Disclaimer: This post contains tongue-in-cheek, in-your-face humour. Meant as a situational satire. Not intended to offend anyone. If you don't like laughing at yourself, please don't read ahead.
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Use this funny behaviour of society as a measuring rod for success.
When you are successful, almost everyone else wants to announce a proud relationship with you. You may be surprised that several people, many of whom you don't even recognize, suddenly claim to know you very well. Some of them announce that they are your chuddi-buddies, regardless of the age difference between you. Some claim that you're "their boy/girl", in every possible connotations that it may be understood.
Many of your former neighbors start remembering you; some even recount funny anecdotes about you, which may have transpired only in the crooked confines of their scheming imagination. In reality, they may not even have interacted with you when you were neighbors. In fact, some of them might even have been instrumental in driving you out from the neighborhood. But when you're successful, they all claim to be your friends.
Even those who hardly knew your name or recognized your face until then suddenly recall that you hail from the same locality, street, area, city or state as they do. They claim to have seen you around, to have somehow helped you at some point in your life, even to have somehow inspired or otherwise prepared you for success.
All these "fake" people seem to believe that by making such tall claims they somehow become qualified enough to share credit for your success. Some of them even seem to believe that you're successful chiefly because you're from the same city or state as they are, or because they recognize you; if not, you'd probably never be as successful.
Keeping all your study, unpaid study loans, hard work, sweat, sleepless nights, expenditures, failed attempts and honest efforts aside, you can believe you've attained a measurable level of success only when these "fake" people start referring to you with phrases (in whatever dialect) such as "apna baccha hai", "humare gaon ki ladki", "nammoora huduga", "namma hudugi", "amgele gaonchi", "amgele makshi gharacho chello"...
Until such time, keep going, you'll eventually get there.
