Do you remember the thrill of your first kiss? Do you remember the pain of the first dent on your car? I bet you do. Any first always holds a special place in one's heart. Well, today I am thrilled at a first of my own. I have received my first hate mail. I am moved.
No really, a real live hate mail. Not the civilized, well-articulated, but basically tame, non-abusive (ha, ha) stuff that some of the readers of this blog sometimes hit me with. So outright hate is a first. Okay, give me a moment here. I have to swallow this lump in my throat.
Oh I know I'll get used to it. I'll eventually develop a crust and take it as the normal course of things. I'll (horrors!) learn to ignore it even. But this is my moment and I intend to live it.
Okay, enough foolin' around. The background is as below.
I wrote a post about Bengalis called
La Nuit Bengali and how we are naive to have let ourselves be governed by the Communists for this long. Well somebody--who is without doubt a fellow Bengali--got all heartbroken at the way I put it. And he posted a comment, mysteriously enough under a different post called
Eighty-Twenty expressing his pain. Go figure, eh?
Now I must warn you, brace yourselves. This guy is a real wordsmith. Very articulate. His comment in its entirety, edited a little by yours truly for family-friendly presentation, went:
You bustard [sic], bleep bleep, bloody bleep, go & bleep ur mother before calling bengalees idiots
As you can see, he is a regular Shakespeare whose time hasn't come. So there you have it folks, my first hate mail. I am touched. Shucks.
After the initial excitement of my first kiss dwindled to nothing, a wonderful thought struck me. I always had this idea that India is behind the curve when it came to per capita Internet access. Internet was for the rich dudes who could afford the steep prices. The fact that a person like Anon is loose on the Internet posting ummm...comments on blogs and stuff proves that this reality is changing. The arena is opening up. The Internet has obviously touched even the lowest strata of Indian society. Very encouraging.
Also, after the excitement went away, I thought about how and whether to respond to Anon or not. I thought for about five minutes and decided thus.
At first, I thought to myself idly, why not rip this obvious retard a new one. Publicly. A reaming that he will talk to his little grandchildren about, over after-dinner coffee and brandy.
But on second thoughts, I have decided to be nice to him. There are four reasons.
First, the general level of conversation by way of comments has been quite high on this blog. Don't want to lower that by getting medieval on and tearing to shreds someone who is, judging by the symptoms, a lobotomized mental dwarf.
Second, it would be just too easy to take this poorly-funded lab experiment (Anon, that's you) to the cleaners, given that it has demonstrated the same linguistic ability and gift for expression as flotsam. No challenge here.
Third, it wastes my time. I am not in the business of tutoring morons who are beyond redemption in the niceties of basic netiquette. I am also not in the business of dispensing free lessons on how to conduct a civil discussion in mixed company, in a public space.
Fourth, it is unsatisfying to beat up on a nebulous entity that you can't even assign a name to. It's kinda like backchatting to yourself in front of a mirror. Pointless and lame.
But I will tell Anon a little something. Just this once. This is why.
As is the norm I suppose among folks like Anon, he did not display even the superficial courage of leaving his name (fake or otherwise) and an email address in his comments. If he had, I would have contacted him at his email address to discuss things in a private manner. Instead, he safely and anonymously hurled some random insults in the public comments section on my blog and moved on to happier hunting grounds.
Well I hope the little bastard comes back and reads this at least.
Dear anon, my little dimwitted songbird, the fact that I called Bengalis idiots obviously annoys you and makes you jump up and down like the retarded ape you no doubt are. You very likely did not ponder carefully everything that I said. You do not consider why Bengal, from the position of being a relatively rich and industrialized state, is now damn near at the bottom of the heap and is just recently making a whimpering effort to scramble back some scraps. You do not think--quite possibly because you are a brainwashed, foul-mouthed, Commie stooge--that every Bengali who really cares about what happens to that state should be screaming from the rooftops about what idiots we have been, by repeatedly electing the Leftists (and still doing it) into power like whip-crazy masochists.
No, you did not do any of this. Instead, you jumped up and down and displayed your ignorance/arrogance by vomiting infantile, unstudied garbage into my blog. Well, being the helpful sort that I usually am, please allow me to do something about your obvious discomfort.
Bengalis are idiots.
Bengalis are idiots.
Bengalis are idiots.
Bengalis are idiots.
Bengalis are idiots.
There, are we feeling all better now? No? Well there's more where that came from. Here you go.
Bengalis are idiots.
Bengalis are idiots.
And you, my dear, with your well thought out comment, just helped along that notion better than I ever could have done myself. I was putting on a bit of rhetoric when writing about Bengal. Remember that I am a Bengali too. But you went well above and beyond the call and provided a concrete example of what I was only talking about in the abstract. Do yourself--and by extension the rest of us regular Bengalis who suffer the ignominy of getting equated with the likes of you--a favour by:
(1) Learning to read. In particular, read the postscript at the end of that post which got you all excited and doing wee-wee on the floor, you misshapen mutt. It might give you a hint.
(2) Educating yourself.
(3) Learning to spell common words correctly.
(4) Learning to think for yourself.
(5) Letting the Commie bastards who first violated you and then brainwashed you at the tender age of six know that you have decided to think for yourself and will no longer wash their dirty laundry for them like the good little slave they brought you up to be.
Apologies as always to regular Bengalis (Anon, this is not you). Do forgive the rhetoric. It is directed at Anon, a fellow Bengali whom nature has obviously not been terribly kind to. It is our patriotic duty to bring him into the light. But slowly and carefully, because he is not completely housebroken yet. Roll up that newspaper and keep it handy.
Dear anon, you don't yet get how this whole Internet thing works, do you? Let me clue you in, you imbecile. The Internet gives you anonymity, but not unchallenged artistic license to spew whatever bilge your unfortunate upbringing lets you think is okay to spew in mixed company. Expect to be called on it, you insufferable friggin' bastard.
But really anon, pleasantries apart, here are some serious thoughts for you to chew on. Take it slowly and you should be fine.
Anon, I am every bit as proud a Bengali as you make your own self out to be. It hurts you to see bad written about Bengal; it hurts me to write bad about it. I am proud of Bengal's past, not terribly impressed with its present, and want to be proud of its future. I hold a lot of things about Bengal sacred also, as you undoubtedly do. But here's something to think about. Never hold anything so sacred that you blind yourself to its faults.
It occurs to me however, judging by the blunt hint that you have provided of your general level of intelligence, that there are grave chances you will not understand much of what is written in this post. But this is okay. I'll let you in on a secret. This post is really not for your benefit. Writing this post gave me something to do late on a Friday night and hopefully will provide much amusement to the civilized readers of this blog who will laugh at you and be entertained. It has nothing to do with you.
Anon, here's my take on you: you are either a prepubescent, sweaty, acne-ridden visual catastrophe who has just yesterday discovered this crazy little thing called the Internet. In which case, the natural question must be, "Does Daddy know that you are stealing time on his computer and peeking at stuff you are not supposed to see? And will he take you out to the shed and spank your sorry behind when he finds out?"
Or perhaps, you are an over-the-hill, lower-echelon Commie-grunt who, against party directive, is trolling blogs when he should be out there on the streets getting in the way of progress.
If the former, my friend, there is perhaps hope for you. Hope that you will one day grow up and get yourself an education that will in turn free (what currently passes for) your mind. If the latter, allow me to say to you: you poor, poor fool; you probably deserve more pity than scorn, because you are beyond the reach of medical science now.
Respectfully Yours (Come now!)
Sougata Sarkar
Postscript: Hey you anon, it occurred to me a little late that the content on the Internet is what may be called a gated private good. Which is a meaningless but cool sounding phrase I just made up. What that means, you idiot, is that once you have paid a gate fee in the form of access charges, the entire content of the Internet including public forums like blogs become available to the best of us (that would be everybody except you) and the worst of us (that would be you).
Internet content is not a purely private good once you (or in your case, the university or somesuch that made the mistake of admitting you) has paid the gate fee. It is non-excludable, which means, you moron, that any worthwhile content that is available to the best of us is also available to vermin like you. It cannot be withheld from you. And actually, in my personal opinion, this is how it should be. Reading blogs and other content written by regular folks offers troglodytes like you the only decent shot at becoming human beings. But mind you, I said reading, not writing. You are, in your current primitive state, still far from contributing anything to the sum total of human knowledge.
Bearing that in mind, if you are thinking of posting any further comments on my blog, please don't tax the few brain cells you have in the effort. Your comments will be deleted and sent to the trashcan, where quite honestly, you yourself likely crawled out of.
Feel free to come in to my blog and browse. You can even engage in civil dialogue with me or the bright people who occassionally read this blog. They or I will be happy to improve your (A) knowledge, and (B) manners. But any attempt at puerile, adolescent commenting will be dealt with severely. In plain English, if I see so much as another swear word in your comments, I will personally and digitally spank you till you are raw, like the bad little child that you are.
I have noted your IP address and will follow up on this quite mercilessly, I assure you.
Don't know what an IP address is? It is this dotted number quad that...oh screw it...this is the magical shit that makes the Internet happen and allows total asses like you to make themselves publicly manifest.
Fucking cretin.
