Just What Is Wrong With You All?

Yesterday, I received a back-handed compliment which ended with, "But for everything else, you are not street-smart at all."

I know that. I've known it for quite a while now. I attribute it to the fact that my childhood and college was incredibly sheltered and that my parents were/ are naive to the point of annoyance (wholly mine). We were not taught that the world was bad or that people were complicated, because in my parents' world, people were honest, straight and that good things happened to you if you worked hard and not, if you didn't.

I discovered this was not the case because I've always worked my butt off and good things did not always happen to me. In general, people were not honest and/ or good and that my world, or the one that I chose to be in (not academics, though God knows how complicated that is too) is complex, complicated and not for the faint-hearted.

Still, opening a newspaper revolts me now. The media makes me throw-up and some of my friends expect me to condone idiotic standards and meanness. Just what is wrong with everyone? This post is because I was talking with a friend who was telling me of a professor from Cambridge (studied in Cambridge, and now teaching at Kolkata) who refused to give recommendations because in his words, "he had not opened a travel agency." I'm shocked. How can anyone, leave alone a professor be so mean? It's one thing to give a bad recommendation to a bad student and one thing to give idiotic statements of this sort. Aren't professors supposed to encourage and mentor their students?

What do you think?