All your life, you eat, sleep and do stuff in between. Everybody has a different way of doing these activities.. The way you live your life, sets certain expectations about it for you. You expect things to work out in a certain way, you expect people to treat you in a certain way and you expect people to see you in a certain way.
Only sometimes, there are situations.. where you have to compromise your aura, that decency or that level of sophistication.. You just live through these situations from time to time and get on with your life as usual. We have all experienced these.. I just thought I might remind you about some such situations here..
1. With a Haircutter -
Most of us have been getting a haircut since we were maybe 2 year olds or even before that? You must have noticed that no style or no arrogance on your part works here.. you simply sit in front of your haircutter with your head bent forward and the guy or the lady in charge of your head at that time, twists, turns and moves your head the way it suits him or her. He can even hold your ear, turn it aside to get to that lock of hair he wants to cut.. well, nobody or nothing is allowed to come in the way of his cutting tools and your hair.. not even you!
It is as if you sign off on giving special privileges and access rights to your haircutter when you go to his shop.. as if you are saying – “go ahead, it is safe for you to do whatever you want to achieve the end result..” ! He arranges your hair the way he wants, he combs it the way it suits him, he brings them forward on your forehead to level them off.. It is a mess, I tell you, you have hair falling on your face, in your lap, on your shoes.. the water he sprayed on your hair is trickling down your forehead, you are all tucked inside a towel, you can’t take your hands out to clean your face, it’s itchy, you don’t like how ruffled your hair looks in the middle of the haircut.. you prefer not to look at yourself in the mirror at that time but realize that he/she is watching you nonetheless.. just when you are not in the best of your presentable self!
Then there is conversation.. between you and your haircutter.. ranging from what style suits you, you are losing hair, some expert advice on hair, to current weather, politics and everything in between! With your head within striking distance of his sharp tools, you can’t afford to have a lot of strong opinion (!) but you manage to keep yourself engaged. If you signed up for shampoo, you get your hair washed and return back to your seat to wrap it up.
I guess you don’t want to meet your haircutter in a mall, in a party or a restaurant because he/she has seen you in that, umm, messed up state! I mean, he has seen your face at its worst, so if you see him, you just wanna walk away, you don’t wanna look him/her in the eye.. 
2. With A Dentist -
A dentist is one of my least favorite types of doctor. Not that I have a favorite type.. but I mean you are sitting there in a chair with all those tools menacingly staring at you with lust.. and your mouth is wide open, you are getting your teeth drilled into or pulled out or scratched up or in general getting tortured.. it’s something straight out of a horror movie in my opinion!
Your visit to a dentist starts with you going in with a cautious smile on your face.. you await your turn and when it finally happens, you find yourself in this otherwise comfortable looking chair that packs two thousand different positions and adjustments to make you presentable to the “craftsman” – err, dentist – who is going to operate on you! Sitting perched up high like that in that chair, under the huge “limelight”, you prepare yourself for the ultimate “harakiri”.. you remember all the ice creams and chocolates you ate, remember last night’s BBQ.. all the smiles, memories flashing in front of you.. you think about how everyone else in the world is happily living their life away from this torture chamber!
Meanwhile, the craftsman.. the dentist, is getting ready himself.. he now has a mask to hide his sadistic smile (!), he has gloves so that you can’t take revenge on him with your saliva and dirt in your mouth, he has an apron so that you can’t spit on him..
With both parties ready in their own way like that, the ordeal starts..
The craftsman first gives you a mirror to see how dirty “the machine” has become, he will then blurt out a few familiar words – tartar, gums, molar, nerve endings, cavities… and finally the first command – “open wide“…..!!
.. we need to clean your teeth first.. all those pointy, curvy tools eagerly waiting to carve into and between your teeth.. the tweezers, sickles and all kinds of hand probes going after the leftovers of delicacies you have enjoyed all this time.. They pull, scratch, and lug at your teeth and you feel as if your teeth will just give up and come right out with those leftovers too! Your jaw is almost dropping with pain and fatigue.. and suddenly you come out of that trance of helplessness.. “Open wide!!“.. orders the dentist.. part of your brain orders the muscles in your mouth to oblige.. and it continues.. on and on.. scraping, scrubbing, pulling, carving.. somewhere a nerve gets surprised and takes you to new levels of pain..! Suddenly the craftsman feels a surge of sympathy, and lets you spit or uses his vacuum to clean out your saliva.. somehow your mouth has forgotten the instructions to close itself!! Your muscles have developed a temporary memory of that “wide open” state! You lose track of time… and you wake up in front of the same mirror – the dentist, the craftsman in him is proudly showing his work to you! All white, all clean.. you try to smile.. a wry weary smile – if you can call it a smile that is – appears on your face.
If you are one of those fortunate people who get away with just this much in life, you should consider yourself to be one of the luckiest individuals on this planet.. But those who have to suffer a tooth filling, a tooth extraction, a root canal or more, deserve my utmost pity! The ordeal will last many more hours and visits and will leave you scarred – dentally and mentally – for days to come!
There, you face the ultimate in human torture tools. You will meet the much dreaded dentist’s drill, the unusually long needles of the anesthetic injection, the tooth extracting forceps, the bone cutters and more!
The craftsman almost appears like a car mechanic at that point. It is as if you have opened your hood, the mechanic puts a block in your mouth to keep it open just like a car hood has a support rod, there is a suction pump hanging by the side of your mouth to keep the place dry, and now the place belongs to him!.. he drills, polishes, vacuums, sprays water to clean his “work area”, goes for a walk keeping “that hood” open (!) on the support block, he pulls stuff out of it, he cuts, saws, welds, takes pictures… and in all this, he might just throw you a question that you can’t answer anyway – “are you okay?.. I am so sorry it hurts“! Ye, right, you think..!
When it all ends, you can hardly manage to close your mouth.. forget opening it!! So you just pay and go home.. leaving the horrors of that place in an attic for such things inside your brain….
3. With A Doctor -
A doctor’s visit is another such situation.. now if you are lucky, you just visit the doctor for a little cold here and there or a checkup.. occasionally you have these annual physicals and sometimes complicated procedures.. And one not-so-fine day, you find yourself sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with just a little apron on your birthday suit and a string tied at the back to hold it together! You are trying hard to make both ends of that apron meet at the back when you tie the knot, but it’s not working to satisfy your decency..
You are given a magazine, the nurse comes, checks your vitals and leaves, leaving you to your destiny in that waiting state.. you can’t even venture out much – dressed up like that.. Every time you hear a sound at the door, you try to sit upright mustering a little bit of panache in your posture (!). You lose track of the time as several minutes pass by.. and finally the doctor arrives.. in his nicely dressed self.. you might be the bossiest of bosses at your workplace or the strictest dad at home or the most stylish person on the planet.. but that moment, in front of the doctor, in that apron, you feel like a specimen of some alien species!..
The doctor examines you.. checking which part of this machine has gone wrong or might go wrong! I always think of this as an amazing form of interpersonal situation. Your other identity is right there.. your coat, shoes, your nicely perfumed shirt, cowboy jeans, your iphone, .. all of them waiting for you on that chair by the side of that examination table.. but you have to pass this moment on your own..
4. and all others -
There are many such moments which threaten your decency, your pride and your position in society apart from the three I have mentioned above.
As a child, you were never shy to show the “urgency” when you wanted to answer a nature’s call! As you grow up, you feel compelled to act in a manner suitable to your personality and age, even though you as a human being are still the same. Imagine you need to go and you are not finding the bathroom in a mall or you find it, but people are waiting in line..!! So you need to wait for your turn and at the same time, wait in a manner that will hide that urgency, that desperation, that irritating unrelenting unreasonable need to answer the call! 
You are walking a tightrope between your decency and nature in this case!
If you think, you encounter many such threats to your stature in your day to day life – when you use public toilets, or you get sick and throw up, or when you sneeze, or snore.. the walls of decency are always ready to crumble upon us like the leaning tower of Pisa and we are constantly trying to hold ‘em together..
It is funny how the very society we built with sophistication sometimes forces us to compromise that very promise of human life. It brings home the fact that in spite of all those layers of society there still remains a vulnerable living being underneath who has to shed all that when he perishes anyway…