Man is a social animal

Man is a social animal

recently, I came across a thread on email group about basic courtesy. Now, the reason that it brought some interesting perspective is that in the end, the rude guy was trying to convince others that what sounded rude was not really intended to be rude. In fact, it was a misunderstanding, something that those familiar with India, Indian politicians and the omnipresent 24X7 news channels can relate to as "being quoted out of context on a comment". Now, that's another story and IMHO, we have a NP-hard problem here (in a nation of 1 billion, an efficient algorithm to monitor the blabber of so many people is obviously hard to even think about, just like this author here:)).

anyway, enough digressions from the main topic, but what set the ball rolling to the title of this blog post is that I felt that in the end we (as in humans and probably all other species as well) need the stamp of social approval. At times, I have seen the nerdiest and the geekiest seeking acceptance to their random or weird ideas ( at least in the geek community). Obviously, the idea in question was considered weird in the first place because it was orthogonal for most normal people.

the point is, when in the earlier classes of my school days, we used to be taught that man is a SOCIAL ANIMAL. And I was like, whats social about it and why do we really classify human kind as animal ?

took many years to understand the deep meaning of the social part, the animal part was easy, considering the brutality of wars, communal riots ( yeah, they are still popular in India and to be precise in the whole of Indian sub-continent). That's another topic for another time... so long...