"Bilawal and Fatima Bhutto are getting married," a friend told me. "Whattt! That’s not possible man," I resisted the information. "Abhi andar ki bat hai but hai 100% confirm," he continued. "I can give you in written." 

"There is a coup coming again." A few days back another friend told me ."No way! If so they wouldn’t have missed the previous chances."  I again tried to rebut the information. "Lehhh! It’s been established and agreed upon. You better see."

Sounds familiar? I am not talking about the content of rumors. I am also not concerned about the authenticity right now. I am talking about the audacity of people to spread such information with such guarantees. It’s not the information; it’s the confidence that amazes me. And I daily stomach this confidence.

Just yesterday, I was coming from work with a colleague. We got confused over a junction that whether we have crossed it or it’s yet to come. She told me, unequivocally, that we have crossed it and I was certain (less than her) that it is yet to come. We wagered on it and she started laughing, really hard. I laughed at her laugh. And then, the junction came. She had lost the wager but she wasn’t guilty of her confidence.

My eight-year-old niece kept complaining that I had missed her prints out. When I asked her to recheck 4th time, she checked and found the pages. "It must be the humidity, they kind of sticking together," she shrugged. That’s all. Zero embarrassments.

Another friend’s boss can’t stop showing tantrums because her attitude lacks submissiveness and her language lacks the ‘pleases’, ‘kindlys’ and ‘gratefuls’. A social media fellow keeps posting rewards and achievements that are not hers, however, she receives likes and appreciation for everything she has not contributed anything to. She takes credit for the efforts of a team (which she is not a part of) and claims all the glory regardless of how much they put in and yet, zero embarrassments. Of course, not to mention our common social media picture gurus, who have the courage to post their unlovely picture for the lovely comments.

The problem is not that people laugh at their postings while writing them ‘ufff, you the beauty’, the problem is that they can’t laugh at themselves.

Today when I look around, I find my home helper and my office boy equally arrogant, always praising their selves recklessly,like some Politician in power. Everyone has become confident (read overconfident), egoistic and self-centered, dying to turn themselves into glittering figures of immense grandeur surrounded by psychologically impenetrable walls.

Recently, Twenge and Keith Campbell in their research found that such as personality traits rose just as fast as obesity from the 1980s to the present. Scores have risen faster since the turn of this century. It was not the case a before that or even a decade back. No one used to talk about themselves, as we see today (thanks to social media); people were more concerned with inadequate self-esteem, which at the time was believed to lurk behind nearly every difficulty.I remember, as a majority, people were humble and cooperative, and they were venerated for these qualities.

No one knows how it all shifted from the desire of ‘being confident’ to ‘being narcissist’. It is like covering the imperfections with arrogance and overconfidence, without actually addressing the core disabilities. Just like a bunch of idiots who does everything to clean the water of the well without taking the dead dog out. But how will they succeed; the reeking carcass is still inside.

This is self-deception,as Elan Golomb in her book 'Trapped in the Mirror' describes. It is because of the extreme urge to be impervious to greatly feared external criticism and to their own rolling sea of doubts. According to a famous American psychologist Leon F Seltzer, people use such behaviour in an attempt to rectify insecurities by getting the outside world to acknowledge them more positively than did their parents or early environment. In various ways, we see people in a constant battle to prove themselves, both to others and to their not-so-confident ‘inner child’ self. Perhaps it is the social media that has made us this self-obsessed way and we indeed love it.

Researchers also claim that overconfidence deprives people from the experiences of new learning and novel exposures. They sometimes just let other people hold the string because they have kept themselves locked and high. And yet they endure the agony of waiting for ‘the others’ to initiate first, text first, call first (yes those first calls too), invite first, because they are petrified of the failures, frightened of the Nos.

It is time to realise that lack of confidence is an issue, but overconfidence is also an issue. A bigger one I would say. If we want our children to be great, they must be realistic and less egoistic to endorse their weaknesses in order to improve them. They can’t be great if they are merely good but they think they are great. If we fear them to have the inferiority complex, we should fear more for them for being narcissists. That it is vital to be assertive, indeed it is, but it is superior to be humble.