Type of Work

......."Shooting an Elephant" is a short story that is also sometimes classified as an essay. It first appeared in 1936 in the autumn issue of New Writing, published twice a year in London from 1936 to 1946. 

Setting

.......The setting is Burma (present-day Myanmar) in the 1920s, when the country was a province of India. The action takes place in the town of Moulmein in the southern part of the province, called Lower Burma, a rice-growing region on the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. 

Historical Background

.......Burma (present-day Myanmar) became a province of India on January 1, 1886, when India was part of the British Empire. 
.......European interest in India began when the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama arrived there in 1498. In 1600, England chartered the East India Company to exploit Asian resources and within decades established trading posts in key Indian cities. Over the next two-and-a-half centuries, Britain expanded its economic interest in India. In 1858, Britain transferred control of India from the East India Company to the British government. The British overlords directly imposed their will and their ways on three-fifths of the populace in what became known as "British India" and indirectly on two-fifths of the populace in autonomous native states. 
.......Meanwhile, after fighting three wars with the Burmese—the first from 1824 to1826, the second in 1852, and the third in 1885—the British gained control of Burma and incorporated it into India.
.......Britons dominated the economic, political, and social life of the their conquered lands. The British got the best jobs, held the top government posts, and exploited the natural resources. They also erected social barriers between themselves and the natives. All the while, native resentment of the English was building. In the twentieth century, this resentment continued to increase. George Orwell and other writers, including E.M. Forster, were among dissident voices that called attention to the evils of British imperialism. 

Characters

The Narrator: Young Englishman serving as a police officer in Burma in the 1920s, when Burma was part of British-controlled India. He strongly opposes the oppressive British rule of Burma and the rest of India. At the same time, he resents the ridicule he receives from the natives, who are unaware that he is on their side politically. The narrator's views represent those of the author, George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Blair).
Sub-Inspector: Burmese officer who calls the narrator for help after an elephant gets loose in town.
Black Dravidian Coolie: Indian laborer from the town of Coringa, India, who is killed by the elephant. A Dravidian is a lower-caste Indian who speaks his own language, Dravidian.
Friend of the Narrator: Man who provides the narrator an elephant gun.
Police Orderly: Person who fetches an elephant gun for the narrator.
Mahout: Owner of the elephant. He becomes very angry after learning that the narrator has killed his elephant. A mahout is a skilled elephant trainer and handler.
Indian Constables
Crowd of Townspeople
British Who React to the Shooting

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.......As a British police officer in the hillside town of Moulmein in Lower Burma, the narrator frequently endures jeers from the natives. They do not realize that he, too, opposes English occupation of Burma. In his position, he sees the misery that imperialism produces.
.......“The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt,” he says.
.......So here he is walking a line between anti-imperialism and "the evil spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible."
.......One morning at the beginning of the rainy season (between June and October), an incident occurs that enlightens him about the motives of imperialism. An elephant is loose in a bazaar in a poor section of town, and a Burmese sub-inspector phones him to come and remedy the situation. The elephant, normally tame, is in must, a state of frenzy brought on by sexual heat. After it had broken its chain and run away, its mahout pursued it in the wrong direction and was now many miles away. So far the elephant had demolished a hut, overturned a garbage van, killed a cow, and eaten produce in the fruit stalls of the bazaar. Because the Burmese have no weapons of their own, the elephant is free to run wild.
.......The narrator gets his .44 Winchester and travels to the site on a pony. The Winchester is not powerful enough to kill an elephant, but the noise it makes can frighten an animal. After the sub-inspector and several Indian constables greet the narrator, he investigates a hubbub at a nearby hut. Around the corner of the hut, he discovers the body of an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, in mud. Onlookers report that the elephant captured him with its trunk and then ground him down with its foot. His body is a ghastly sight—skin torn from his back, head wrenched askew, teeth clenched in agony.
.......A friend of the narrator owns an elephant gun, and the narrator sends a police orderly to fetch it. After he returns with the rifle and five cartridges, the narrator heads down a hill toward paddy fields where the elephant was last seen. Throngs of people follow him to witness the shooting of an elephant and to reap the harvest of meat afterward. However, the narrator hopes it will not be necessary to shoot the beast.
.......At the bottom of the hill is a road, then the paddy fields. The elephant is on the other side of the road feeding on grass. He seems peaceful, as if his must frenzy has subsided and he has returned to normalcy. To kill the elephant would be a terrible shame. After all, he is a working elephant, just as valuable as an expensive machine. If he has indeed become docile again, his mahout will have no trouble controlling him. The narrator decides to observe the elephant for a while. If it continues to behave, he will go home. But when he turns around and looks at the spectators, now numbering about two thousand, he realizes that they expect him to shoot the elephant and that he is a puppet who must do their bidding.

And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys . . . I had got to shoot the elephant . . . To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

.......The narrator experiences three conflicts: one with the Brtitish Empire because of its unjust occupation of Burma, one with the Burmese because of their mockery of him as a representative of the British Empire, and one with himself in his struggle with his conscience and self-image. In literary terms, the first two are external conflicts (because they are outside him) and the third is an internal conflict (because it is inside him). All three conflicts complicate his ability to make objective, clear-headed decisions. 

Narrator's Point of View and His Shortcomings

.......The narrator tells the story in first-person point of view. He blames British tyranny and Burmese reaction to it for his troubles, as the following paragraph indicates:

I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

The Evil of Imperialism

.......Imperialism is evil. First, it humiliates the occupied people, reducing them to inferior status in their own country. Second, it goads the occupiers into making immoral or unethical decisions to maintain their superiority over the people. In “Shooting an Elephant,” the narrator acts against his own conscience to save face for himself and his fellow imperialists. 

Loss of Freedom in a Colonized Land

.......When imperialists colonize a country, they restrict the freedom of the natives. In so doing, the imperialists also unwittingly limit their own freedom in that they tend to avoid courses of action that could provoke the occupied people. In “Shooting an Elephant,” the narrator realizes that he should allow the elephant to live, but he shoots the animal anyway to satisfy the crowd of natives who want him to kill it. He then says, 

I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. 

.......Although the narrator seems to respect the natives as fellow human beings, other Europeans regard the Burmese and Indians with contempt—an attitude made clear near the end of the story: "[T]he younger [Europeans] said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie."
.......Historically, the British placed their own men in positions of authority in the colonial government in India, which then incorporated Burma, and natives in inferior positions. Moreover, the British generally did not socialize with the natives. 

Resentment

.......The natives resent the presence of the British, as would any people subjected to foreign rule. They ridicule the British from a distance and laugh at them whenever an opportunity presents itself. In turn, many of the the British despise the natives. And so, there is constant tension between the occupier and the occupied. 

Vocabulary

bazaar: Marketplace on a street with walk-in shops and outdoor stalls.
coolie: Unskilled laborer.
Coringhee: From or having to do with the town of Coringa, India. It is in the state of Andhra Pradesh in the southeastern part of the country.
Dravidian: Lower-caste Indian who speaks his own language, Dravidian.
imperialism: Policy of controlling weak or underdeveloped countries for economic, political, and military purposes.
in saecula saeculorum: Latin for in this age and for all ages; forever; for eternity; until the end of the world.
mahout: Skilled elephant trainer and handler.
Raj, British: British government rule in India, of which Burma was a part; the period when the British government ruled India. 
sahib: Master, sir. Indians and Burmans used the word when addressing an Englishman.

Climax

.......The climax occurs when the narrator decides under pressure that he must shoot the elephant. 

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Symbols

.......Following are examples of symbols in "Shooting an Elephant":

mad elephant: Symbol of the British Empire. Like the elephant, the empire is powerful. When the elephant raids the bazaar (marketplace), he symbolizes the British Empire raiding the economy of Burma. When he kills the coolie, he represents the British oppressing the natives. 
dead coolie: Symbol of the downtrodden Burmese. Note that Orwell says his arms are outstretched like those of the crucified Christ. 
football (soccer): Symbol of British imposition of their culture on their colonies. Modern soccer was developed in England in the the 19th Century.
mud: Symbol of the squalor in which the Burmese must live under British rule. It is also a symbol of the political mire that the British created for themselves when they colonized India and Burma. 

.......Following are examples of figures of speech in the story.

Alliteration
Repetition of a Consonant Sound

yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, 
cowed faces of the long-term convicts
I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool. . . .
I was momentarily worth watching. 
He looked suddenly stricken, 
An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. 

.......Anaphora is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of a clause or another group of words. Anaphora imparts emphasis and balance, as in the following examples: 

Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant.
I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes—faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. . 

I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. (Comparison of wills to a physical force)
I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. (Comparison of the narrator to a puppet)

grinning corpse 

.......He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, 

Paradox
Contradictory statement that may actually be true

[A] story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. 
I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.

The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit.  (Comparison of the elephant's action to that of a man skinning .....a rabbit)
[T]he elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. (Comparison of the elephant to a cow)
[H]e seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. (Comparison of the elephant to a rock)
The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet. . . . (Comparison of blood to velvet)

.......George Orwell (1903-1950) was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. Orwell, a British citizen, was born in Motihari, India, in 1903, and attended school in England. Between 1922 and 1927, he served the British government in Burma as an officer of the Indian Imperial Police. After becoming disenchanted with British treatment of the native Burmese, he left the police service, traveled in Europe, and in 1934 published his first novel, Burmese Days, which impugned British imperialism. He also wrote several fine short stories, including "Shooting an Elephant," which are based on his experiences in Burma. His most famous works, both of which warn of the dangers of totalitarianism, are his novels Animal Farm and 1984.

1....Do you sympathize with the narrator? Explain your answer.
2....In an essay, compare and contrast the plight of native-born Burmans and Indians of the early twentieth century with the plight of American blacks in the same time period.
3....Write a short psychological profile of the narrator.
4....In an essay, discuss Orwell's use of irony in "Shooting an Elephant."
5....When and under what circumstances did India and Burma gain their freedom from British rule.
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All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically — and secretly, of course — I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos — all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism — the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone ‘must’. It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of ‘must’ is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of ‘Go away, child! Go away this instant!’ and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant — I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary — and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant — it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery — and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of ‘must’ was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing — no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of ‘natives’; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick — one never does when a shot goes home — but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time — it might have been five seconds, I dare say — he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open — I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dash and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.