud and Kant and excerpts from other thinker's texts, and my own personal knowledge and ideas about some of these wonderful people whom I have the (mis)fortune of counting in my group of friends/people-I-know and fueled by the questions of the masses, I decided to take the plunge and try to figure out what makes these people tick, what is it that makes them who they are... and what is the reasoning or tradition that lies behind this occult cult.

First off I decided to go and question a person I knew about this strange act of wearing these shades indoors, during the twilight hours and even at night and the answer I got was staggering in its revelatory powers. This person (anonymous by choice) said, "Dude. It looks kewl". Yes, you read that right. It looks KEWL, that one thing everyone one of us aims (not) to be, that tag we all (don't) aspire to, the one that (thankfully) seems out of our reach... and it is so easy to attain. After all, who wants (not) to be just plain old cool, humorous and well-versed in English. Those days are gone, so yesterday as some might say (or is it ystrdy now?). Anyhow, that was but the first in a series of revelations.

However, not all the people seem to fall into the category of these kewl people. Some of them actually turned our to be part of the (in)famous Dude gang who wear this not only to look like the wannabe-cool-movie/sports-star imbeciles (if you're a Dude reading this, that is another term of affection) but also to go 'sight-seeing', or 'bird-watching', as some of them call it, without getting noticed or caught. But these dudes are another species altogether, hence I shall leave them alone for now. They deserve more than a mere mention in this piece (they deserve a thorough beating).

Coming back to the topic, I shall now proceed with a little theorising about these 'shady' people using my own personal knowledge of those few I know and the many that I have observed.

The first theory, of course, is none other than the theory of 'kewlness' and picking up girls. I believe that most people you see probably are acting as per this very (il)logical and (un)sound theory. It goes somewhat like this: if you wear cool looking shades inside a mall or some other fashionable place (or anywhere else for that matter) you look more 'fashionable' and hence have a higher chance of picking up 'fashionable' gals or guys, whichever your gender/preference dictates.

This narrows down the playing field for them a bit as this 'elite' crowd, as the word 'elite' suggests, is not a very common or easy to mingle with crowd, but then again it is worth it, right? After all, who wants to hang* with people who are so outdated and foolish as to consider the act of wearing shades dumb. I mean, they're meant to be worn. Sun or no sun, indoors or outdoors, nightclub or mall, they just have to be worn, right? Sun-shades/ sunglasses? Aw, c'mon, that's just a name, a silly, old tag from the stone ages and as The Bard once wrote, 'What's in a name?'.

The above paragraph of digression apart, this theory works the other way round as well. In this second (and perhaps unintentionally successful) case it works as per the wounded bird principle which applies to some girls. Looking at these poor chaps shambling about a mall or a busy street with their hopeless attempts at looking 'kewl' some of these girls (or guys), at times, take pity on the idiocy of these deluded souls and decided to take them under their wing and nurse them back to a delusion-free, sane world.

The second theory is that of unbearable brilliance. Some poor souls probably find these fancy modern places too much for themselves to handle and hence where these shades to protect their eyes from the brilliance of all the modernity, however, these few star-struck souls are but a minority if the attitude is anything to go by and most of those who don't subscribe to the 'kewlness' theory only wear shades for the common good, i.e. they help people identify realise that they are in the presence of sheer awesomeness

How? Well, they say that the eyes are the gateway to a person's soul (or his optic nerves at any rate), and the brilliance of these few souls is such that it shines through their eyes so blindingly bright that they need to wear shades to make sure they don't damage the eyesight of  the crowd around them. Thus the shades mark them and set them apart from other mere mortals, kind of like Cyclops from X-Men.

Of course, all these long-winded theories are but the result of mere speculation, and the end result may be much simpler: Low self-esteem, which can only be healed by looking 'cool' all the time, or Narcissism and low IQ that demands they wear this eye-wear everywhere and instantly assume they look awesome for doing so.

UPDATE:
Another theory I've just come across, suggested to me by the insightful externalexpressions^ (http://eternalexpressions.wordpress.com/), is that these supreme "kewl-propagandists" are simply functioning at a higher plane of thought and communication, aided by the "kewl"-est of accessories - Shades. This mysterious plane could perhaps be one of those extra dimensions that all those propagators of the string theory talk about. Or something else all together. Who knows? We mere mortals can but watch on in awe and keep conjecturing while these 'supreme'-beings stride into realms unfathomable to the uninitiated, shade-less masses. 

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*hang with- ... : A rather silly phrase I feel. Every time someone says that, I picture them hanging side by side from the gallows, or trussed up by some cannibals; who aren't planning to eat them, as they may get indigestion due to the sheer weight of  'kewlness' in them, but will sacrifice them instead to some mystic god or another (who will naturally have a better, stronger, digestive system).

^and this mysterious eternalexpressions, as it turns out, is none other than the inimitable Amrith Nayak, champion of expressions and witty word play.