Cluster-o-phobia!

Cluster-o-phobia* : The fear of, well, clusters. Clusters of people. Mainly people with some mischief, vengeance or hate in mind, body or soul. Quite correctly, the permutations and combinations are clearly way beyond finger-counting. So in all probability, let it be at clusters of people, a general assumption at that.

In every national daily, every day in a week of frenzy and constant development of this story, sits pretty the same report. Gujjars v/s Meenas.

Today, a young man was driving his mother along the busy by-lanes of a local shopping street. Too lazy to accompany her, he parked nearby and asked her to finish off her routine window-shopping wander in haste, the heat being extremely subduing. The radio on, his mind carelessly wandering, he noticed from the corner of his eye a group of six-to-ten men, unarmed, yet seemingly dangerous. He immediately missed a call, gave a missed-call rather to his mother, who was hardly aware of the ghastly happenings only a few feet away. He told her to expedite. "I don't know why, but even though they looked like an ordinary sub-set of the Indian male sample space, a part of me was involuntarily fearful, quite contrary to the Gaussian distribution of the probability of invoking fear in a person on witnessing a group of men, which states that a minimum of a rowdy mob is required for the purpose." The young man had clearly had either too much to drink, or spent too much free-time on wikipedia, or his mind was window-shop-wandering at the most horrible of places. Needless to say, he needed to get a life. Yet, he acted true to his instinct. Whether it was worth it or not, he escaped the heat, which was a much more of a relief than the stay of the OBC quota bill, in his own words. Little did he know, however, that it was a Gujjar get-together, publicly voicing their stand and exercising peaceful protest.

"This involuntary fearfulness", our expert psychiatrist relates to us, "is the growing trend of 'Clusterophobia' ". This damned ailment of the Indian psyche is extremely widespread, although not contagious. It's strange symptoms are that of tension, hypertension, constant fear and acting completely shell-shocked on seeing a group of more than five men together. The worst of cases might also consist of severe schizophrenia where the patient has delusions of a crowd constantly around. "The reasons could be many. The press, for one, does nobody any good by constant exaggeration of facts and misrepresentation of reports of crimes.", finishes (thankfully) the expert. The public seem to have a better idea of things, we found out, as the latest SMS poll was conducted on the subject. "TV is biggest culprit", "The police are like sitting ducks", "I love John Cena", "I need help", "Thr s a cnstnt fear englfn us n dat s nt a gud sign fr d cntry", "Nethn is pssbel", "V hav 2 b prepard 4 d wrst", "We have too much corruption and poverty" were some of the best of the lot. Ladies and gentlemen, kindly avoid the expressions of 'tru luv' in times of national crises such as these.

As prevention measures, it is advised that one should stay away from crowds, lock him/herself at home and order free home delivery. Use the internet for your work and shopping and the telephone for communication. Suffer, instead, from claustrophobia.

* You're right, you literary geeks, you! It is the official Oxford dictionary opposite of claustrophobia.