Imagine you’re in a strangely familiar social situation. You’re talking to some close/not-so-close people, seeing some familiar faces around, or noticing some people hitherto completely unknown. After a while the introvert in you gives up and tells you to go your own way and get new perspectives from strangers, and as much as you hate it you decide to give it a try and get hold of a random person. There’s the initial social tension about topics to talk about, some common ground still in the process of being searched and occasionally hindered by abrupt crowd silences, and a regret phase that yells “why am I even here” through your inner voice.

But then as the conversation picks up beyond the first few pleasantries and enough time passes, some really obscure topic finds its way in, somehow. The mystery of human interactions for thousands of years has been precisely this - how these obscure things even come into the picture - and perhaps we’ll never find out. But nothing stops there (…)

Obscure

adjective

not known to many people

The Cambride Dictionary says so. Given enough number of people (and their possible individual uniqueness) it suggests that there is so much collective knowledge that no one would know all (or most) of it. There will be a handful of topics that some would know in more depth than others, and some among the some even deeper.

Humans being the competitive species we are, we don’t like being challenged and not doing anything about it. And so it goes for the knowledge of obscure topics.

Coming back to the (…) where we previously were, when an obscure topic is introduced in a social situation, things escalate quickly - there’s always that one person who brings up something even more obscure when not asked for. And that one person soon becomes two people, and then three, and so on…until the awkward crowd silence deadlock is reached. No outobscurer can segue into their agenda from that social point of no return.

But the moment itself doesn’t last long. There’s always someone in the crowd to break it by cracking a meta-joke or raising some random question. However, it is a loss for the outobscurer, whoever it was donning that hat at that inopportune time.

There’s always a next time though. The Obscurity finds its way, and outobscuring makes its return soon, whether in a few minutes or a few hours. But it does.

Just when I thought The Obscure would be a good name for an underground band, I found this.

Perhaps some other time.