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!

Alone, but not Lonely!

“Mumma, I need to go to the toilet. Please come with me!”- this is what the hazel-eyed, brown-eyed boy would say to his mother. He was scared of the dark. Funny thing was, he wasn’t scared of ghosts, he was scared that he would be trapped in the toilet for some reason. And he couldn’t think of anything that he would do inside if ever such a travesty struck.

“You are big boy, beta. 7 years old and a grown-up man! I get scared standing outside. Don’t you think I should sit inside here, safe, away from the darkness outside,” argued the mother. She was a smart woman (as if there is any other kind of women. They are all smart. Haven’t seen otherwise!).

The boy would go talking to himself or humming a song. He was always averse to the idea of being alone; actually, he was more averse to the idea of silence; the deafening eerie silence that actually gives you the impression of not being alone, but being lonely.

He grew up to be a gregarious young boy. Always talking, not only to others but also to himself. It was his way of reassuring himself that he was not alone.

“Pray like normal people once, will you? You don’t have to talk to God like he is a person”, scowled his mother. She didn’t understand that the boy was not only alone, but he was also lonely. And if the entity that accompanied him was to be called God, then be it.

In all this, this guy, who grew up much more, with premature grey, found the best remedy. He surrounded himself with a lot of friends. Oh so many of those! Constant chatter it was, whether it was with them in person, or over the phone. He very well could have run an entire call center! And talk he did-of his life, of other’s lives, of the various ideas that his head spun. People grew used to him, habituated to his constant banter.

The greys increased. The boy realized that it was during the time when he was lonely and quiet and talking to himself, he was at his best. He loved himself, not in an asinine, narcissist way. He loved his own company. It took time, but he realized that he was his best friend.

Today, he thinks back- he was never lonely, he couldn’t have been. He was only alone!

And, well, I was always there with him, like I am now, when he is typing!

Write? Yeah, Right!

Has there been a time when there’s one thing you think you are good at and then someone comes up and gives you a “reality check”? Well, I just had my share of being brought down a peg or two. I might be good at a lot of things (abysmal at many more), but there is one thing I hold close to my heart-it is my writing. I know by this time you all might be going like, “Constructive criticism, heard of it?” Yes, I have. And to be honest, some of the stuff I write is pure crap. But then there’s some that could be graded as average, if not good. So, I put my foot down and said to myself, “To Hell with them! I will write till my fingers bleed (hyperbole, inspired by many Bollywood films)! Be it verbose vomit! I don’t care!”

I am sure someone amongst you is a dancer, a singer, a musician (thanks to the plethora of talent shows on prime time television), a cricketer, an actor, and so on. And maybe that’s what you think you are, but you aren’t. You are probably the butt of all jokes at the cricket try-outs; maybe the bellowing of the buffaloes has more melody to it than your aalaaps; maybe the motionlessness of a stone is more entertaining than your wriggling and twisting your torso; or maybe John Abraham’s face (or ass) has more expressions than your face (or anything else for that matter!). But all this shouldn’t come in your way to doing what really makes you happy! If you think you are a Madhuri Dixit or a Meryl Streep or a Tendulkar or a Picasso or whoever you think you are, don’t stop thinking.

Think, but with conviction. Don’t lie to yourself. And if you are going to lie to yourself, then please don’t take yourself so seriously. You might not be the next big thing, but hey, in your own little world that you can create for yourself, you already are!

So do what you think you do well and let this be a message to all the snide people out there- that for better or for worse, they have to put up with your antics. And all said and done…I continue to write…(crap, maybe!)

Thesis on Friendly Behavior and Creatures Termed as “FRIENDS”

Man, famously known as the social-animal (despite his many anti-social elements), loves to be surrounded by a throng of people, whom he more often than not mistakenly calls his Friends. We study in this thesis the purpose and peculiarities of these creatures, their importance in one’s personal life, their detrimental effect on one’s health (smoker befriends smoker paradigm) and the mother of all questions- who are friends after all?

Oxford Dictionary has a foul, defecation-like definition of friend-“a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relation” . First of all, it’s too concise. I mean I know they had to fit in all-so-many words in one little book, but elaborating a little more wouldn’t have killed them. Moreover, I think the definition is out-dated. Mutual Affection-honestly, seems like the writers of the lexicon, were short of words. Plus, the sexual part isn’t completely true-Friends with Benefits-ring a bell to you? (this part is strictly not based on my personal life or my affiliation with my friends. It has purely been platonic.)

(Enough about the dictionary definition! Back to the theory now! The writer has a bad habit of digressing.)

Postulate 1: Total number of friends in one’s life is a fixed constant. (Partial credit to a certain friend for helping me come up with this one!)

The “capacity of friendliness” is like the power of adsorption of a substance, purely based on the composition of subject-in the former case, it’s the person’s true, innate nature. So, if you are trying to befriend more people than you can actually handle, you will realize the true paradoxical nature of this thesis- you will feel all the more alone. Lonely, to be precise!

Postulate 2: Number of Facebook friends is inversely proportional to your friends in real life

(People who have more than a 1000 Facebook friends, please dismiss the writer as a maniac and navigate back to Facebook)

The reason why you got so many friends on “The Social Network” in the first place is that you have spent a big chunk of your life liking and tagging people and pleasing them with the saccharine and sugar-sweet life. What about the bad part? Facebook doesn’t have a Dislike button. You know why? Because then people would stop going there.

Postulate 3: A Friend to All is a Friend to None

Everybody’s friend can be your friend, but never the best one. He/She will be discreet about things until you will learn about them on twitter/ Facebook or through India TV (If you are that happening and have famous friends). Litmus test to identify such friends- ask them a question about taking a stance about someone, if they fail, then they belong to this category.

Postulate 4: You can have ONLY ONE Best Friend

This is the truest of the postulates. You might have a lot of close friends and choosing one of out of the lot, might seem like a challenge (being true in the writer’s case), but there’s always one friend who’s true to you, at least truer than the rest. It may happen that one is the best out of the lot for a time-span, then there’s someone else. So if you have the time, keep a list every month. (You are a LOSER if you actually do this!)

(Enough with the thesis! Friends are Friends, with whom you can kick-back, relax, and sip a beer (sherbet in some cases, where people are from small towns, like in the case of the writer)! Families are your inheritance- you may like your aunt’s husband or may completely detest your paternal aunt, but you have to put up with them. With friends-they are the family you choose. So do as they say in any Telebrands commercial-“Choose wisely, live well”)

Below song dedicated to ONLY those friends with whom I have laughed my heart out!

PS- +1 it on google icon if you like it, or share on FB J