The Class of ‘99

It’s not that difficult. Follow these guidelines:

1. Have No Opinions of Your Own: Suspend all your opinions and camouflage them in the colour of your social circle. Mould your beliefs and preferences as per your group, even if it means contradicting the beliefs imbued by your previous group. You are allowed to be yourself when you are alone as long as you don’t admit it in front of anyone.
   
2. Short Attention Span: It’s mandatory to have a short attention span. Condition your mental faculty in a way that you cannot concentrate on anything for more than five minutes. Whenever you watch a movie, never forget to say “it’s too long”. If you are a University student, ask your instructor for a break after every fifteen minutes. If you don’t have a low attention span, then as Alfred Hitchcock, in his intonation, told his actor who was unable to emanate the desired emotion for a particular scene, “Fake it.” Just pretend to have a low attention span. Nobody will catch you, because the chances are that they too feign it.
3. Loud Music in Car: While driving your swish car, turn the volume of your music-player, exuding sonorous clamour from the latest hip hop or country songs, at a very high level so that the bass and treble are audible to the outsiders. Gloat about how your hearing has been affected by constant earshot to loud music.
4. Driving Instructions: Disregard traffic laws. Jump red lights frequently. When joining a main-road, just dash in, bisecting the ongoing traffic, without even pausing and looking at your left or right; expect the traffic to stop and make way for you. Zoom through narrow lanes at a minimum speed of sixty kilometres per hour. Be allergic to seat belts and bear them only to elude traffic police.
   
5. Be Ashamed of Ethnic Languages: Have a strong aversion towards Hindi and local languages and label them “lowbrow”. Go about telling people how comfortable you feel with English. Pretend to be weak in your national language and gloat about how you always flunked it at school. Make fun of people who speak it fluently and call them villagers. You can add a few European languages to your repertoire as long you maintain strong distaste towards the local languages.
6. Mental Slavery: Mental slavery and bigotry are also necessary. Feel inferior to “superior” groups and never spare an opportunity to disparage “inferiors”.
7. What Will People Say: Spend your entire life worrying about “what will people say?” Make your important decisions keeping that in mind even if it means spending an eternity in hell. “Everybody is doing so” is a good enough reason for you to do it even if it is irrelevant and entails no benefit to you.
   
8. Laws Are For Mortals: Have no regard for laws. Share your misdemeanours with the same pride that army officers ascribe to serving their countries. In public places feel free to scatter waste anywhere you want. If someone questions you, retort, with a finger pointed towards them, “Nobody tells me what to do.”
9. Never Stand in a Queue: Take no notice of people standing in queues and amble towards your destination parallel to the queue in your ostensibly high-and-mighty comportment.
10. mk ur own dkshnry: Dumb down your writing skills on purpose. Minimise the usage of punctuation only to full stops and ocassional usage of commas and questionmarks. Disregard sentence case. It’s blasphemous to spell correctly. Spell “you” as ‘u’, “great” as “gr8”, “music” as “muzik”, “for” as ‘4’, “what” as “wot” etc. While addressing women, use “man” repetitively. Limit your vocabulary deliberately and pick on two-three lame words to express almost anything in every sentence you utter. 

The first rule is the most important. Whatever you do, have no opinions of your own. It can degrade you to the lower echelons of society. Just follow the crowd. There you are, now a part of the coolest echelons of society.