The Peer Pressure of Celebrating Life

My cousin bro, Yogesh bhaiyya, wasn't very surprised when I told him that I chose to avoid any parties etc. for the new year festivities - and was sleeping at home instead.

His family and him went down to the public hall at their recently chosen new residential premise, and attended a party organised by the residents - much with the hope of meeting interesting people, and socialising with the like-minded ones.

While talking, he made one very interesting point: quite a lot of people, if not most, go out for such parties almost purely out of peer pressure. In his party, he observed that most of the families and couples who had come down there, in fact, were dawdling around within themselves, busier with eating and drinking than with meeting other people, keeping an eye on their kids, and almost waiting to excuse themselves from the gathering.

But they had to come, or people would have blah-ed about them (or so they thought)!

Then, one of these days, I chanced upon this very nice read, "I'm Trying To See All These Movies. You Want To Talk? Go Home!", where the author introduces us (me, atleast) to the phrase, "companion media". He opined that people "view a movie as companion media, something to be taken in while doing other things like chatting up a pal next to them or updating their friends and relatives with texts or calls during the course of the matinee".

However, like Po's dad in Kung Fu Panda says, it's all what you believe it is. People I know don't find the idea of going to the movies all alone very comfortable, and understandably so. But for me, some movies are best viewed in isolation.

Then, these post-25 years have made it difficult to find a friend in sight whom you could go out with. If you do, it's hard to align everybody's calendars to watch a movie together, and the worst part is, most of the friends *have* to watch a movie with their spouses (sometimes by choice).

Given these constraints, I find it reasonable for someone to go out for movies alone (especially if a Monday morning show would cost as less as 70 bucks)! Succumbing to peer-pressure, instead, and waiting for a friend to tag along with me would have deprived me from atleast 5 good movies I watched last year. 

After that small conversation with my bro, I have come to feel that peer-pressure celebrations can end up being much more depriving and depressing than not celebrating at all.

Feels good! :)

Meanwhile, I am busy using seventymm, torrent-streams, and the cinema to update myself with all the good movies of 2008, so that I can watch the Oscars with some contextual information! Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case ... , .. all in the reckoning.

Gyan: At the Oscars, they don't say, " ... and the winner is ..." anymore, because they don't want the others to feel like 'losers'! They, instead, announce, "... and the Oscar goes to ..." How much time before our desi-imitators follow suit?

"There's no special ingredient."

Po's father, to Po.