Love & it’s Maladies (Part 2)

Sequels being the current fad, I decided to pen some more on the foibles of lovelorn couples. In case if you missed it, link to the prequel (http://errorcode404.blogspot.in/2013/09/anti-love-love-and-its-maladies.html). So without any beating around the bush, here’s the low down.

·         Petty Fights: The commonest thread amongst couples worldwide is to fight about insignificant, absolutely mundane things.  A guy, trying to warm up to his girlfriend, bought her a yellow t-shirt. Little did he know that this gesture of his will be misconstrued and he will get hell for it! Reason: He had given a yellow t-shirt to his ex-gf, which his current gf knew about. Hence, it was absolutely and completely crystal clear from this that he still had feelings for his ex-gf. (Please note that this is sarcasm. If you are a girl and you are agreeing with it, stop reading here and rather read about shoes or bags.)

·         Nicknames: She has a name, that too a very nice one. Why would you call her babyyyy, chocolate, shonna, shonnu, gullu, chullu? The most bizarre name that I recently overheard a girl was summoning her boyfriend with was Chottu (Read: Small). I didn’t know whether he was her man-Friday (obviously before dating), or it was a more read between the lines nickname.

·         Handbag holding chipmunk: Picture a guy, struggling to hold a lady bag in a way that would paint a masculine picture of him. Breaking News: It is an impossible feat to achieve, even if you are Arnold Schwarzenegger. So either you ask your girlfriend to carry it with her at all times, which I am sure you won’t have the balls to do, or suck it up and keep holding it in your hand until a guy, holding a bag in his hand out of choice, hits on you.

·         Free Home Delivery: Some girls treat their boyfriends as slaves (not in the 50 shades of grey way). If she needs bread from the store next to her house, Mr. super boyfriend will rent a cab, go 3 blocks, buy the bread, and deliver it on time. Still he will be scourged for not using his head, because after all when she meant bread, she obviously meant brown bread, and isn’t it a commonplace logic to buy eggs when you are asked to buy bread. The guy too will be profusely sorry for not using his intellect in making the bread+egg association.

Phew! After the previous one, I got many hate mails in my private mailbox. So I guessed that what wrote struck a chord somewhere…Even though it might have hit the wrong notes, I am just happy that it made some noise, if not music!

Anti-Love: Love and its Maladies

Some foolish, errant ‘loveholic’ once said “Love is blind”. I think what he really meant was “Love blinds you!” and maybe he didn’t find the nerve to say so because of the fear of his nagging girlfriend. I have been fortunate (sarcasm) enough to have been surrounded by people in relationships, and with the same people when they are out of relationships. If there were a graph of stupidity vs. time spent in a relationship, it would have been an exponential one, skyrocketing through the ceiling. What am I bantering about: Love makes you irrational, inconsiderate, anti-social, euphoric, possessive, and to put it is simpler words-plain stupid. Read on to find the telltale signs of individuals’ height of pettiness when in love.

·         Married to your phone: Thanks to the lack of space (physical and emotional) in our country, we often see couples talking over the phone from dawn to dusk (and to dawn again, as popularized by a commercial). To add to it are texts, whatsapps, and god knows how many more apps. There was a guy I knew who would mouth let’s say about 20 words a day, now talks through the night, not in person, and definitely not to me or his other friends, but into a phone. His girlfriend sleeps through it, she candidly confessed.

·         Gifts and Other goodies: Every day is an occasion for our love birds. And to mark every occasion is a gift. Even if they might miss buying fresh pair of underwear every month (which I feel is rule of the day), they will spend their hard-earned monies (or their parents’) on buying gifts for one another. Last silly occasion of a couple I heard was “The day we said I love you”. I puked in my mouth!

·         Misplaced Chivalry: Don’t you hate it when your rudest, most obnoxious friend suddenly becomes this mush ball? They pull the chairs not only for their girlfriends, but also her other friends; they order sophisticated & expensive food. And because of such guys, we look bad. I am NOT advocating impoliteness, but I find it impractical to go 20km out of my way to drop someone, in broad daylight.

·         Sick time, cozy time: People in relationships, you have to see them when either of them is sick. “Jaanu, take your medicine.” After 5min 32sec, “Jaanu, took your medicine? Now sleep”. After 3 min 18 sec, “Jaanu, why does your whatsapp show last seen 1 minute ago. I thought you were sleeping. Sleep now my chocolate. How will you get well?”

I have nastier dope on them, but enough toxicity for now…Maybe a sequel to this post... :P

After reading this you might want to read my earlier post: http://errorcode404.blogspot.in/2011/09/10-new-ways-to-break-up-with-your.html

Thinkers vs Doers

We box people based on anything and everything- their sex, color, caste, religion, nationality. My grandmother, however traditional she may be in her appearance, but ultra-modern in her mind, said to me “The world consists of people who do and who don’t do!” 18 years later, I believe her and I think there are people who just think and people who act. It’s completely binary- you are either a thinker or a doer; there isn’t a quasi-state!

Inherently and intrinsically, I believe that we are either of the one. But we have the ability to be a bit of the other side, when need be. However, this is just a feigned skill that fades away.

Being a thinker doesn’t equate to being a procrastinator, as a procrastinator actually acts upon his ideas, albeit with delay. I am talking about people who want to be writers , but are engineers; people who want to be singers, but are engineers; people who want to be dancers, but are engineers. The problem here is (apart from the fact the an engineering degree is very easy to get these days) that we want to “BE” rather than “DO”.

Even if you are a thinker, don’t think what you want to be, think what you want to DO. Don’t be a writer, WRITE; don’t be a singer, SING; don’t be a painter; DOODLE (especially, after you are high! You might end up painting a colorful blob and the world might get its next Picasso).

I often hear people talking about what a great thinker, say eg. Mahatma Gandhi was! Well, it would have been all thought and no act, had he not marched all the way to Dandi. Just imagine if Einstein would have just dreamt the energy-mass equation, and tossed around in his bed and continued to snore. Well, he got up and he wrote. He did and lived on the t-shirts of nerdy geeks from around the world with the famous equation scribbled across his portrait.

I know you would say that in order to do, you must think. And I completely agree with it. I am not saying to stop thinking. I am saying if you have been thinking…and you have been thinking…and you are still thinking, then I guess you are thinking too much. J

Just get up and do!

Onions are Us!

When I was a kid my father once told me that humans were like onions-layered. I am pretty sure that this was not his own creativity, but borrowed. However, those words stuck with me, but for a different reason, as at that point of time all that I associated with onions was stench, tears and a distasteful flavor. And funnily enough, that’s pretty much all I can associate with humans.

On a pessimistic day, like today, I think beneath all the layers of deceit and pungency, lies, well, nothing. I mean you peel, and peel, and peel- to get nothing. On an optimistic day, I tend to examine the layers up close. And trust me, then too, it’s not all hunky dory.

Just like the exterior of an onion, dry and deceptive, we humans too feign fake emotion, a façade. You can be what you want to be, but only for some time. Just as easy it is to peel off those outer layers; it is as simple to unearth the person beneath. It takes only a coffee date or two to know that your girlfriend belongs to the female canine species or your boyfriend, in simple English, is a dog. But you still continue to meet. Because you are a peeler! You want to see the layers, slowly uncovering every little annoyance about the person. Yet to continue with the hope of a juicy center, but it’s all hollow.

I frankly sometimes don’t see the point in knowing a person so deeply because what you are ultimately going to end up with is the hollow core. But then with a vivid mind when I think, I realize it’s the process of chopping/dicing/slicing all the layers that helps you connect with the person’s particular trait (good and ugly) that even you possess.

However jittery, hurtful, irritating, and painful the path of self-discovery is, the path of excavating someone else is sadistically easier, joyful, and critical.

 So be mindful while you peel of your onions, because while you are teary-eyed busy doing so, someone else is un-layering you!

PS: Ah well, all this from an onion that just got slaughtered and fried by me!