Shakespeare to Shakira

People love to categorize. Put everything in a box and then label it. It gives them peace of mind. Yes, we have figured it out. Hurray! Problem arises when one cannot find a category, a label for someone, something. There are some fixed idea about things that people do not like to toy with. But nature takes its own course and forms people's mind with all the possible unexpectedness.

If a person is good at studies, it is taken that he or she would be a very serious grave person. Same goes with intelligent people or intellectuals. A PhD scholar or a Maupassant-Maugham or a Rilke-Baudelaire or a Monet-Matis or a Bach-Beethoven or Camus-Kafka-Kundera or a Chopin-Puccini fanatic is not supposed to dance at the pub drunk listening to Bailando, less twerking to get your freak on. But he can. He does.

A doctor or a physics professor can be a religious person who never forgets to pray in front of his gods, and at the same time keeps an eye on the television because soon Skyfall is going to start. A Muslim could be a vegetarian. He could hate meat. And when everyone is eating supposedly forbidden meat wraps he could go for simple grill cheese sandwiches. He shyly requests his quite capable and over qualified but otherwise sickeningly lazy unambitious wife to get a job as people start to whisper that he being a Muslim is against the idea of women working. On the other hand it can also happen that a knowledgeable person with all his wisdom decides to a stay home and not do anything. 

Someone who loves to cook all the time starts to discuss for hours about Browning or Keats or Donne or Virginia Woolf people get shocked. And if then he starts to talk about the gory violent thrillers of John Sandford, Steig Larsson, Val McDermid people get shocked. If you know about Chaucer is it a rule that you cannot know how to make a fantabulous chutney! If you are a CEO of your company that means you cannot twerk like Miley Cyrus! (It seems twerking is becoming a recurrent motif of this piece of writing). A person who is talking ardently about Shakespeare, if he is seen talking about Shakira with same fervour people feel like they have been cheated. They give this look like they are saying "we are told and made to believe that you are gonna and only can talk about Shakespeare, and here you are also talking about Shakira, we have been conned to believe you are only this person, but no you are actually that person, too"!