Let's talk about overshadows. Or rather, the overshadowed. It is a strange word, overshadow is. Impressive, but strange nonetheless. Impressive for haply how semantically appropriate it is, and strange, maybe because it is seamlessly literal. Taking the elliptical course back to the point, the point being a cute synthesis of both the impressive and the strange, we need an understanding of the overshadowed.

You've seen them around campus, or rather, ironically, you haven't seen them around campus. They're the non-entities. They're the boys with unnaturally lean postures, a lackadaisical style of walking that though is nothing like a swagger but seems more like a crooked ancestor of the trudge, to add to the moronic masquerade, pop in a crabby, dry, unpretentious hairdo chronically bleached under operative sunbeams, a camouflaged squawk being scandalously passed of as a baritone, a marigold-shedding overtly effeminate smile and the pricey coup-de-grace, the last hieroglyphic handprints of misery, a plaid shirt drawn into a bun-hugging jeans that went out of vogue in the swinging seventies. The sum is a live and walking Frankensteinian faux-pas.

The Hegelian antitheses to these that make up the homogenous social order are the plagued surplus that suffers from the highly contagious 'dude' and 'stud' factor. They're the lot who adore the chink in their biceps and the sweet definition of their abdominal musculature, the ones who wear semi-translucent shirts that bare the tanned, nippled tips of their evilly voluptuous man-breasts, these are also those who smear greasy, unctuous gunk onto their skulls and comb slit-like crevasses into the shoddy fabric of their hair, its elongation being a tribute to the avant-garde of Rapunzel and Rip-van-winkle.

For the ladies, the meter topples over further; they're the damsels who evaded braces post-kindergarten and diet pills post-secondary school, they're the bronzed faces with a sleazy overkill of eyeliner, irrational cosmetics and mascara, who sidle and prance, barefacedly cock their eyes at rippled butts, are sinful pioneers of the eerie 'Teresa' effect, sport efficacious amounts of a deodorant that either Jane Austen wore to a ball-room affair with Thomas Hardy north of Wessex or that which Britney Spears selectively adhered to while attending the same, deigningly demand dignity but deter deserving it, irrespective of a tank-top or a suit, make petty with the first hint of cleavage and sully altogether with the final brunt of a presaged naked waistline giveaway, model ostentatious earrings among other ornamentation that often seem likely borrowed off an ornate wedding tabernacle, and pitifully sometimes, give vehement, new-fangled dimensions to the 'b' word.

These are the stratums of the liberal male and the female. Nothing exceeds these provisos. Everything or everyone exterior to these norms are either peripheral or tangential counterparts of the partial same. This is a presiding state of homogeneity. Within this state, we overlook the passive, reluctant victims; we forgo overshadows.

The overshadowed have little to choose from. Options for them are at the branched ends of a dichotomy, either they resort to be loyal sidekicks, or miserably succumb to being Lost Souls. Sidekicks and Lost Souls - we could call it the 'Batman and Robin' phenomena vis- -vis the "Ghost in the attic" ? epidemic. The symptoms of both are rather typically the same, perhaps because their origin is one - a particularly defined lack of individuality. A bit on sidekicks. Every institutionalized body has its own private slot of beautiful lasses and handsome lads. For the deprived lot who haven't seen a beautiful girl, they're the rare pedigree with a rich, mellow soprano for a voice, auburn locks and curvaceous tresses that furl and lace around a subliminally oval head, menacingly gorgeous pupils that dilate at her volition, spindly hands that dangle like the slack arms of a palm tree at the brush of a draft, legs that sculpt down from the arse as if willed by Michelangelo, mountainous, even bosoms that precipitate against a lipless kiss of air, warring past its own stereotype, her flesh as resplendent, emotive and luminous as freshly kneaded, sodden dough and lastly, a grace that catapults from the thigh region and splashes across the ground, holding each step in perpendicular propriety and a peace that could soothe the heart of a spurned lover. Conversely, the handsome lad criterion is usually something of a marginal adaptation of the 'dude' or 'stud' malady harped on above but subtracted of the pomposity and the major ego disfigurement. It is a fallacy to consider both, a mirror as a partial spectator, and at a parallel, an actual spectator to be as partial as a mirror.

In the course of events, when you stagger across one of these twain artifacts, despite the obvious floundering temptation, try to incline that glance to their immediate sides, drive the perception askance and you'll notice someone there. A shriveled someone. As overshadowed as a person's rear. In covert, anonymous circles that oft conspire to overthrow democracy and reinstate the extremists' rendition of the caste system, that creature is termed a sidekick.

Sidekicks live a hideously transparent life as ambassadors of someone's person. They become shallow attributes to a person avid to demarcate his or her eminence. Soon enough, their own being dissolves into the personality of the Main and it renders them with an unconsciousness that is as alleviating as any saleable drug but also similarly noxious; they lose a total sense of self-acknowledgement and brandish vacuums to adjust an external demanding individuality, immolating their own. Sidekicks abound in all sorts of exteriors, frames that portray the best of faculties to the best of their ability, but facilitate little in interiors, inferring an insipidness and innate dullness ideally casual of a sedate asthma patient. They're sound invalids who tamper with a moral currency to willfully summon and withdraw as well as urgently silence and suppress a placid ignorance and a similar consciousness, until they wreak a moral bankruptcy, engendering worlds for parasitical influence. They achieve a skewed social standing as an anterior component to something famously tangible, but also lose in the process a standing more vital than a socio one, and lose past the process, an irreplaceable private tangibility. Sidekicks are the more desperate form of the overshadowed, and that quotient of desperation is always in proportion to the one of self-contempt and a generic pity.

The next faction of the dichotomy is the Lost Souls clan. We've all seen them. We refrain to talk about them for we fear we might be talking straight out o' the hat. We fear we might tread a road of radical contagion. Of a pervasive infection that is beyond correction. Of a kind of notoriety that assails not with its naturalness but with a tarnishing ignorance so unfathomable that it requires no reason, no modus vivendi. They're the people who stay reticent in classes, have warm, stressed eyes and a small, inconsequential frame to boot, are sadly quiet in their etiquette and little pronounced in their manner, they're the 'blend in the background' garden variety with unmistakable quiescence and an unmoving passivity, they're those who have no last names, who leave no memories for kind retrospect, who affect nothing and by a wicked standard, demean themselves so, these are the people with an indecipherable inner beauty for their exterior one reads incompatible, they're the ones with microcosms smaller and tighter than rat-holes, with a presence equivalent to that of a single floor tile in a towering multi-storey, with an availability vastly greater than their need and a need that is invariably enriched, rehashed and made competent, they're those with names as proper as an algebraic sum, they're borne by anonymity and parent apathy, they scribble odd poems of despise, loathing, reluctance, fantasy and mania, and they maintain a diary where they annotate sordid vows of dying and death almost as rigorously as the maintain a clean film of new skin under their nails, they're craven perverts and bathroom singers, by day they conspire of fantastic sexual escapades and by night, under thick, wooly quilts or erect on toilet seats, they take the untoward detour to a whiling while of salvation, they philosophize on Life behind text-books and talk dirty, bilge and balderdash to bare acquaintances to garner notice and interest, they're devoted 'Stephen King' and 'Harry Potter' fans and have endeavoured, at least once, throwing a broom between their legs, hoisting themselves on their haunches and plotting to sweep the skies with their buttocks - in the end, as is typical of their breed, without so much as a word, they disappear, without changing the world, without having affected anything at all, without in fact have existed further than having existed in frames, without having mattered, they disappear and soon we wonder, if they were ever there.

This article is a plea, a critical one. I beg of every sidekick and every Lost Soul, if you believe there's still hope, rehabilitate your notion of survival, discover your own personal sense of individuality. Be free of your own choices, and free enough to be able to choose them.