You, like everyone else, have got a set of people around you who, after being brought closer to you by mere chance and after many years of mutually sustained tolerance and collective experiences some of which have been the anti-thesis of exhilarating and some, well, let’s stick to the tolerance part, have managed to stay just People Around You (PAY). This set – PAY – is the best source of entertainment for you, provided you are serious enough to get the element of fun infused with your daily life, and do all the following things religiously.
The first thing – portray yourself as an idiot. Not the Shakespearean idiot which in my view is the most logical literary characterization I have come across, but plain stupid idiot. When you do so, you open the Pandora’s Box, not of evils, but of amusements based on the urgency of people to dominate others and demonstrate their high self-concept and in the process showcase their complete set of tomfoolery, ignorance and mindless intellect – never stopping for a moment to realize that they have displayed the best of their stupidities all the while living in the invisible cloak of visibility. Visibility. The key word. Visibility of stupidity. Of amusement. Of personalized and customized laughter. You must have heard that story of the naked king who walks around in his kingdom assuming that he is wearing a cloak made by two tailors positioned as the best and the lightest one ever made? Deciphering the gasps and shocks and amazement of his subject to be an appreciation of his cloak never realizing that they are about his bare skin and bare tummy and bare everything? Yes, that one. The same exact concept. Make them the King. Praise them. You become an idiot.
The second thing – if you have superior credentials than the members of PAY, do not forget to mention those to them, just once with full glory. Once is enough. Then go all silent on them. If situations demand, be subtle about them. Now let the magic unfold before your eyes. People tend to externalize others’ successes and their own failures. Members of PAY, when presented with your constructed idiocy, will combine it with your superior credentials and your inhibition to talk about them will mostly be mistaken as your shame of not having achieved the success because of your talent but by external factors. Modesty is the least acknowledged virtue. And when PAY members have done all of these, they will display in full light their desire to crush you down by their assumed brilliance and sour-grapes logic. And you will have an uninterrupted flow of great laugh-out-loud moments in your head.
The third thing – Lie. Now, this one is inspired by a brilliant literary character named Agastya Sen, also called English, August. Smartly construct a set of unique non-contradictory lies about yourself, each for a different subset of PAY. It need not be about anything serious and could range from your illness to your relationship status. For one you could become a person who is living-in with a girl and for the other a married man whose wife is having an extra-marital affair. For one you could be a diabetic and for the other a man with one kidney. Here, your amusement will be delivered to you in two stages. First when you tell the lies. The level of entertainment will totally depend on the believability and creativity of the lies. Be creative and watch out for their reactions. Second, when those subsets of PAY interact among themselves, and as the human tendency goes, belch out any fact that is unusual or a societal misfit about any of their mutual acquaintances (You will definitely be one of them). They will then reconstruct you in their own eyes as a total non-confirming nut-case who has no regards for the generally accepted societal norms (which you know are nothing but blasphemies) and will behave in the most interesting way around you. So, have fun.
The fourth, the last and the most important thing – Do not forget the fact that “You Are Not A Part Of Anyone’s PAY”. Because I want you to get the best entertainment possible. Everyone the best entertainment possible.
All said and done, to the remaining set of people you know (the ones except the PAY members), be as good as you could be. It never hurts to be nice and true to nice and true people. Especially the ones who genuinely are close to you and/or care about you. After all, the entertainment that you would derive if you do the above mentioned things would double itself when you share it with them. And laugh together!
Shishir Chaudhary 
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