I love the “Rule of Three” — one of the many gems from American Pie. It refers to exaggerations in stories of romantic exploits. According to this rule, take the number of women that a man claims to have hooked up with and divide it by three. You get the real total. Similarly, when a girl tells you how many guys she’s slept with, multiply it by three and that’s the real number. The movie says the “Rule” is an exact science, “consistent as gravity”.

Apparently, the basis of this so-called rule is a person’s tendency to inflate facts. We all know such people as friends, lovers or spouses and continue to meet them in the future. They are like God. Omnipresent. But they are extremely irritating. In fact, I believe very few things put us off as much as the balloons of a braggadocio. Why, we wonder. Because they manipulate their worth in order to prove their superiority over others in order to survive. They dilate facts about themselves to appear more important than they deep down feel they are. However, let me add here that not all guys exaggerate facts (I’m one of them, you have to trust me on this!), but some do.

Back to gasbags. They always boast of their exploits. When you ask these peacocks how many chicks they have dated in the past, they’ll come up with such hair-raising figures that will make you feel insignificant like a stray dog with incurable rashes all over your body (unless you have a lovely self-esteem or a healthy girlfriend. I’m sorry. It’s the other way around. A healthy self-esteem or a lovely girlfriend).

Similarly, if you ask a boaster about his new jacket, he will immediately give birth to an uncle in Nairobi who “got it only for him”, and not for his two-and-a-half brothers and three-and-a-quarter cousins. You will only secretly laugh at his reply because you know the truth through a common friend: he bought it at the CST subway.

What’s the need to lie so blatantly is a question that humble souls like you can’t answer. I mean it was just a simple question: where did he get the jacket from? What would have happened if he had spoken the truth? Would the reality have made him feel smaller in your eyes or his own? I leave the answers to these questions to psychologists. If you are one, do share them with me. I’ll appreciate your efforts.

Anyway… let’s talk more about boasters. What do they do? They often gather a group of people around themselves and recount stories of their “bravery” or “heroic deeds”. They like to believe they are above others and deserve more importance. Remember Soorma Bhopali, played by comedian Jagdeep, in Sholay? In a scene, he brings together his staff and tells them how valorously he fought the two protagonists of the movie, Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra. In reel life, Jagdeep is caught and made to eat his words. But in reality, such lies and exaggerations keep crossing our path. Incessantly. Continuously. For there is probably no way to check them.

But using handwriting analysis, we can spot such guys. According to graphology there is no single stroke that can reflect on the writer’s tendency to exaggerate: it is a combination of a few strokes. The two important ones are: inflated lower zone (pic A) and vulgarly-embellished large signature (pic B).

US-based handwriting analyst Bart Baggett says that every time an inflated lower-zone writer tells him anything, he divides it by three to get the actual figure. Plainly speaking, if a large lower-zone writer says he lost $3,000 in stock market, you can safely assume that his loss was around $1,000. There are a few exceptions to the rule too. So, be careful before you make an opinion about someone. Besides, they are many other strokes in handwriting that are indicative of the traits found in braggarts.

Anyway… if the traits reflected by pic A and pic B co-exist with low self-esteem, lying loops and head-in-the-air syndrome, you’ll have an incorrigible braggadocio who can go to any extent to be heard and considered significant by people around him. If I were in America and I had all these strokes in my handwriting, I would have stood atop the Statue of Liberty one night with another torch in my hand and told my friends the next day with a swagger in my voice: “Guys, be jealous and perish. Yesterday, I had a one-night stand.”

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