Opinion The Yossarian type: A subset of the self-obsessed have been proven right — mosquitoes do target them above others

Everyone knows at least one person who takes everything a little too personally. Even a mosquito bite is attributed by such people to having particularly “sweet blood”. Even the less-than-intelligent vampiric insect is given malicious powers of discretion by the self-obsessed. Call it the Yossarian phenomenon. The main character in Catch-22 — an American fighter pilot during World War II — refuses to fly a mission. There are, after all, thousands of Germans trying to kill him. “But they’re trying to kill everyone!”, his commander insists. John Yossarian, though, made it about himself.

Yossarian’s self-obsession was a way to deal with the absurdity of war. Most people, though, insist on acting the part without context. There are those who blame their clumsiness on being “accident-prone”. Or (and the pandemic has made this worse) insist that their WebMD-fuelled hypochondria be taken seriously by everyone around them. Then there are people who think a bad relationship or a poor increment is the fault of the stars — money is spent on soothsayers and pendants to assuage this paranoia. But, before we judge them too harshly, remember, it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you. A new study at Rockefeller University in New York, published in the journal Cell, has found that some people are, in fact, mosquito magnets. It’s all in the smell, apparently. The dengue and malaria hosts do target some people more than others as a result of certain chemicals secreted by their skins.

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Given the inordinate amount of research now being carried out across the world, isn’t it possible that, like the “meetha khoon” types, all the others who think they are in destiny’s cross-hairs, too, could be right? Perhaps they deserve a sympathetic ear. But, till science proves it so, their constant “I-am-such-a-victim” drone is only slightly less annoying than that of the mosquitoes.