I admit. I pretend to be an intellectual. Not in an obvious sort of a way. It is only in the sense that I will not usually jump to correct that sort of misinformation you may have formed of me when talking to me. Guess what, I will make the necessary amends today and tell you explicitly: I, my dear friend, am not an intellectual.

Unfortunately, there are many people who are just ordinary but claim to be, or are celebrated by a subset of the social strata as, intellectuals. From Deepak Chopra to Nityananda and from Sambit Patra to Kathy Newman, media recognises such people as public intellectuals, which I think is just newspeak for bogus people.

The social game requires you to be competitively higher on the ladder of the abstract and show off such abstractness in your speech as to bamboozle the odd listener. And hence, someone who speaks complicated sense that only a subset of a social group of followers claim to understand, but are largely sensibly inaccessible to themselves and the rest of the world is merely a pseudointellectual.

That is all I have to say on this topic. That I am not an intellectual and there are a lot of ordinary people who are seen as intellectuals. If you were waiting for some sort of counter argument or a conclusion, you are not going to get it. Because, I am quite serious about this. During these times of prolific fake news and lagging fact checking, being a public intellectual like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jordan Peterson, Carl Sagan or Stephen Fry comes with a great understanding of how the world operates and sufficient clarity of thought when uttering something. Anyone who makes between vague sense and nonsense on the public sphere and yet is famously attributed an intellectual needs to be indubitably doubted.