Facebook or Yellow Journal??

Off-late there is an abundance of posts on Facebook, being generated automatically by the websites people are accessing, even without their knowledge. Many a websites, from video sharing sites to newspapers now have plugins which integrate them with Facebook. And if you are logged into Facebook while accessing these, they very well have access to information about you and can even post on your wall. While some of the more decent ones prompt before posting anything, there are the naughtier ones which decide to let your friends know what you are upto, even if it is one of your bathroom secrets which you don't want to let out of the door. One such occurrence off-late is of the video sharing site Dailymotion posting on walls of people, the videos they have been watching on the site. Well everyone watches the dirtier stuff on the net; whats the fun of coming online without that anyway? But we don't want the whole world to know the details, do we, especially since some of our parents have figured out the PC off-late and are on an adding spree on Facebook, and its becoming harder to keep them at bay. Interestingly, some of the people who have got caught red-handed with interesting video views are these same semi-techno-literate elders, who later don't even know how to make the newsfeed go away :).

I am just dreading the day Facebook fits in a plugin inside our potties that posts automatically on our walls what we have been eating and what we have been throwing out in minute details. That day, my friend, isn't too far away !!

Move-On

To like and not be liked

To want and not be needed

To think and not be remembered

To feel and not be heeded

While they taught you to persevere

To hang on, despite the wear-n-tear

The wise know not to waste their prime,

To give-up and move-on in time

In love or in a relationship?

So which of the two are you in, in love or in a relationship? Let’s analyze the common responses....

i)                    Neither, I am single – Well dude, you aren’t. Let’s deal with that in detail later on.

ii)                   Both; aren’t they one and the same —Again wrong. They can’t be more different.

iii)                 And if you say, you are in one but not other, maybe you are having some clarity about what I am getting at, but let’s sort it out anyway.

So what do they mean anyway, being in love or being in a relationship? Weren’t we made to understand that they are one and the same? Aren't all those romantic movies about this only, about people who fall in love and get into a relationship and live happily ever after? Doesn’t being in a relationship automatically translate into being in love with that person?

Well the first point of difference between the two is the number of parties required for either. Being in love is pretty simple and straightforward. You can fall in love with someone all by yourself. No need for any approvals here, no need for any reciprocation or agreement. If you fancy someone, you like their actions, their appearance and the way their presence or company affects you, you are in love with that person. That's why I ruled out the first response in the list above. Everyone is in love with someone or other, whether they let the other person know of it, or accept it themselves, this much is always true (now please don’t give me examples of ascetics; they aren’t reading my blog anyway!!). A relationship on the other hand entails two parties, with mutual consent. Though people get into a relationship due to mutual love for each other (or maybe because of peer pressure, as most of their friends are in a relationship too), the love part may not remain true or relevant throughout the relationship. Relationship by nature is a solid identity provided to a much more abstract concept of mutual love. Though the love still remains just between the two parties involved, the relationship part expands to encompass all the people who come to know of it. Thus a relationship is a much wider thing, as its existence is not just in the approval of the two involved parties but in the knowledge about the same of people around.

A second point of difference lies in the way either get terminated. Though a point of termination is hard to define in love, it generally happens pretty naturally. One fine day you realise that you don’t actually feel as strongly about someone now as you used to. Meeting them, talking to them, being in their company doesn't give you the same thrill as it used to. You may try to give reasons to yourself for that, and they may or may not be true. Maybe what I described above happens only temporarily, and things get back to the previous state pretty soon. But the point remains that, falling out of love doesn’t need any external actions, not even the need to inform or get approval of the person you stopped loving.

A relationship by nature is much more complex to terminate. It’s like a contract drawn out with many witness signatures, where the parties forgot to mention an expiry date or an exit clause agreeable to everyone. You may stop loving the person you are in a relationship with, but still for the rest of the world you two are in a relationship, which again compels you to hang on to that person. Many a relationships are bound not by love, but by this external expectation of being a couple. In these cases a relationship becomes not a room that encloses your love, but rather a prison which doesn’t let you escape from it.

A queer and interesting thing to notice is how people don’t really give much thought to either of the above terms, and often use them inter-changeably where actually they don’t exactly convey the meaning they expect. When you actually said “I love you” to someone, and they accepted it, what you started off was not your love with that person but rather your relationship. The love started much earlier and the sentence was just an expression of an already existing feeling. And similarly, you didn’t experience a love failure when the other person turned down your proposal, but rather just failed to get into a relationship. Again a breakup is not the culmination of love but rather the relationship. Breakup doesn’t happen at the exact point when you stop loving someone. You would have reached that point much earlier. Break-up happens when the process of putting up an act of being in a relationship with someone you don’t love, for the sake of the external world’s expectations actually becomes unbearable to you, and you decide to rather get out of it than playing along. That's why most breakups are a greater shock to your friends and acquaintances, than to you. The people in the relationship most times do have a clue. If they are still caught unawares, then it just means they were dumb enough not to get the clues or just didn’t want to acknowledge them.

Finally one major point of difference, and the most controversial of them all, is the number of parties you could be in love or relationship with. Though love is made out to be exclusive and draped in a veil of purity and chastity because of this exclusivity, the truth of the matter is that it is the most non-exclusive feeling. You could love more than one person at any time. That's because you don’t actually love people, but rather the character traits that they embody. You love the personality type that they represent, and this personality type is actually a reflection of your own self, the way you see yourself, the values that you hold dear, the actions that you deem acceptable. In loving someone, you are actually looking out for a part of your moral standards in them, and you can’t help loving everyone who meets these standards.

Relationship on the other hand, is built on the premise of exclusivity. As it’s a social structure, and not exactly an individualistic one, the rules of engagement of a relationship keep changing with the prevailing social standards of the day. Thus in the Arabic world polygamy is an acceptable relationship standard, while the same thing is considered taboo in the Hindu or Christian way of life. The way you look at a relationship thus is not dictated by just your preferences, but also by the kind of society you live in. Though relationships have evolved over the ages under many tags, from arranged marriages, to love marriages, to live-in relationships, or just being committed with someone, the basic premise still remains in the quest for social acceptance and trying to define something abstract and thus bringing in more stability to something which otherwise is too undefined and volatile. While this tag does lend stability, it also may acts as a limiting force as we discussed above.

Finally, it hardly matters what you call anything, as long as it feels right. Just ask yourself if you are personally happy with something or someone and you aren’t in it just because that's the right thing for you to do according to someone else’s standards. If the answer is yes, you don’t need to define it. Just go ahead and experience it and life would be good.

The cute girl and the dirty puppy

There was once a cute girl. She was just like any other cute girl you see in the town; cute, attractive, lively and fun. She had a dirty puppy. It was like most other dirty puppies too; dirty, ugly, with quite a few infections and quite a few queer traits.

But both of them had a strong bond. The puppy loved the fact that the cute girl would take such good care of it, even though it was so ugly and smelly. She was giving it attention, even though there were quite a few dirty puppies in the town to take care of. The girl loved the fact that the puppy was so pathetic and hopeless. It had nowhere else to go, and was latched on to her, and she loved this sense of hopeless attachment.

The girl liked to take the puppy out on walks every now and then. She loved the way the puppy used to follow her every step, and go everywhere she wanted without a question. She loved the way it used to bark and get all worked up when any other dirty puppy on the road got too near her. She loved the silly manner in which the puppy would run ahead of her sometimes, and then look back, thinking that she is actually following it. She laughed to herself during these moments, because the puppy kept forgetting that the leash was actually with her. This convenient forgetfulness made the puppy feel happier and more independent than it actually was. Very rarely, the puppy used to discover some interesting scent on the road, and used to run behind it, forgetting that the girl was with it. During these times, she just had to tug on the leash once, and the puppy got back on line. As much as she loved pampering the puppy, she also secretly loved the sense of control that such tugs on the leash made her feel.

The puppy also loved such walks. It felt a sense of pride on the kind of companion it had. It loved the look of desperation, and envy on the faces of the other dirty dogs on the road. Seeing this, it felt a new surge of liveliness and got a spring in its step. It would bark aloud at any other dirty dog on the road that dared get nearby. But then the cute girl had too big a heart. She often used to stop by when she saw a dirtier, more pathetic puppy, and play with it for some time. She used to tend to its wounds, while also laugh freely at the kind of antics the other puppies used to do. The dirty puppy used to hate such times. It used to try barking at first, to show its displeasure, then tried whining to show that it was hurt, but no use. The puppy had no hold on the girl. It even tried getting into a fight with the other puppies, but then it just made the girl notice them more. She would even shout at it for being so dumb and inconsiderate.

When they got back home, the girl loved feeding the puppy. It gave her immense satisfaction to be the one who fulfilled such an essential need. She used to get whatever food she thought was best for her puppy. She would place it in the bowl and wait for it to eat. The puppy sometimes didn’t eat immediately, which would make her sad. She would almost get tears in her eyes thinking that she had taken so much effort for it, and it is not even honouring that. Finally, miraculously, the puppy used to get around to eating the food, and then stand looking at her wagging its tail. That's when she would give it the nice cuddle, and pat in the head that she knew it was waiting for. Sometimes when she called the puppy for food, it would bring with it some bone, or some piece of chicken from the trash, place it on her feet and wag its tail. She never used to understand what it meant, but would simply throw it out, and drag it inside.

The puppy never used to enjoy the meal times much. The cute girl, out of all the care for it, used to get it all sorts of things to eat every day. But it was never something which it wanted to eat. It used to try and bark and let her know, but she never understood. It even tried to make her understand by not eating what was placed in front of it, but then that just made the girl sad. This was one thing the puppy couldn’t take, and would eat whatever the hell was kept in front of it, and then wag its tail as if it liked it. This did make the girl happy, and she used to give it a nice pat and a hug. The puppy did enjoy this part, and was willing to do whatever it takes so that such hugs keep coming. Sometimes the puppy felt that it wasn’t doing much in return for the girl. Just like she was getting it food every day, maybe it should also get her something in return. Maybe she would like it, and they both could have it together. In this expectation it fetched her the best of the bones it could find, and fight with the other dogs in the trash spot to wrestle away the best chicken piece there. But she never seemed to like what she saw, and always threw it away, without even a glance at the puppy. This did make the puppy pretty sad, but it never knew how to express it, and even if it did, the cute girl never seemed to notice. The puppy thought maybe it hadn’t done a good enough job, and used to try that much harder the next time.

The cute girl had a beautiful little family. She had a loving mom, a caring dad, adoring brothers and sisters, and lots of friends and relatives. The girl loved spending time with all of them. She loved talking about all of them to the puppy. She loved taking the puppy along when she was meeting them. It just made her feel happier. She felt like she had all the various parts of life pretty close together and in place.

The puppy too had a father and mother, but it never cared about them. Which puppy ever did? Sometimes they used to howl away in the distance, and the puppy too would reply back with a howl, but then it never spent much time thinking of them. The puppy also had a few friends. This was before the girl had picked it up from the road and brought it home. Now it hardly had any idea what was up with them. Sometimes they would come to the gate and bark at it. The puppy could never understand what that meant. Were they angry at it, or laughing at it or just plain envious? It assumed the latter and just continued on. Bloody jealous hounds, can’t even tolerate someone being happy. Anyway the puppy was way too obsessed with the cute girl to take notice. It didn’t like being taken along to her parents’ place though. It seemed they never liked it. They were always having a disgusted look on their face. They would even tell the girl to stop playing with such dirty dogs, and that they would get her one belonging to a good breed. The girl just smiled at them, and continued on.

Every night, after having played with the puppy for some time, she tied it outside and went in to sleep. Not that the puppy would have escaped if she hadn’t tied it; it was way too attached to her for that. But then she just loved to know that she indeed had complete control. She never felt bad that she was having a comfortable sound sleep here while the puppy was outside. It never occurred to her that the puppy needed anything more. Wasn’t she being generous enough already, sparing all the time she did.

The puppy just dreaded the nights. That's when she used to leave it outside and go in to sleep. Just before she did that, she used to play around with it. She used to give it a nice warm hug, talk all sorts of sweet little things which the puppy never understood but always loved hearing, and show that she really cared. The puppy loved these moments, but just when it was craving for more, it would find itself locked out. It never understood this part. Not that it was so enthusiastic to get into her bed, but just that if she really liked it then why this forced distance. Was it supposed to mean something? It quietly waited out in the dark. Sometimes thoughts of running away did occur to it, but then it quickly dismissed them as signs of weakness and stayed on. After all, didn’t they say, every dog has its day.

Now for those who understood what the story actually meant; bravo. You atleast realise the soup you are in. For those who think this is a sweet bedtime tale from Aesop’s fables, well I hope you guys have gone to sleep already.

There is no moral to this story. Draw your own conclusions. I just wanted you to realise that life is a bitch and men always remain the underdogs!!

The Wave

It was almost time. 15 more minutes and he would be done with his shift. Standing there, all he could think of was the cup of tea he wanted to have. Tea, the one addiction he allowed himself to enjoy.

It was his first week of duty as a traffic police. He was in other duties before; nothing significant, nothing interesting. And neither was it now. This wasn’t the regular big city. It was one of the smaller ones, where the authorities just decided to put up a half dozen signals to amuse themselves. His other colleagues didn’t even bother to discipline people who didn’t obey the lights, which was almost everyone. This damn town didn’t need them in the first place. But he was more dutiful, the kind of thing one is during the first week of an assignment, before the indifference sets in.

It was almost ten. The road was almost empty, but the signal was on. And then this guy came, zooming along in his bike. He was just going past, as if the light and the man in the uniform didn’t even exist. This pissed off the cop. He flagged the guy to the side.

This guy was strange. Even as he pulled the bike along, he was busy on his phone messaging someone. Not the usual thing kids do when they get caught. It’s usually the good guy act, and too much attention to the cop. As he neared the kid, he noticed that he was seemingly lost in his phone. It was as if he had pulled up and then forgotten why he had done so. He didn’t smell of alcohol, and this town was too small for drugs to have taken over kids so easily. There was something on.

The cop just rapped his ringed finger on the bike’s tank, and cleared his throat to get some attention. The guy finally looked up with dazed eyes.

Cop: “So where do you think you are going off so fast kid. Can’t you see the light is on, and I am still standing here.”

The guy: “Sorry sir, didn’t see that. Wasn’t paying attention.”

He obviously didn’t mean the sorry. And he obviously wasn’t paying attention either.

Cop:   “So what makes sir so busy at this time. Where are you heading off to.”

The cop didn’t care about all these details usually but in this case he was indeed curious. And the kid just looked on trying to digest the question and think up some response. He was obviously too lost to lie, and rather came blurting out with the truth. Anyway he was in a terrible hurry and just wanted to get going.

The guy: “Sir, it’s actually to do with my girlfriend.”

Cop: “Girlfriend. Hmmm...  So what's up with your GIRLFRIEND. Is she sick or something?”

The guy: “No sir.”

Cop: “You got to pick her up or something.”

The guy : “No sir.”

Cop:  (with a wink) “Going to sneak into her place when her people are away, aren’t you!!”

The guy: “No sir, not all. Her people are anyway there.”

This kid was impossible, and the cop was getting really exasperated.

Cop: “So what the hell are you doing anyway? What's the hurry?”

The guy: “Sir, I have to wave to her.”

Cop: “You’ve to what??!!”

The guy: “Wave sir. Everyday night before she sleeps she comes to her balcony. I go there, wave to her from the road. She waves back, and then I come back.”

He was telling this as if it’s a very routine and normal thing for anyone to do, like going to work or having a morning walk. The cop was clueless. By this time, the cop having the next shift had come and was listening to the conversation with amusement.

Cop: “So you do that everyday at this time?”

The guy: “Yes sir. Today, I am already late. She would be waiting for me there without sleeping!!”

He said that in such a pitiable tone, that suddenly the cop seemed like some dark villain standing in the path of true love. The cop too was tired of this guy by now.

Cop:  “Ok, get lost. And don’t get caught in my signal the next time, unless you want to walk all the way for the wave from here.”

The guy was off in a flash. No sorry, no second look. It was almost as if nothing had happened all this while. 

The cop wasn’t surprised though. The only thing he was surprised by was that the kid had pulled up in the first place.

The cop from the next shift couldn’t suppress his grin.

2^nd Cop: “So seems you had your own share of love affairs in your youth to probably let the kid have his time.  Else I don’t see you letting off people without penalising them.”

Cop: “Naah!! The bastard is already in a bigger mess. Cant screw a guy who is already screwed up so much..”

And the laughter continued over the much awaited cup of tea. What would he do in this world, but for this cup of sanity......

The screwed up history of Indian relationships

Are you a Single Indian male? Do you feel life's been unfair to you? Do you ask yourself why you have ended up like this? 

Are you in a Relationship? Or is that what your girlfriend has led you to believe, and you don't know if you are better off for it or worse? Do you ask yourself if your Single friends actually have a reason to feel envious of you or should it be the other way round? Do you feel the relationship game in India is just too complex for you to play? Well join the club. Lets see, why its so?

Men are nothing but glorified beasts.  To understand how screwed up our relationships are, all it takes is to see how the animal kingdom deals with its mating game. Let’s accept, that's how nature had intended us to be. The fact that we didn’t turn up that way doesn’t change the fact that we were actually designed like most other animals.

               

In the animal world, relationships are pretty uncomplicated. A monkey, a horse or a lion grows up, attains puberty and starts looking for a mate. And good for them, they find accepting females, who don’t ask them to marry before agreeing to have their baby (Not just one, but rather a whole bunch of them). Whoever said that our women aren’t that demanding. I know half the readers are already cringing their noses at the animal comparison. You may say that, ‘of course we have evolved to be better than that’. The fact of the matter is that the complication of the mating game is actually the price we are paying for all the fruits of evolution. The grass is always greener on the side of the horse.

If indeed the game hadn’t got complicated enough by virtue of being born a human, if you also have the misfortune of being born in India, then it’s worse. While there are quite a few regions where still many men are living the animal way, in most other places they just don’t have a clue what to do.

The new relationship game in India is indeed pretty funny and strange. It aspires for international standards, but still is rooted in Indian ground realities. And the problem is, the players haven’t actually understood the rules of the game, or are having different assumptions about it.

When it comes to relationships, Indians carry a huge baggage – the baggage of their past. The way men and women got together in this country has been changing quite rapidly in the past few generations, and while people have been moving ahead, they still have a part of them tied down to the past. In the generation of our grandparents (this doesn’t apply to you, if you are already a grandparent while reading this), the relationship game was pretty simple. There used to be the boy and the girl. As soon as they came of age, or maybe even before, they were married off. So, as soon as the boy starts discovering his physical self, and his longings, he already has a wife at home to play around with. Good for you kid!! This practice, though crude and termed as unjust to the kids by the modern society, had two good results. Every kid in the block was always in a relationship, and every other kid knew this. Also, if we consider the fact that one got a mate even without trying and even before one could appreciate the need for it, and if they could only know the hardships of competing in the open field, then they would realise that it’s not that bad a state to be in after all.

So it does seem our grandparents had it pretty good back then. The next time you find an old lady telling you how she got married at the age of 15 itself, realise that she is actually throwing a taunt at you about how early she started her sex life, which you, a 21^st century junkie, still can’t openly have at the age of 25. So you know how much weight to attach to your grandparents’ words on chastity and self-control from now on. They just don’t know what they are talking about.

Now comes the generation of our parents. They had it a lot harder than the previous one. Suddenly the marriage ages increased, especially for the men. Women weren’t yet completely independent. Most households let them study till their schooling got over and maybe for a few more years of college, and then immediately married them off. The men on the other hand had to get a job, settle down in a few years and then marry a girl of their parents’ choice. Because of these extra years men spent to settle down, there was always an age difference between the men and women. This age difference has been the issue of a lot of propaganda, which varies from the one about how it lends stability during old age, to how women actually reach mental maturity quite early. All bullshit. What this age difference actually meant was that, as the women got married in the late teens and the men in the mid to late 20s, there were actually no women the men could socially see in this intermittent stage before marriage. For example, if you are a man of that time, you maybe having female classmates till school (even this is highly unlikely as most schools were segregated on sex), but after school, you hardly knew any girls of your age group, as all of them were married off. So unless you could pull off an extra-marital with the lady in your office (also quite dangerous), you had zero contact with women. I must say this was the worst stage in the Indian male’s history. That's why maybe Amitabh Bachchan was always angry as a young man, while Amol Palekar had to take special classes to woo the one lady he knew. That's one of the reasons why I empathize so much with the previous generation.

For this reason, be a bit guarded when your parents advice you on chastity and self-control. They actually know what they are talking about, but that's because they never had a choice. You have it.

Now comes the current generation. This is the most confused lot of them all. There is always confusion, when there is a choice. For once, the women finally came out of the shackles of the past. Thankfully, or maybe not, they are now everywhere, doing all sorts of jobs. Of course if you are a mechanical engineer or a bus driver or in sales, you still are one generation behind and may have to wait! So the guys finally had a hunting ground at their colleges and office spaces. Of course, they themselves fall prey most times, but that's a secret which is best left unacknowledged.

Now there was sufficient representation of both the sexes. And there was the sudden communication boom, which made all that messaging and calling possible. So nice of the telecom operators; as if the men didn’t have a big enough leash around their necks, now they had to explain their every action, and spell out their every location. Add to that all the relationship drama on various American sitcoms which we could download now at negligible cost. So sitting at our homes in the gullies of Delhi or Chennai, we were actually taking relationship advice from Joey or Barney, while our sex-lives weren’t any better than that of Wolowitz.

This exposure caused more harm than good. It raised our expectations, without there being much change in the ground realities. There was just an increase in the transaction costs, without much change in the results. So instead of the beaches, park benches, Rs.5 Vada Pavs and Rs.20 cinema halls, now the guys had to take the chicks to fancy malls, posh pubs, buy them Subs and see the same kind of movies at Rs.350 per head multiplexes.

While social networking websites clocked the biggest growth-rates worldwide, the matrimonial sites outgrew them in India. The Indians do know how best to use their IT. Now it’s a common trend to look up a possible bride in Facebook, just to see if she is as much of a saint as her matrimonial profile suggests, while on her part, it’s just a matter of tweaking some privacy settings on Facebook, and all remains well.

A new trend emerged. The arranged marriage scenario changed, from one where the parents had the final say, to where the parents started acting as a dating service. It’s pretty common to see young couples getting engaged, then starting to go out together, just like any normal couple who are seeing each other. In the past, any meeting of the bride and groom before marriage was considered taboo. Now it’s become a way of life. And if the couple feel they don’t get along during this phase, then engagements are easily broken. We are just waiting for the time when parents could run this dating service without having the need to label it as an engagement.

This generation also saw a lot of cross cultural exposure, a newly discovered fascination and curiosity in people from other regions. While instances of flaring tempers because of intolerance to a different culture are quite common place and many such feelings are often given vent over the online medium, the getting together of different kinds of people also resulted in an overflow of passion, which had been quite bridled-in due to familiarity in the past years.  The cross-cultural mix-up added new elements of novelty and discovery to the age old mating game, thus adding more spice to it.

With the rapid globalisation, and the current generation transitioning to parenthood, it would be interesting to see how the game pans out in the next set. Maybe parents would beg their children to marry within their country, in place of within their caste. Maybe Facebook would add matrimony features within the Indian version of its website. Or maybe the concept of matrimony itself may become extinct. Whatever happens, the hope remains that the game doesn’t get any more complicated than this. The damn species stands the risk of extinction otherwise.