Weddings: Suddenly Less Fun

It’s like an epidemic and an extremely contagious one at that. Everyone I know - my age, a little older, a little younger - seems to be either getting engaged or married. Literally everyone.

When I was younger, I used to believe that I would NEVER want to get married. I’d picture myself as a single bachelor (pardon the tautology) - the person all my friends would complain to about their wives at parties and other such occasions. A single bachelor accompanied a different girl each time. Or maybe the same one might stick around for a few months, or even a year, but certainly no such bond or commitment as frightening as “marriage”.

In my fantasy little world, I’d imagine them casting lustful glances at the girl I’m with, followed by sleisha fearful ones in the direction of their wives to see if they’ve noticed. “Why does this fool get to enjoy his life as he pleases,” they’d think, “while I’m stuck here with this ol’ hen!” I have a vivid imagination and it’s biased toward me.

Yes, that was the stupid old me.

I think it all started to change about a year or so ago. I can’t put my finger on exactly what triggered it - in fact, it probably wasn’t anything in particular - but I do know that slowly weddings seemed to be going from just happy events to happy events tinged with a bit of sadness and jealousy. I had reached “that” age and I realized that I DID want to get married - and how!

These days, when I hear of an upcoming wedding, I’ll still be happy for the couple - especially if I know one or both of them well. But I’d be lying to myself if I said that deep down - real deep maybe - I didn’t wish it was me instead. Not with that bride, of course, but well, you know.

Basically, I think I’ve had enough of the chicks, I want the hen - and I want her for life.

If you’re getting married and I know you, invite me. But if I appear a wee bit sad at the wedding, you know why.

White Dancers

(Like I mentioned earlier, I’m currently in Germany and having the time of my life because the clubbing scene over here is wicked. Nothing like the Mediterranean or something, obviously, but a million times better than where I’m coming from. However, there is just one small, little thing… )

White people are just the worst club dancers ever. White guys, especially. If you’ve seen one white guy dance, you’ve seen them all. To be more precise, if you’ve seen one white guy dance for 30 seconds, you’ve probably seen every white dance move ever invented. Twice over.

I’ll be the first one to admit that I’m no great dancer. But even I am far better a dancer than 99% of the Europeans I see on the dance floor. That’s saying something! Put me in the midst of a group of white guys and you could easily mistake me for a professional.

White guys have exactly two moves. The more commonly used move is to hold one arm out in front of you, slightly above head level, palm open and facing down and then to pretend like you’re pressing down on some imaginary invisible object in front you in rhythm with (what you think is) the beat. You’ll see this move everywhere – sometimes two or more people doing it together as a group. When doing this move, it is apparently best to either look down with a very serious expression on your face or look straight ahead with a goofy grin. I guess it depends on how sozzled you are at that point. The only variation possible with this move is to, well, use your other hand. (Old masturbatory joke comes to mind here.)

The second move is used for music with a slightly lighter beat. It involves holding your arms to your sides, bent at the elbows so that your forehands are pointing forward, fists closed lightly, and pretending like you’re jogging in one place and not getting anywhere. Fortunately, no variations are possible here.

White girls tend to move their entire body randomly and vigorously in all directions. This is normally quite pleasing to the eye – since most of them are rather good-looking – but all it takes just ONE somewhat overweight, inappropriately dressed enthusiastic dancer to ruin your entire night. I don’t care how many hot chicas you see on the dance floor, the sight of an ungainly belly – almost unhindered by the clothing over it – heaving itself like a blob of Jello on steroids is going to stamp itself over all of them in your mind. There’s no way you can even try to enjoy the night after that.

This is one reason why I like to dance with my eyes closed.

Germany, Ich Komme Zurück!

I am scheduled to fly back to Germany on the 10th of March for about 6 weeks. I will be staying in Frankfurt, like the last time. Weekdays will be hectic at work, but I ought to have the weekends to myself. Any suggestions on which cities or towns within the European mainland (within the Schengen Agreement member countries, preferably) are worth a visit?

I visited Paris (hated it, except for Jim Morrison’s grave) and Rome (loved everything about it) the last time I was in Europe, so those two are out. I’m thinking Amsterdam and Prague this time. What do you’ll say?

How Not to Order Food

Ordering food at a restaurant or café always gives me the heebie-jeebies. I have strict requirements, you see. No, they're not vegetarian or heath related requirements. I always like to leave the place feeling “exactly full”. That means a state where even a single morsel after that would provide a negative utility value. Also, I don’t like food being left behind on the plate when I’m done. So every time I visit a restaurant, I need to pick a set of dishes, comprising of the various courses, so that they all total up, in volume, to exactly the amount of space in my stomach. That is, apparently, something known as an NP-Complete problem. It’s not MY fault I can’t always solve it.

To add to my woes, there are other people sitting at the table to be considered. They’re going to eat some of my food, and surely, I’ll dig into some of theirs. The variables just begin to pile up. And it's really hard to do all these calculations because, let's not forget, the odds are that I'm really hungry!

Then there are the unknowns -- unless it’s a place I eat at often, I can’t really be sure exactly how large the portions are going to be. So I don't even have all the information required to tackle the problem. The best I can so is take calculated guesses regarding the various amounts and hope that my errors turn out to be cancellatory rather than cumulative. Often, I'll get it all wrong.

Whenever we go out to eat, most of the group will be scanning the menu to see what sounds delicious. I'm desperately trying to do triple integration in my mind. My thoughts might go something like this. "Hmmm. I think I'll start with a bowl of tomato soup and then have some of the chicken tikka. But then, I'll need three rotis and if I call for the rice after that, well, let's see. The square root of this is so much, and so blah blah blah [...] blah and then after factoring in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Hofstadter's Law, we get so and so. Damn! Overshot it! Okay, time to backtrack and try another alternative." Soon my circuits will overheat and there'll be sparks coming out of me. After that happens a couple of times, restaurants tend not to allow you to go back there any more.

The point I'm trying to make is that it's okay to have weird idiosyncrasies, but it's probably a good thing to ensure that they don't get the better of you. Also, please ask me out to dinner sometime. No one ever does any more!

Advantages of Being Gay

I was pondering on and wondering about homosexuality the other day, and I realized that there are quite a few advantages to being gay. Firstly, allow me to state that I believe most people are “bi-sexual”. By this I mean, if 0 is completely straight and 1 is completely homosexual, then most people would lie somewhere in between. A large majority of people are close to 0, but they’re not exactly 0. Most things in this fuzzy world are gray (as opposed to black or white) and so I would assume that it should be no different for one’s sexual orientation. I would define true “bi-sexuality” as somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6, but that’s open to interpretation.

Getting back to the advantages. To begin with, homosexuals operate in a perfectly balanced demand-supply market. There are as many gay men as there are, well, gay men. D = S. If you think demand and supply don’t really matter much you were obviously never an engineering student. As a straight guy in India, I’m swimming against the demand-supply tide. There are more single straight men around than single straight women. Of course, quality will always come out on top and if you’re either rich or have a lot of money (the only two things chicks look for), you’ll get plenty of constant poontang anyway. But it’s a lot harder because you’re in the majority and so you’re devalued that much. Strike one for gays!

Then, as Jerry Seinfeld once sagaciously pointed out, if you’re gay and you’re dating someone with roughly the same build, you automatically double your entire wardrobe. For a guy, this may only mean four pairs of shoes instead of two, but for a girl the numbers are staggering. A gazillion times two pairs of jeans and a squintillion (that’s where you have to squint just to see all the zeroes) times two pairs of shoes. I can’t even do the math. But it’s definitely another plus point in favor of homosexuality.

But the final, and most important, advantage I see to being gay is what I call the “what’s your point?” retort. Let me explain how it works. Normally, when you do something stupid someone else will be quick to poke fun at you saying, “That’s so GAY!” Now, if you are in reality gay, then you can come back with a “What’s your point?” Let me give you an example.

Big Stud: Hey, look at you, calling for the menu at the bar. That’s just so goddamned gay!
Cool Gay: And what was your point again?

Admittedly, this last advantage is only applicable to male homosexuals but I have a feeling it’s slightly made up for by the fact that lesbian have an entire porn industry for their pleasure while gays have practically nothing on the internet that would interest them.

Okay, so on the flip side, being gay means that you can’t visit Iran without losing your head or Israel without shaking the place up (link from here) and in the small eventuality of the Bible actually being true you’re likely to get rogered in hell for all eternity when you die. But to me it seems like it’s totally worth the deal.

What advantages can you think of?

So Cute! (Or Not.)

One of the biggest advantages, I think, girls have over guys is what I like to call the “So Cute” safety net. If a girl does something well, that’s great – she comes off a winner. If she does something badly, she always has the option, if skilled, to come off looking “So Cute”! Guys don’t have that. They can either pull something off or appear like a loser.

For example, karaoke. A girl who sings a karaoke song well is loved by everyone. So is a guy. But what if they fuck it up? How often have you seen a girl go on stage, rape a song, do a little hip dance and almost everyone in the audience thought that was just “Sooo Cute”! Quite often, I’ll bet, and probably more than that. Now when was the last time you saw a guy manage to do that? Never, right? Imagine a guy who messes his song up. There’s nothing he can do, except maybe find the back door and make as quiet and quick an exit as possible. Same thing with reality shows on T.V. Sanjaya Malakar was not “So Cute”, he was “So Gay”.

Or consider a party. A girl can go up to the guy she likes and botch her opening line up as much as she wants and chances are he’ll still think that was just “So Cute”. Or she could go up to him and ask him for a light, light her cigarette, take a puff and end up coughing – “So Cute”. If a guy did that, it’s plain gay.

Girls can cry while watching a movie or get scared of the dark, and get away with it because someone somewhere will think that’s just the cutest thing they ever saw. Girls who like driving fast are cool, girls who don’t are just being “cute”. Why aren’t guys allowed to get away with that?

You just can’t lose when you’re a girl, I tell you. Us guys have it tough all the way. We have no choice but to be the very best at what we do. There’s no “So Cute” net to catch us if we fall. Who wants voting rights! Bah!

Virgin Problems

I am often asked rather embarrassing questions by kids around me. They always bring back memories about embarrassing questions I used to ask when I was a kid.

For example, once when I must have been about 6, I realized that we refer to the mother of Jesus as the “Blessed Virgin Mary”. I could figure out what “blessed” meant and “Mary” was obviously her name – but what the heck was “virgin”? I used to attend Sunday School as a kid – yes, a very­ “Catholic” upbringing – and that’s where I was when I realized this.

So I picked the nearest adult around – one of my Sunday School teachers – and fired it at her. “Why do we refer to Mother Mary as ‘Virgin’. What does that mean?”

For those of you’ll who have never been to Sunday School, let me try to describe the average Sunday School teacher in one line – “Be-spectacled, old prude who never quite managed to get any in her time.” (Ironic that my question dealt with the meaning of the term “virgin”, when you think about it! Who better to answer!) And being the type that they are, Sunday School teachers embarrass easily. As soon as she heard my question she sucked in a sharp breath and turned as red as a monkey’s bum. I knew I had hit a winner.

Looking back at it now, I just appreciate the difficulty of the situation I had just put her in. How in the world does someone explain “virginity” to a kid without first explaining “sex” to them. (Actually how do you even explain “sex” to someone when you haven’t ever done it in your life? But let’s not get into that.)

“Well son, you see,” she started off gamely after recovering from her initial shock, “Joseph and Mary weren’t married. And yet, and yet Mary gave birth to a son.”

“You mean like Hollywood!” I was eager to show that even though I was just a 6-year-old, I was right up there when it came to following celebrity gossip. “Ma’am, is Hollywood full of virgins?”

“No. No. Not at all. You see, son, this birth was special. Mary and Joseph weren’t staying with each other as yet.”

“I see.” It was plainly clear that I didn’t quite see. But she wasn’t going to take any chances. “Class is up for today. Remember to do your homework for next week kids. Have a nice day!”

Can you blame me for believing then, until I was about 10, that children were born when two people – man and woman (whether married or not) – just happened to be living together?

“Need To Change Your Balls!”

Most of us hate going to the mechanic because we know we’re going to get screwed and there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s because most of us don’t know squat about our cars or motorcycles and when we take them to the mechanic we’re as much of a sitting duck as anything. He’ll throw fancy terms at you -- “fan belt”, “radiator hose”, “bevel gears”, “Gossamer sheets”, “monkey piss”, etc. To be very frank, these sound like nothing that could possibly be in my car -- but what the hell do I know? I’m not the mechanic now, am I?

So I reluctantly agree that “Yes, my wanker shaft does need to be replaced” and “Yes, it is indeed a wise option to be ‘on the safer side’ and put in a new set of lubricated balls”. All the while I’m trying to add up in my mind what this is going to cost me and I wind up with my mental calculator displaying the words “You’re fucked!” Then I ask the mechanic, “How much is this going to cost me?” and get a reply that’s about twice my mentally calculated estimate. (Double fucked!)

But I’m a poor (even poorer by the end of the day), ignorant idiot who has no clue what’s causing that irritating noise somewhere in the trunk and if the mechanic says he’s got to put in new headlights to get rid of it, then I really have no choice but to agree with him. And if fitting a new rear-view mirror can help avoid the grinding sound that comes whenever I shift from third to fourth, then yea - I want that done too!

The point I’m trying to get at is actually this -- how is a mechanic any different from a doctor? I personally hate going to a doctor because I don’t know much more about (the internal functionings of) my body than I know about my vehicle. And if my mechanic can screw me over with a smile on his face, then so can my doctor! When I go to him with a certain problem or just for a general physical (the equivalent of servicing your car), he throws weird medical student terminology at me. Prescribes enough medication to keep the entire population of Colombia high for a month and sends me on my way with a huge hole in my pocket. Just like my mechanic does.

In fact I suspect they probably even use the same words (what would poor, ignorant me know!).

“Your wanker shaft needs changing and you’ll have to lubricate your balls! That should get rid of that headache!”
“Right on, Doc!”

Most people never understand why I hate seeing a doctor. Now I’ve stopped going altogether. (Sometimes I’ll break an ankle or something and the pain will so bad that I have to attach a pair of crocodile clips to my nipples just to take the focus of it, but even then I’ll staunchly refuse to pay the doctor a visit!) Hopefully, after this post people will understand why I’m so scared of going to the doctor. (And also, why I sometimes have two weird protrusions sticking out from under my T-shirt.)

Near-Death Experiences in Bombay

I was in Bombay this past weekend and being the “when in Bombay, do as the Bombayites do” types, Friday evening found me at Dadar railway station trying to board a local suburban train in the direction of the evening returning-from-work rush. I’m not new to Bombay or the experience of traveling in such trains -- which incidentally can almost be considered an X-treme sport. But this time I not only had the disadvantage of having to fight the evening crowd but was also handicapped by a rather cumbersome travel bag that I was lugging around.

The train comes in, I grab onto the pole in the middle of the doorway with my right hand and try to squeeze myself into the compartment (already occupied by about a gazillion sweaty individuals). My bag is in my left hand trailing behind me.

There’s an old Spanish saying, “Donde comen seis, comen siete”. (Or something like that.) It translates to “Where six can eat, seven can eat.” This might seem like good logic. But I found out that evening, that “where a gazillion can fit, a gazillion plus one can’t always”! So the train starts moving, and I find that my only physical contact with it is my outstretched hand holding onto the bar in the middle of the doorway and about three toes of my right foot that have managed to find about three square inches of free space somewhere on the foot board. (I always knew real estate in Bombay was ridiculously hard to come by, but I was finding out just how bad it really was!)

“This won’t do,” I think to myself. “I’ll just take the next train. And if that’s too crowded, then the one after that, or the one after that...” Death by falling out of a train was never on my list of “Cool Ways to Die”. So I crane my neck around and what do you know -- suburban trains in Bombay can accelerate! And how! We were already moving too fast for me to get off under the best of conditions, and certainly not jumping backwards and with a heavy bag in hand. So much for Plan A.

That’s when exactly two thoughts hit my mind.

The first was -- “Think of something clever to say to these people around you. Last words are always important.”

The second was -- “Ummm, one hand’s keeping you alive and the other is holding onto your [very important] bag! What if someone reaches into your pocket right in front of your eyes, removes your wallet, takes out all the cash and the cards, waves them in front of you, stuffs them in his pocket and then puts your wallet back in! Which hand do you use to punch him?”

The people of Bombay are a good lot though. The guy in front me yells out to some people in front of him, something about “the person behind him being as good as off the train” and “what the hell were they doing not moving forward and giving us some space?” and were they “waiting for him to fall and die before they moved?” It was an impressive display from him, I must admit and people did inch forward and I managed to move from my three square inch hovel to a relatively decent one room house -- enough space to keep both my feet and somehow rest the bag on top of them. I was still by no means safe -- too close to the door, but at least not outside it any more). I had no idea when the next station even came (the platform was on the other side).

The station after that one, however, was on my side of the train. I got pushed out and then pushed back in again and was now living in a (comparatively) luxurious one bedroom apartment! I was just planning my house warming party when I realized it was time for me to alight. I used the good old “float-and-drift-with-the-tide” algorithm there and managed to escape alive, carried more by the crowd than by my own feet.

That is Bombay. And I love it.

At Least He Was Honest

It’s time to get back to blogging -- even if all I have to offer you today is a small snippet.

The other day, a bunch of us had gone to one of these small dhabas next to our office. The food in our office cafeteria is unworthy even to puke out -- so such places run a thriving business. We sat down at an empty (and surprisingly clean) table and tried to decide on what to order. (This, most of you’ll will agree, is an NP-Complete problem.)

Finally we settled on an order and summoned one of the waiters -- a young lad of about 12. He hurried to our table, pen and pad in hand, looking ready to jot down anything we could throw at him. One of us started calling out our order, one dish after the other. He didn’t put any of it to paper but instead, I could see each name was adding a further ounce of confusion and befuddlement to his face. After about four dishes he was completely lost.

“See,” I started kindly. “You have a pen and paper. Why don’t you just write down the order? There’s no way you’ll retain the entire thing in your mind.”

He just gives me a shyish smile.

“What’s the matter?”, I asked.

“Sir, I don’t know how to write!”

The mystery of why he was toting a pen and paper around may never be solved.