When The Mask Wears You

As an young boy I acted in a stage play like many of my kind. Those were times when we were not finding young girls opting to take roles in them. Inevitably we had to manage with young boys who had not started showing the darkness on the cheeks as it happens when the beard starts showing. We were told by our director to read the script and enter into the roles. In fact he made us call each other by the script names before about a week of staging it. He said it will help to play the roles on the stage against each other. We were so happy to get a chance to stage a drama and a role in it that we were accepting almost anything that was being told to us.  But it was quite an effort to call your friend with a feminine name and it was much more embarrassing for him to respond to it. And these were our adolescent times making it much more difficult. As the day of action was nearing we found it almost natural to fall into this play within the play without a hitch after the initial discomfort. We found it almost amusing when our friends called us afterwards by our stage names to tease. But gradually these things died their natural death and we came out of the Mask of our roles to ourselves and moved with our lives.

Every time it does not happen that smoothly. Just think about the gaits and styles we pick up to emulate great people or contemporary style. What about the many who started with smoking to be thinkers like Sir Winston Churchill ? Have they been able to come out of the mask ? What about the Marxists / Rightists / Gandhian / Liberals / Hindus / Muslims / Christians / Buddhists / Sikhs etc. Is it ever possible for them to come out of the Mask and see the events from the prospective of a normal human being sans the riders ? It is then that the Mask wears you. You try to act in a way the Mask would like you to act. You get dissociated from your essence which made you try the mask in the first place.

The more you allow the Mask to wear you the more distant you become from yourself. You dare not walk back to yourself as you are afraid to loose the privileges the mask has brought to you. You see your true self in lesser position and thereby denigrate yourself. But you are not happy with it for you are always afraid that the mask may slip and expose you. To protect it you withdraw yourself from people while wanting publicity. A strange recipe made to make you brittle and unhappy. Yet you clutch the Mask as your last help and allow it to wear you.

You remember the story of the jackal who fell into the indigo-pot of the washer man by mistake and picked up a blue hue. He projected the strange colour as the insignia of approval of God and became the King among the animals. He always tried to be far from the other jackals lest they recognise him and lived in fear of getting exposed. But he could not leave the Royal privileges and come clean. He was finally exposed when a jackal barked near him and he responded out of habit. His game up, the big cats felt humiliated for accepting him as the king and killed him instantly. 

Do we have to wait for others to take away our mask and humiliate us ? Should we allow our mask to wear us till our death ? Or should we dare to drop the mask and reinvent ourselves ? We have nothing to loose except for our mask.