Tips on how to be a pseudo intellectual.

Even if your life history is not a rags to riches story invent a rag or two for the local rag.Hopefully your puns will be better than mine.Whenever you make a pun say I am sorry I couldnt help myself. This will indicate that you are an intellectual even though you dont want to be.Dont make puns too often though its not cool and it will seem as if you trying too hard.
If you are going to say something thats even mildly or even remotly a cliche (I mean everyday cliches not intellectual cliches which you would be using all the time), lift you your hands up in quotation marks and gesticulate wildly.
Pepper your conversation with latin or french phrases such as Carpe diem, ergo propter hoc, mea culpa , enchante and touche.This is just the bare minimum.I am also trying to be a pusedo intelletual so any help in this direction would be welcome.Use French for the opposite gender and Latin for your own.
Never admit that you are reading the classics for the first time.You allways rediscover them.Say you were not much of reader but indicate that you had read the complete works of Shakespeare by the time you were five. You should also express faint dissapproval for anything that is abridged or concise.
Your ancestors were poor but cultured and liberal.Please mention the fact that your grandfather studied under the street lamp. He probably had his own suite which was lit like the Mysore palace, but this does not matter.If you find this too difficult to do atleast talk about how he walked 20 miles each way to school and back.
Dont even by mistake ever say that your favourite pastime as a child was watching television.Your favorite pastime should been your father or mother reading to you in the candlelight.Preferably the Illiad.
If you have watched a movie which is based on a book you should invariably observe that the book was better than the movie.
If you are in the social sciences you must say mathematics is just a language and statistics but a tool.However use a lot of equations in your paper , leave out a lot of the algebra and state that the results are trivial and self explanatory.Even if it takes reams of paper to proove them.
Please express disdain for awards and public approval.Your attitude should be
the journey is more important than the destination, you have an open mind and and you are allways willing to learn.But this shouldnt deter you from letting people know that you got a 100% in the second quarterly class examination in lower kindergarten for counting the dots.

The 'Za'

My name is Padmaja. All my life I longed to be called Padma. I felt the “ja” was completely meaningless and unnecessary. In Hindi ja means to go away, I believed all that all that was good about me disappeared because of the ja. This created a deep sense of insecurity and I suffered from an inferiority complex. It was extremely difficult for me to meet any Padma in the eye.
I struggled to come to terms with my name. It is only now that I have realized that there maybe advantages in being called padmaja.
I never realized my name had a Spanish flavor to it. Many people think it's Mexican and pronounce it as Padmaha, this has helped me blend in with the true Texans better, because everybody knows that Texas was once a part of Mexico.
It also helped me fulfill my parents’ wishes. Not everyday commonplace wishes but deep inner wishes. Wishes they were scared to express for fear of being laughed at. I fulfilled my mothers desire to be a lotus, the name Padmaja in Sanskrit
means the being that originated from a lotus. So my mother is a lotus. My father was fascinated by the Nizams of Hyderabad, he always wanted to be associated with them. Padmaja can also be spelt as Padma Jah just like Mukkaram Jah, Asif Jah or Aristo Jah.
There have always been signs from the divine; I just never had the positive frame of mind to interpret them. In college my friends from Nepal use to call me Podomoza this was later shortened to Za. The Za has a certain Zen like quality to it. It can only be inspired from the divine. This revelation has led to great joy and inner peace.
I had been incredibly selfish in wanting to keep all that was good and sacred within me. Goodness is never destroyed, it is just transformed it becomes a part of the grass, the trees, the mountains, the birds, the animals, the fish, the rocks and the beautiful flowers.