We all love watching wonderful graphic designs spread all around us – on the web, on different posters and advertising banners, on greeting cards, and where not? We owe it to the great designers who toil hard to make our digital world beautiful. One of the key tools that these designers use is masking. Masking is essentially just another way of making a selection.[1] The fields of masking and vector masking have varied applications that help the designers in bringing out the very best in their creativity.
But the term masking is not limited just to the designing world. Masking has got applications in the lives of each one of us. Living through the course of life, we all learn the ways to very cleverly mask the traits of our personality in different ways depending upon the place and situation we are in, lest we commit a faux pas. Two major masks which everyone of us carry with us are the ones which govern our behaviour as a part of a mob and as an individual. Apart from these two, each one of us carry different set of masks just like different designers use different masking techniques to make their creations look the way they want them to. We mask our traits which we carry with our friends[2] at out home and vice versa. Carrying a single mask while with friends doesn’t always help either. Depending on the people we are with, we need varied masks. The most stringent and necessary masks are needed with some special people, on some special occasions. I can’t imagine myself without any masks in front of my boss or even my girlfriend (if i ever get any!) on my first date. As i talk of boss, the irony is that even more characterized masks are needed while in front of one’s juniors! The types and uses of such social masks are endless.
Being a socially successful person is nothing else but a measure of one’s capabilities in masking. The master of masking is always the one with the biggest social circle. As a school child, i read many moral stories and poems concerning social masking and almost all of them condemned the practice. They asked and taught the readers to ‘be what they are’ with everyone as it is always beneficial in the long run. But today i ask all those authors a question, among all the people we meet daily, with how many do we have a long term association that we need to care about the ‘benefits in the long run’? Ours is a fast changing world and most of the association have with people are essentially short term and this is where masking comes in handy and allows us to present a better social behaviour. I may sound a bit radical but what i am writing is what practicality is.
There’s only one class of people with whom we can think of living without caring about masking. That class is of our friends. This ‘friends’ out here is totally different from the one mentioned in the second paragraph. More on ‘friends’ in my next blog. Till then, happy masking to one and all!
[1] Definition of masking referenced from ‘Photoshop CS2 – All in One Desk Reference for Dummies’ by Barbara Obermeier.
[2] More on the term ‘friends’ in my next blog.
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