The Safety in similarity

Likes attracts likes.

Waiting for the bus that is scheduled at ten at night, while I reached the bus stand at 9 due to leaving home very early overestimating the Bangalore traffic, gave me nothing but a lot of time to observe completely random people and analyse their behaviour. It was really fascinating to see the strikingly evident pattern that's visible while looking at how and why random people come closer in a completely random environment.

Here I stand in a noisy bus terminal with people impatiently waiting for their buses and some already irritated. It is these typical environments that one gets to do a lot of behavioural analysis. I was consciously not wanting get irritated at the beginning of my journey to Chennai, which was going to give great inputs for my travelogue that I am about to write next! Hence keeping my happiness levels high was a prime importance.

What I couldn't help but notice was the coming closer of four completely random people unrelated to each other. One striking commonality between them all is the fact that all these men are having ear phones plugges into their ears. Out of the four one has been thinking something very deeply for quite a long time, the other fiddling with his rubix cube bringing it to form and then enthusiastically shuffling the colors, the other noticing me noticing all of them and there was another girl who was out of the place but nevertheless closer, I presume this was because these were unrelated people and the distance she took was because she was in one way not common to all of them, she was a female.

After sometime the female seemed to have attracted more alikes around her, and like the female, they were all rich and sophisticated. Needless to say with headphones!

Another point to consider was that there was this old man who walked atleast thirty steps just to take a seat among these guys who were all lonely specimens lost in thought and music and thinking. This was of course out of place, but this gave spark to a lot of questions.

Was this old man intelligent once? Still intelligent but just slowed down by aging? Why did he subconsciously prefer this group, when there were so many other seats available in other places?

Why did these people prefer to have have a seat by each other?

Was it because their minds perceived other people more alert and occupied as potential dangers? do they fear them? could be...

I think we all try to settle within our comfort and safety zones. All ears plugged means one of their senses of perception is occupied, hence they prefer to surround themselves or fit into a surrounding in which they see potentially lesser dangers.

Too deep into thinking in an environment which demands complete alertness and conscious wakefulness? Thats risky, hence the minds choose subconsciously a set of people who are more like us and tries to fit in quietly into the environment. The safety ring. The Similarity ring.