"How are you doing today?"

How do you think I'm doing? Of course I'm not doing all that well or I wouldn't be here. I'd be rather having Lo-mein with a crispy spring roll at my favourite Chinese restaurant instead of spending my lunch time at a doctor's.

Not necessarily voiced aloud, this is what some people would feel like saying when they are posed with the ubiquitous question, one of the many which are only spoken and not meant. The answers are equally unreal and hardly do justice to the condition that the questionee is in when greetings are exchanged and questions asked between fellows who are doing it for the sake of it. (For sake of simplicity, I'll ignore the responses by prattlers and babblers who'll, without fail, throw up their life stories in front of you when asked how they were doing.)

Is there an escape from such triviality? Probably not. Infact it is not even trivial. The banality of such exchanges does not undermine their importance. It is required to respond whether you feel like it or not, with a shake of the head if not by words. A lack of response would surely put you in the path to being called crazy.

I read something, somewhere to the effect that "sanity is nothing but conformity to norms". People who make their own rules are technically crazy, unless of course they find a public appeal and following.

Thus insanity is not a person's state of mind, it is categorized by what others perceive about that individual.

So the moral of the story is that to avoid being insane follow the norms of the society and to avoid perceiving someone insane, step into her shoes.

However,a lot of us want to be different from the rest of the world and will continue to do so. Thus, insanity is eternal.