The rude life

Your mother is furious to see you always chatting on your phone (FYI: BlackBerry is not the only option now), calling it rude and against etiquettes. But this seems to be your second nature and you don’t even realise that it’s considered bad manners. In fact, one place where you can see this in public, as I did — is inside a metro.
The general behaviour, at least as I have observed, is that it’s ‘uncool’ to say ‘excuse me, ple­ase’ (you’d rather push your way towards the seats) or to offer a seat to somebody elder to you unless he or she looks ready to collapse any moment. And you don’t even consider it against etiquette to look into another’s phone when he is typing a message or peep into somebody’s book.
Foul language and fouler behaviour is what you get to see in reality shows, which are ubiquitous on television. Henry Alford, author of the forthcoming book Would it kill you to stop doing that? says reality TV is “semi-engineered psychodrama in which untrained actors exchange their dignity for money”. So true. The ruder and meaner you get, the better it is.
Ironically, with more and more advancement in technology, we are becoming backward culturally. Today there is nothing that you cannot do on the internet, or even better, on your phone. Everything is just a click away. Chatting has replaced talking and mails have replaced letters. You can even go shopping online without even feeling the urge to haggle. The virtual world has literally taken over the real world. Where is the need to get that healing touch of a real person? “And which is why dealing with an actual human can feel like an evolutionary step backward”, says Alfred.
But the fact of the matter is, it’s not the gadgets that are rude. We are making them tools of our bad behaviour. Instead of ‘what can be done?’ a ‘what should be done’ policy would be a better choice—making a personal guide or list, at least for your own self, to be a little less robotic and a little more human.