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I was a thorough-bred confused kid at its finest. My best form of exercise was jumping to conclusions and letting my imagination run wild. I just took me little bits and pieces of relevant information to construct something utterly atrocious. There have been times when my mom had to reprimand me and stop press when I headed up a kiddie editorial and publishing club only to contribute an fantastic article on “How babies are made?”. I simply wouldn’t understand why my mother would stop me and my fellow twelve-year old friends from knowing the answer to the most confounding puzzle of all. But that was simply the tip of the iceberg.
Stifled at home, I seeked answers elsewhere. Rummaging through my parent’s forbidden bookcase or paying close attention to old wives tales told by our maid servant was the primary source of information. I did not have the luxury of Googling in the pre-computer let alone Internet age. But such kind of learning led to haphazard thoughts swimming in my brain and I confused fact and fiction with elan. Although sex was the forbidden fruit, this learning process also inter-mingled with other seeminly harmless topics like relationships and nutrition. My gold fish memory fails me but I can recall only three of my all-time favorite misconceptions which I grew up with.
Cows gave milk and buffaloes gave tea - Before you laugh, listen to the logic. Moms always forbid children from drinking tea to force milk down their gullet. Hod do they do that? Not by threatening but rather by providing a disincentive - Drink tea and you will be black….like the buffalo. I can’t see why any kid wouldn’t make the connection.
Oral sex meant talking about sex - I bet everyone thought of this one initially. We had those dreaded oral exams, which I had an extra reason to fear. So when you simply use two words with independent meanings in a phase, the joint meaning is the sum of the individual meanings. I learnt the folly of taking English language for granted the hard way.
If you are nice to people, people and this world will be nice to you as well - Don’t we hear about this non-existent truth almost everywhere, right from gospel talk to management seminars…makes you want to believe it, right? Hopefully some day I can reaffirm my belief in this misconception.
Thankfully, the first two have been long resolved, much to the relief of my family and friends but they still haven’t been able to provide me with a convincing argument to prove otherwise in the third. Unfortunately, I still believe in the goodness of people. Maybe I have yet to grow up.
by Patrix | on Wednesday, February 4th, 2004 at 2:16 pm | 
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