The girl I ate lunch with today was complaining that I was too busy looking around all the time. Well, let me tell you something – guys are always looking. I’ve yet to meet the guy who wasn’t “looking”. In fact, guys are born looking. They come out into the world, see a cute looking mid-wife, they go – “Hey there, sugar. Leave me your name and number. I’ll get back to you. In about twenty years.”
I think the following anecdote goes a long way to describe the difference between the way guys and girls behave. I have these two friends – a guy and a girl – who live in another country. One of their common friends, A (a girl), was supposed to come down to India for a while.
This is how the two friends convey the information to me.
The girl spends half an hour on the phone describing just how amazing A is and how much fun I would have with her around.
The guy catches me on Google Talk and says, “A is coming. Check your mail. Sent you two pics.”
There’s a medical camp at work this week — blood pressure, blood sugar, heart problems, general check up etc. I, of course, haven’t gone. That’s because I’m scared of doctors. For one thing, I don’t want to hear the bad news — “You’re not going to live to be forty.” I already know that, I don’t need someone else to tell that me. Even if it’s for free.
More importantly though, I’m scared of doctors. The biggest problem is that their word is so final. It’s almost like living in a dictatorship. Once you enter that room, anything that doctor says is the law. He tells you to “take off all your clothes and make yourself comfortable” and you have to do it. You can’t say no — he’s a doctor! If she tells you to “hold steady while I insert this long, pointy thing up your rectum”, the best you can hope for is that it’s well lubricated. That’s about it.
I think that’s how hypnotism came about. That’s nothing but a bunch of doctors who realized that their patients will do anything they tell them. And they thought to themselves, “Hey! This is a good way to have some fun, make some money and also appear like magicians at the same time.” Let’s call an audience, charge them to watch and for subjects we can just pick people from there itself.
To me that’s a hypnotist — an opportunistic doctor who graduated bottom of his class in medical school and decided that he can’t really cure anything but that it’s a lot of fun to get people to act like a monkey.
I don’t really understand the concept of the “blind date”. I mean you obviously know that the other person has got to be some sort of loser. Just the very fact that they’ve got to resort to the blind date means that they’re not very ‘dateable’. Whom are you expecting? Alicia Silverstone? How desperate do you have to be to say, “Okay, that’s it. I don’t care what you’ve got, I’ll take it.”
Girls, for some reason, love setting people up. Guys don’t. Guys classify all (single) girls they know into four broad categories. There’s the “not dateable”, the “I’ve already dated”, the “I’m currently dating”, and the “I would like to date sometime in the future”. It’s easy to see why a guy wouldn’t want to set any of their friends up with someone from one of the above categories. Girls, on the other hand, just love the concept of fixing someone up. I think girls have only two real motives in life – first to get themselves fixed up and then to fix up everyone else they know. Because it’s never the single girls who are fixing you up, it’s always the girls who are already going out with someone. When they were single, they would never have considered dating you. But now that they’re not, they suddenly seem to think you’re the most eligible bachelor in town – for their friends!
I’ve lost track of the number of times a girl has said to me, “Oh, you’re single right? You should meet my friend X.” It’s like they’re getting money out of it. And X has always got “a great personality”, that’s the other thing. Just once, I’d like to be set up with someone who’s got no personality but looks like a supermodel. Yeah, set me up with a Playmate who’s got the personality of Attila the Hun. That would do just fine, thank you very much.
That’s why I don’t understand arranged marriages either. Because that’s like the biggest blind date of your life. You haven’t met her, you haven’t seen her, you know nothing about her other than the fact that she’s got a great personality.
How utterly desperate have you to be to settle for that?
I saw two guys, the other day, walking down the street in the hot sun carrying a big, wooden door on their heads. I don’t get it. Wouldn’t it just be simpler just to carry an umbrella?
I did the “Free Hugs” thing this past Saturday evening on M.G. Road here in Pune. For those of you who aren’t quite aware of what this involves check out the videos on Youtube or this Wikipedia article. This is the Free Hugs Campaign website.
I will be soon posting more stuff on my experiences in the coming days. I also plan to keep doing this. For now though, here’s an article that I wrote for the Pune Mirror regarding the my adventure.
Stay tuned.
The following piece appeared in the Pune Mirror on Monday, 7th July 2008.
How would you react to someone standing at a street corner with a sign saying “Free Hugs”? Would you be willing to give someone you hadn’t met before a hug if they asked you for one? Why is it so hard to get a hug from someone you don’t know? These are some of the questions I wanted to find answers to when I decided to conduct my “Free Hugs” social experiment.
The idea, of course, wasn’t an original. The concept was started by a person called Juan Mann (One Man) in Sydney in 2004. Since then it’s been carried out in many cities across around the world—and popularized thanks to the online video sharing site youtube.com. When I mentioned trying it out in India to some friends, the responses I got leaned heavily toward “It won’t work in India.” I disagreed but thought it was worth finding out.
I picked M.G. Road because I had expected it to be a Walking Plaza and also because I thought it would have a fairly distributed demographic set. (At the last minute, I found out that the Walking Plaza had been put off for two months because of the rains, so that was a bit of a disappointment.) I could have tried a mall or a multiplex—but in that case I would only come in contact with a certain type of people. I wanted a slightly more varied sample set.
After just one run of the experiment, I would have to say that it was a success. I received a fair share of hugs yesterday and only a couple of really negative responses. Most people who declined, either did so with a smile or just refused to look in my direction at all. That’s okay—everyone has the right to make their own choices. No one told me to get out and go home. So experiment part – success.
There is another side to the whole story though. I actually do believe in the power of the hug. I’m sure every one of us has at some point in their lives felt like that they needed a hug real bad but there was no one around who would offer them one! It shouldn’t be so hard to get one from someone you don’t know. When I stand on the street with a board saying “Free Hugs”, the statement I’m making is that irrespective of who you are—young, old, rich, poor, clean, dirty, anything—if you want a hug, I’m willing to give you one. I think that’s a powerful statement to make.
I plan to continue doing this in the future. Not for the experiment bit—okay, not just for the experiment—but for the sheer fun of it. At the end of the day, each single hug I got, more than made up for all the hugs that were turned down. Hug someone around you now and see if you don’t feel better!
She: What’s your name?
He: Can’t tell you.
She: What do you do?
He: Can’t tell you.
She: Where are you from?
He: Can’t tell you.
She: Ummm. Is there anything you can tell me?
He: Your breasts are too big, you wear too much make-up, and yea – word of advice – try wearing a bra.
