Crying foul? or merely a sob story?

I have got to admit this straight away—when I feel terribly hurt, I cry. I mean tears just roll down my eyes, despite my best efforts to hold them back. I am not sure if that makes me less manly, any more than crying less or not at all makes a girl less girly. For whatever my understanding of feminism is worth, I know that such obvious association of particular behaviors to boys and girls have nothing natural about it. Nevertheless, I begin to feel apologetic and search for some suitable excuse to justify my latest outbreak of tears. What follows is admittedly an apologia, but one which also makes a feeble attempt at some self-mockery. Only some very profound dose of self deprecation can effectively deflate my gall-bladder sized ego, whines my dying-but-not-yet dead self-esteem. After all, the charmer who had reduced me to tears awhile ago began by making it clear that I was the biggest megalomaniac in the whole wide world. If you only begin to calculate the number of Is casually dotting this paragraph, you’d see the charmer was spot on.

The megalomaniacs are not disagreeable people at all and they are all great romantics. They love to willingly suspend their disbelief in their being of relatively little use to anyone else but themselves. I feel rather pleased to belong to this species of men and women, and hence now proceed to bless your souls with a little edification on why it is not such a bad thing to break into a sob once in a while. Crying is no silly business at all and has so much more complexity and depth—and confusion and potential for commercial profit—built into its successful performance that it provides fodder to more novelists and scriptwriters than you and I would ever be able to count in a single lifetime.

In English language alone, teardrops have given birth to more confusion than unsuspecting students can handle. Even if tears of incomprehension roll down their eyes, the smart ones are not expected to shed any tears for them. Their mothers can weep in despair, wail in anger or choose to drown their sorrow in tears. On the other hand, the neighbors may well relish such prospects but never fail to shed their crocodile tears of fake sympathy. The plight of their wards meanwhile tears the parents apart and they cry out for justice. The English teachers of the world would not of course be moved to tears at this turn of events. What the children actually need is a cry from within, they would pontificate, to tear the difficulties to shreds and master the language. The parents would also be duly advised not to behave like cry babies. Depending on which side of the fence you stand, you may choose to call it crying foul or a sob story. Or just Tear Gas.
I propose to sign off with an anecdote. Iswarchandra Visyasagr, the great Bengali educationist and social reformer of the 19th century, was also affectionately called karunasagar (Ocean of compassion). Somewhat unlike me, he too had this tendency to break into tears whenever he felt particularly moved by others’ plight. You see it takes a large and compassionate heart to be able to beak into tears and admit it in print. Second, whenever great men are in sniffles, they leave something for posterity. Vidyasagar would often donate money or some provisions to the aggrieved visitors. Yours truly just wrapped up this piece for you