Metamorphosis or metastasis…?

Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was originality in the air, everyone looked different and everything looked like perhaps it was supposed to. Girls looked like girls, boys looked like boys.

Well, no story ever began like that, now did it? Adults looked like adults and behaved like them too. Forget about looks, they even did things differently, as in there were specific aspects to childhood that one wouldn’t want to trade off, ever. There was innocence, there was individuality, there was contentment; there was peace.

Then a silent, but salient wave overtook everything and changed it forever, perhaps.  Metamorphosis, turned out to be a tad uniform when it referred to the humans peopling the cityscape. Everyone looked painfully similar. Originality went out the window and a monotonous similarity became overwhelmingly visible.

Little girls looked like clones of someone, one happened to see in the latest magazines, adult women looked like them too. They all carried the same flashy mobiles and wore similar kinds of dresses. The signage around town and they looked quite the same. Signage was meant to be uniform, so as not to confuse! Girls barely twelve looked like they were shrunken versions of some celluloid creatures that glaringly popped out of every hoarding, every magazine, and almost every newspaper. They had impeccably adult expressions.

There was too much poise, a desperate need to look good and to fit in. Glossy hair even streaked sometimes, penciled eyes, stiletto heels…pure artificiality in the air.

One can’t tell the difference between mannequins in shop windows and people, peopling the streets anymore. Well both are as zombie like as the other. One would expect the mannequin to be just what it is meant for, a clothes hanger, but people? The same plastic looks, the distant void in the eyes…metamorphose they did, but into strange, warped creatures…

This malaise seems to have overtaken almost everything. Be it a personal dressing style, eating styles or even buildings and the world of design. One is often unable to tell the distinct difference in foods by singling out the aroma, taste and distinctiveness of the ingredients used, as they all seem to be drowned by the most popular taste or colour. This has had a rub off effect on even very basic traditions and culture.  Almost every second marriage function sounds, smells and well looks similar.  Each of the brides look like what someone else wants them to, of course hats off to all the make-up artists who make them look beautiful, but there is a plasticity to it, there’s a certain disconnect, every little thing seems to be lost behind a cover, a shroud of falseness or shoddy copies of the original, something is hugely amiss.  Is this change or is this an unfortunate cancerous growth of cells going out of control, till they wipe out every other healthy cell?