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Not your place

Fiction

I had warned him.  “Facebook is not a place for a person like you.”  That’s what I had told him.  Could I make it clearer than that?  Especially to the best mathematics teacher in the school? 

Mathematics doesn’t teach you the equations of human affairs.  Facebook does.  Facebook can, at least, provided you know where to draw the line between trust and friendship.  Between genuineness and deceit.

Stupid! You are too good for Facebook. Could I tell him that?  You tell me.  How do we deal with somebody who is a successful mathematics teacher with a loving wife and two loving children when he chooses to go active in Facebook when he cannot even get his water supply properly because he does not know how to communicate with the government officers in the Panchayat office who don’t know how to calculate hundred minus hundred though they know what a two hundred rupee bribe is?

Some people fall on this earth by mistake.  He belongs to that category.  That’s why I love him.  That’s why he loves me.  I’m a useless person.  I look around for those who need help and render that help.  But I’m a crook. I have political ambitions.  I set cows loose on the streets so that I can catch antinational people.

He was upset with Facebook posts about Dalits and Muslims being killed in the name of cows.  The idiot didn’t even know that cows are scapegoats.  I could not tell him cows today are scapecows.  We are creating a new vocabulary.  A new lingo.  The mathematics teacher didn’t understand that.  Can’t understand that scapegoat has become scapecow in the new lingo.

That’s why he has gone into depression.  I told him to quit Facebook.  Live with your family, man.  I told him.  But he wants some society, he says.  What is society?  You tell me. 

In the meanwhile, let him take antidepressant pills if he doesn’t know that his society is his family. He doesn’t belong anywhere else. 


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