A world-wide recession: many large companies closing their doors forever, thousands of jobs lost, cost cutting everywhere. All things reduced to a fraction of what they were  except the vanity of a human. We are inherently blessed with it. Vanity doesn’t wan.  Human Vanity is the one certainty in today’s uncertain times

Vanity!   It is expressed by us in various forms. In the tanned and toned up bodies, in our choice of clothes, the cars we buy, the houses we keep, the schools we send our kids to, the vacations we take and so on. Vanity must have crept in us even when we were not a civilized race and since then we have nurtured it well. I am sure Adam was vain of his six-pack abs and Eve was of her long hair or thin waist or only  Eden knows whatever else. It must have started with which tribe makes better tools to hunt or whose fire was bigger. Later with inventions of wheel vanity traveled far with us. Our numbers increased, we formed villages, cities, countries. Vanity thrived under all the big empires of the world. The Romans, the British, and the Mughals.

All of us have the  vanity hormone in different doses and the side effects vary too. It peeks from under the shortest of skirts in teenage and shines in the colorful highlights. It shows its flashing metallic rear end as car tags. ‘Phat and Philty Rich’, ‘Follow Me’ and other such  vanity plates which show up everyday. By 30’s and 40’s vanity rears its designer head with  Cartier, Tiffany and by 50’s vanity brags about Hormone Replacement Therapy.

Since, we are humans, we are all vain to a degree. If we can just control the spread of it, so much the better for us. We can be spared actions like jutting out our legs at the Oscars.