Pathology of Eye Contact

Maaam! Maaaam! Rupees, maaam! Twenty beggars in an unimaginable state of physical decay, both children and old ones (old as in looking seventy and being thirty five) are trying to touch you and you get this feeling deep inside your heart and belly that the rupee they’re asking for means life for them and nothing for you, that life isn’t fare, that you ate cookies for breakfast and they had nothing for days and fuck! hopefully they don’t infect you with leprosy! and they are children and grandmas for God sake! and their master will beat the shit out of them if they go back empty handed!

But you do know what happens if you give them the life saving rupee. Same thing that happened to the fellow from Perfume in the last scene. You reach for the rupee and their number will increase exponentially and then they’ll eat you alive. And as you’re just another white underweight under height woman wandering alone, you do know that survival of the fittest = letting the Red Cross and UN to save the world as you have your own white ass to save first.

So what do you do?

You avoid eye contact.

Do you know that tiny culturally shaped reaction that states your existence, the reason why we might believe dogs are as smart as human beings, whose absence makes timid people sink into the social informal hierarchy?

Well, just forget about it! No eye contact, no you. Peace at last…

So you see, now that I left the streets of Hyderabad and I’m working as a Recruiter, the only indicator I use for filtering mentally disordered candidates is the quality of eye contact. If they fixedly stare at me or not. Now, I give a shit if the Sys Admin won’t look into my eyes when telling the story of Ubuntu and the clusters, but I do freak out if a candidate glues his eyes on mine so roughly that I feel a claw scratching the inside of my skull. The immobility of eye muscles shouts danger and – stop staring at me! or at least move those eye balls! Are you by any chance trying to get into my mind? Find out my deep thoughts? Turn my brains into ashes by Afro-American witchcraft? Hypnotize me so I go around killing your enemies?

PS: the last person with a fixed stare that I met during a training also explained me how he never leaves traces on internet, as he will become one of the most important people in Romania and in the whole world. Now, as a professional thief of contact details and identities, I am totally aware of the importance of traces.

See? I was right. I knew they are all trying to get into my mind!