Popularity : Being alike

Popularity:
A certain lack of refinement is necessary in all expression to easily connect with the masses. I realized this long ago.


It holds good for the blog posts too. Simple words, small sentences, common parlance and light stuff which relax the mind are most popular. Hence the popularity of visuals, even cartoons is much more than pure text.


This stuff is precisely not that! But you will enjoy once you sail through.


Tricks of popularity have their roots much deeper in nature than in mere psychological aspects.


When I was in college some classmates would not mingle freely with me. I saw no obvious reason for their hesitation. I soon found they were hesitant and shied away as they considered I belonged to the posh upper class from my polished manners and language. As soon as I adopted their manners and lifestyle they could easily connect with me and my popularity increased.


This connection of being “one of us” is most powerful bond and therefore important for anybody and everybody opting for a life or career dependent on public opinion. Be it a performing artist like Singer, actor, dancer or a politician.


Wherever VOTE counts, we tend to favour our own “likes”. We tend to like people who are ‘like’ us. The intensity of liking depends on degree of like-ness. We feel more comfortable with people like us, surroundings like our native place, food and language we are used to, garments we have seen or worn most.


A community is formed by population ‘ALIKE’ based on place of living, place of birth, education, profession, caste, colour of skin, tastes, socio-economic-political factors, language…so many factors-innumerable; no fixed criterion can be ascertained for defining a community. What is certain is that the strength of this bond among people in a community increases with the number of factors of being ‘alike’. Higher the number of ‘likeness’ factors, longer the bond takes to break. Interestingly, the converse is not true; the bond does not build up faster if there are more common factors.


The inherent quality of being associative holds good for any community, any living organism including humans. Everybody, every organism feels more comfortable, more secure and more stable emotionally and physically in the company of ‘a-likes’.


It’s in nature, in genes, in the very basis of our survival and reproduction. Everyone considers ‘self’ as the best, and those like us are only ‘versions’ of ‘self’ and hence ‘GOOD’. Those at variance from ‘self’ are ‘not GOOD’ and greater the difference from ‘self’, the more is their ‘non-GOOD-ness’ or maybe ‘BAD-ness’. The more threatened any living organism ‘feels’, the lesser comfortable it becomes and thus depending on the degree of this perceived threat the lesser tolerant or more aggressive it becomes in its approach towards ‘non-GOOD’ ones and thus the ‘non-GOOD-ness’ takes the form of ‘BAD-ness’.


It’s not narrated in so many words but it is rooted deeper in our genes than even the subconscious, and hence not easily approachable by even the psychologists. It is rather in the purview of Genetics.

(to be continued in part-II)...