Good morning! You’ve changed.

“YOU’VE CHANGED.”

How many times have you heard these dreaded two words? I mean, you’ve been hearing it since you didn’t even know you could hear: from the time you were born, every day of your life someone new came to visit you and commented on how tall you’ve grown, or bigger, or fatter, or thinner, or naughtier or whatever-ier, from the last time they saw you.

This grew particularly annoying when occasions like marriages or family gatherings came about, and random people whose faces you can’t tell from Nam walked up to you and told you, “Itni choti thi jab dekha tha,” or the more inane “Kitni badi ho gayi hai.” Like seriously, we should’ve stunted when you last saw us. Heaven forbid, we grow a millimeter in height, or half a brain, since!! Yikes!

That’s that about relatives. What’s worse is when you’re forced to confront friends or other people you haven’t met in a while — who probably knew you from a different time zone — and they comment on how you have changed. Ditch specs and wear contacts, and presto! A barricade of ‘Contacts and all, huh!’ is unleashed onto you, followed by the dreaded duo: ‘You’ve changed.’

Some people take their love for observation power one step too far and drink in everything about you, from your hairstyle (longer, shorter, even the same length of hair will undoubtedly evoke a comment, even if it is to say, you have the same hair as before), to your toe nails, whether you’ve painted them (and whether that’s a diversion from the previous YOU),  to your dress sense, weight and, well, maybe even that extra hair popping out of your nostril. Er, okay, don’t distort your features on that, learn to take a perfectly intelligent, unbelievably funny joke, okayyy??? Hmph.

Ahem, yeah, so, continuing.

Sometimes we tend to avoid people we haven’t met in a while.

The point is, different people meant different things to you at various points in your life, and brought out clashing strands of your personality. You may have four distinct kinds of friends and you may be a vulture in front of one, while another may bring out the nerd in you.

And you DO change little by little along the way.  How can you not? A joke you laughed at five years ago, will obviously not evoke the same Hyena laughter now, will it? Just in the way you cannot listen to your favourite song on a loop for three months in a row. Or even three days. I’m sure it must be a form of punishment in some countries. There’s only so many times you can cry when DiCaprio dies in Titanic.

The point is, people change. Choices change. Circumstances, YES – change. The only difference is, sometimes you’re around to witness the change, sometimes you’re not. Sometimes you are able to accept it, and sometimes you simply cannot identify with it. But that doesn’t give you the right to have your eyebrows reach Lithosphere in shock when you see ‘that friend from school and how he’s changed’.

That kind of constant judging — er, which we all fall prey to every once in a while, either giving or receiving it — only leads to mindless chatter. And for some people, that constant judging is so, well, constant, it should be some sort of a job qualification. Or placed in a matrimonial column under the sub-head ‘Hobbies and Interests’.

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