BBPIN: GOFUCKYOURSELF.

Disclaimer: I don't mean to offend anyone. Really. You know I love you guys, right? OK.

Something's amiss.

So there I am, minding my own business on an uneventful Tuesday evening, scrolling through scores of meaningless posts on my Facebook feed when I started noticing a pattern. There was a steady stream of the same bullshit status messages, more meaningless than the previous one. Almost every Tom, Dick and Harry was proudly putting up his/her 'Blackberry Pin' as a status update. Some of them who I don't talk to much, and some of them who a lot of people don't talk to.

So where was all this love for Blackberry when it was sinking? Where were all these Blackberry 'loyalists' when  it went down the drain not a long time ago? Agreed, BBM is now available on iOS and Android. Whoop-de-fucking-do. With Whatsapp, Hike and a dozen new messaging services mushrooming everyday, is the cross-platform launch of a has-been service something that huge to celebrate?

Like moths to a flame.

Throughout the course of history, people have ALWAYS criticized something that they don't understand. Wonders get unnoticed mostly, but if someone you know raves about it, it is imperative for us as humans to talk about it, rave about it, own it, and pretend to like it when we actually might not.

With all due respect to Blackberry and the original loyalists, I have no idea why this BB-pin status flood caused so much angst within me. I might be really reaching for something here, but is this how being part of a mob feels like? To be part of a political procession led by a good-for-nothing scumbag politician, and mindlessly cry praises in his honour just because the person next to you is doing it? To commit hate crimes against people whom you don't know why you hate in the first place?

Some of you might actually be fans of BBM and are genuinely elated about the launch on Android and iOS after its downfall. But most of you, I don't know what to tell you. Most of you don't even know why you downloaded it. I swear to God, a friend of mine came to me, asked me matter-of-factly if I've downloaded BBM on my Android phone yet, to which I said 'No, now why would I do that?'

To which he said this: "Um, just like that?"

I still don't know if that was an answer or a question, if he was asking me or telling me something. But I know for a fact that he doesn't know either, and neither did you. 

However, what I can do is to create hypothetical scenarios and personas which you might fit into: 

1. The ones who drink Red Bull without knowing what it does to you, being duped into a placebo effect thinking that you'd be set to party the whole night like a rockstar. 
2. The one who went to the Swedish House Mafia concert without even knowing who they are, only because everyone was talking about it.  
3. The ones who watched The Hangover in the theater and pretended to laugh. Hard.
4. The ones who think David Guetta is the coolest thing to happen to music but don't have a clue who David Gilmour is.
5. The ones who own 'Mein Kampf' but don't know what Hitler's party is called
6. The ones who struggle through engineering and eventually bribe the management to clear their papers, and then start planning for 'higher studies' in the States
7. The ones who plan for 'higher studies' in the States, and think the capital of the state of New York is New York City
8. ...and the ones who didn't know New York was a state
9. The ones who look at a pretty-looking photograph and ask the photographer, 'Hey you must have used a nice camera. Which one was it?'
10. The ones who bought an SLR after that.
11. The ones who then fight about who has bigger megapixels. Because bigger megapixels = better camera, right? :/
12. The ones who think a quad-core processor on a phone is good for faster messaging(Sorry Aarti lol)
13. The ones who sing songs about vodka being the ultimate drink.
14. The ones who compete with their 'friends' about who can smoke more pot, drop more stamps and snort more lines of coke.
15. The ones who contribute to the box-office collections of a Salman Khan movie but think Abhay Deol  is a waste of time and Nawazuddin Siddiqui is a watchman.
16. The ones who went overboard and got Sheeshas banned.
17. The ones who thought Breaking Bad was an action video game.
18. The ones who uphold Indian culture and enforce moral policing, but get caught watching porn in the Parliament.
19. The ones who join candle marches to pray for a rape victim, but jerk off to 'Sheila Ki Jawaani' later that night
20. The ones who called the girl in the DPS MMS Scandal a dirty culture-less whore, but downloaded the full version of the video that evening 'by mistake'

Wake up and smell the fucking coffee.

I might be either terribly right or horribly wrong. No disrespect against any of you and you can call me a cunt if you like or ask me to go fuck a cadaverous farm animal. 

But my fellow countrymen and seemingly ignorant individuals, my sincere request to you is this:

• Have a fucking mind of your own.
• As much as I worship Tyler Durden, I believe we aren't all part of the same compost heap. Most of us, atleast some us might be unique snowflakes. Act like an individual.
• Please don't ape trends, and please don't make something undeserving a trend.
• Please don't buy things you don't need. If you do have money to burn, please make your kind donations to 'The RawMango Charitable Trust for the Poor and Hungry'. For those interested, it really exists.
• For God's sake don't join a social cause just for the sake of it. It's not cool.
• DO NOT give in to marketing gimmicks unless you really believe in it. Paraphrasing Simon Sinek once again but through your eyes, Don't buy 'what' companies sell. Buy 'why' they sell it.
• Don't criticize what you can't understand. Be it someone's sexuality or their bizarre taste in movies or the color of their socks. It ain't your life.
• Wayfarers without lenses DO NOT constitute 'swag'. Take them off, right now. For the love of humanity.
• Do not give in to peer pressure. Don't try to act cool and do things you might regret doing, like dying, etc.
• Listen to the music YOU like. Not what your friend does. And for God's sake do not criticize Classic Rock if you listen to things like Bruno Mars or Pitbull
• Do not join mobs. For obvious reasons.
• Write. Write. Write. Whatever you feel like. Wherever you feel like.
• Find what you love and let it kill you. And be fucking proud of what you love.
• Don't 'fit in'. Strive to be different. Every. Fucking. Day.
• Don't form opinions and harbour preconceived notions about people ( like I just did)