The memoirs of a hopeless romantic

Soon it will be time for the last page of the 2007 calendar to present itself. And soon it will be time for the year-end India trip, the highlights of which, among other things, will be the annual writedowns of my Love life Ltd accounts. They happen as part of a very friendly, social setting called the wedding. Weddings of close female friends, who would have been my love interest at some point of my spectacular love life. Its really becoming a disturbing pattern of late.

There is absolutely nothing more disheartening for a nice guy than a unrequited love's wedding invitation. Why do they have to rub it in? It goes something like this:

Unrequited love: "Suuuummeeeeeeet!!!!! I'm so happy"

Sensible brain: "You sound like you are very much in love and are about to get married to that jerk who was worse than me in every sense. So you are off my development list. No more resources granted. I've gotta rush! Can I talk to you later?"

Nice-guy mouth: "Heyy!! tell me about it!"

Unrequited love: "Im getting married to Un-nice-guy!!!!! I'm so happy!!! I met his parents last week and it was all finalized!"

Sensible brain: "why not me?" "Why not me?"

Nice-guy mouth: "Awesome! I'm so happy for you! When is the D-day?!!?"

Boring monologue follows, and then she proudly proceeds to reveal the most disturbing statistic:

Unrequited love: "You know Sumit, you are the first friend to know!"

Nice-guy mouth: "I'm so honoured! Thanks!"

Sensible brain: "Boo hoo. %&#&*^. That's the most useless thing in the world. Its like telling a cancer patient that he's going to die, and then telling him "You are the first one to know!". No, babe. I'd rather not know. Ever heard of ignorance being bliss?"

Unrequited love: "I soooooo want you to be there! Please please don't ditch me! Listen, I'm not going to marry unless you are attending!"

Sensible brain: "I'd love to attend, darling, but only as the groom. Since you have already chosen someone for that position, I really dont see the point of wasting my time, money and emotional energy by attending your wedding. And seriously, you promise me you won't marry if I don't attend??? Sounds like a plan!"

Nice-guy mouth: "How can I not attend? Ill be there for sure, to witness you in your special moment!"

The phone line's long gone dead, but I'm still absent-mindedly holding the receiver, as if it were transmitting my thoughts back to school when the heart was more hopeful but the record equally abysmal. The annual losses then were revealed mid-year, at another festive occasion called Raksha Bandhan. I hated it every bit- as if the remembrance of having real sisters wasn't painful enough, the fashion among girls of making "muh-bole" brothers made it even more depressing. For some reason I was prime muh-bole material- every girl I liked would reveal her feelings to me in the form of a dirty string to be worn around my wrist, and parried around for the day for everyone to mock me! My mental angst soon had a physical form- I strangely started falling ill every Raksha Bandhan day. Doctors could never find the problem, but I had found the ultimate solution!

So its UL-wedding day. And as I stand there in the wedding hall, devouring yet another generous helping of the mutter paneer (food does work as a good anti-depressant), another machiavellian pattern presents itself to me. Every girl that I pine for, have a crush on, or am romantically involved with, somehow ends up getting married within a year. Of course to someone else. It was most disturbingly proved last year- she wasn't even thinking of marriage when I first met her. "Oh no, I'm really not looking to settle down soon.", I swear she told me. And 12 months later she had married someone she had known for 6 months!

So I'm really thinking of starting a matrimonial witch-craft agency, targetted at desperate parents of nubile women. Your daughter doesn't want to marry? Commitment phobia? Too career-oriented? Cant find the right man? Arrange a meeting with the renowned marriage sorcerer, Sumit Mehta aka Nice Guy! Aka the "hopeless" romantic :)

Why We-blog

"Why do you blog?": This isn't the first time I've been asked this very simple question. Back in 2005, when I was excitedly announcing to everyone that I was about to start MY OWN blog, a friend of mine did wonder the same. She argued that all the benefits of a blog could be achieved by having one's own personal diary, then why exhibit one's personal life to the scrutiny of a voyeuristic surfer-by? I don't think my answer was very convincing then, because I was just doing something that seemed right to me. The basic elements seemed to be in place- I could write, I was happy to write, and I had things to write about. What else did one need!

Two years, 30 posts and a revival of a almost-dead blogging career later though, I think I have a fair idea why. A hectic social life and the coincidental timing of me relocating to a new country have left me with very little time to blog- but somehow I keep wanting to go back to it.

It's primarily because I always have a lot to say. I'm somewhat opinionated (though I like to keep an open mind!), I feel strongly about certain things and I'm curious about almost everything. And I love sharing with everyone those small incidents that are probably just worth a chuckle. Though my closest friends often wiggle their way out of having to listen to my funny anecdotes, I never give up: I always find opportunities to insert them into casual conversations. Blogging is another method I employ to expand my victim circle.

But most importantly, for a person like me, the very public nature of blogging is something very essential to bringing out the best in my writing. I have written diaries in the past- a year later I would read them and find them so boring, because they were an exact replica of my usual thoughts- verbose and haphazard. Only when I blog is when I sit down and order them, construct meaning out of them and present them concisely (ok, relatively speaking!). The fear of writing a bad post and getting negative feedback on it always plays on the blogger's mind- and she/ he responds to it by being one's own critic, proofreader and editor. And that's where one transcends writing to a higher level.

This may sound strange, but after you become a regular blogger, the one-way traffic lane between your mind and the blog transforms into a duplex exchange. For initially, you write everything that you think, but then you soon exhaust all of them. When the mind then starts hunting for different topics to blog, and finds something interesting (like this post!), it becomes attuned to thinking more towards it and completing the thought's incomplete silhouette. Thus blogging helps me think more, think better, and think focussed. (That could be used as a tagline by Blogger!)

And of course, it helps me reach out to people in an efficient way. Feels good to see comments from friends I haven't met in years, and to meet new interesting people. What's been fabulous is a few complete strangers who emailed me complaining about me being so lazy with my writing- that has really spurred me on. To know that people connect with/ mull over almost every thought you put out is a massive sense of achievement. As Sudha points out, its just another medium for a people-hungry extrovert to expand his social associations! :)

Test (on) Tube, baby...

Right, so I decided to venture my blog into the maze of cryptic crosswords. Ill confess, I've been a fan of this geeky business since I was a kid. All courtesy my Dad, who spent his mornings multi-tasking between ignoring my mother's fervent pleas to start exercising his body and joyously exercising his mind. Sometimes, the crosswords were beyond his reach, so he started employing my help in finding words or just in finishing off the left-overs. Google hadn't woken up, so we used big fat Oxford dictionaries. It ashames me to admit that I've spent hours combing through them, looking up all words that were 5 letters long, with the 2nd and 4th letters being R and Y! (One such word is CRAZY)

So it wasn't long before I had caught the craze, and soon me and my Dad were fighting over first right to solve the crossword. That gave my mother some more headache: soon she was multi-tasking too, between yelling at my Dad to exercise, and exhorting me to go out and play. Every extra moment of sleep was critical: if you weren't awake to jump on the scared paperboy when he came into deliver the paper, you had lost the match there itself- 50% of the crossword would be solved by the time you could put a hand to it. Soon it became very competitive, and after a few cases of domestic violence over the newspaper, it was amicably agreed to buy 2 newspapers. The scared, bewildered paperboy just couldn't fathom what was the matter with this nutty news-hungry family who loved the paper so much that they weren't satisfied with one- he soon changed his delivery area, citing personal problems.

So, back to this one. I've tried to make this one fairly easy, so as to not scare away people who havent got much practice in cryptics. Cryptics are very enjoyable because on first look, they look so tough and yet when one finds the answer, it always seems that it was right there staring at you. Solving these requires a fair bit of lateral thinking: you have to force your mind to abandon its usual flow of logic, nay, interrupt it at certain points and then reconstruct it all together at the end. That's what makes them so much fun. I don't understand what all the fuss about Sudoku is- working numbers into a grid is just so boring! Cryptic crosswords combine language skills with logic and lateral thinking all into one neat little 15X15 grid that can massage your brain better than anything else.

And if you are one of those who want to get started on cryptics, but dont know what to google, there's something for you too! I like some webpages that give a fairly easygoing and comprehensive introduction: try this and that. You might want to read these before you try the one above.

Finally, some notes before you start solving: This is a themed cryptic, and the theme is London Underground (mostly zone 1) stations. Which explains the total lack of symmetry- I've not added any words outside the theme to make it look better. If you are not acquainted with London, heres your cheat sheet. Clues are a mix of cryptic and simple ones, mostly the former. In some cases where the words are multiple (like Willesden Green), clues may refer to the entire word formation (e.g Will+esd+eng+re+en). Some clues refer to the theme, or hint towards it (e.g "area in london...", "london's financial center...") whereas some don't.

So get cracking! I already subjected my manager to the ordeal yesterday, he being the perennial test market for all my eccentric ideas and thoughts. The trouble one has to take for one's mentee :)

Confessions of a Judgemental Mind

Sudha ran an interesting article the other day, writing about the 10 things that she judged people by. She's tagged me to do the same, and I thought, I consciously stay away from negative emotions on my blog because I'm such a cynic at heart. So do I really want to do this? But then I said, what the heck, lets give it a go!, but I know, this is going to be ugly. So here are my 6:

They live life within their comfortable closed loop of thinking. They mock those who are brave enough to experiment, and react bucolically when someone confronts them on the shut windows of their dust-gathering brains. They are the parochials, the narrow-minded ones. I find quite a few Indians here, and also in India who can be described such: they are parochials on issues such as integration with non-Indians, respecting people for qualities other than wealth, and attitude towards women. I judge them instantly and I instantly despise them.

Their minds, in an effort to make sense of the complications around them, simplify by classification. They occasionally get lost in the maze of things, and to rationalize, they run to the help of adjectives. They are the stereotypers, the judgers. They judge you from day 1, moment 1. They judge you oh-so-unfairly even before you open your mouth: they have already labelled you based on your appearance. "You are wearing outdated fashions, you are so uncool, you would be so boring to speak to!" "You are Muslim, oooh you must be a fanatic" "You are so hyper, its because you are insecure about yourself!"- their minds are at it already. I pity them for their unevolved thinking, and really cant stand it when they proceed to share with me their half-baked judgements of me. So ironic, but I judge judgers.

They love to focus on the grim realities of life, only that they do it to an unreal extent. They brood over the wrongs, the lows, the sorrows. The fact that they call themselves "practicalists" is probably the only euphimistic thing they can ever do: they are the pessimists, the half-empty ones. Most of them refuse to play the odds: they are content with making no effort and then complaining about it for weeks after. "What are we doing yar, we dont have a girlfriend" "Some people are earning so much, shit we have no money as compared to them." They look at life's bell curve with one conveniently blind eye, focussing only on the part thats better off than them. They defy the purpose of life, happiness.

They sweat over the small stuff all day, and they do it so well that they are bloody good at it. In the process however, they lose touch with the broader meaning of their lives. They fret and fume about love affairs, about doing things as per schedule, about pleasing their bosses, while they lose no sleep over where their life is heading. I call them the microscopes, the 9-to-5s. (Ariel says I was one of them a few years back!)

They are the spoilt kids of yesteryears, born with a silver spoon up their arses. They strutted about in college in their own elite cabals, laughing at the rest of the world and their lack of social tact. Somewhere down the line, they forgot to do anything useful, while the gawks worked away. Let me introduce to you the rich-dad-poor-kids, the arro-cants. You find them in different kinds- punks in RAIT ("ultra-cool" engg. college in Bbay) or the ICSE kids. There's a great sense of achievement to meet them now, remember at being laughed at, and to have the last laugh.

They spend all day sitting in front of the TV, fascinated by the kitsch that cable television throws at us. Content to vegetate with their own lives, they excite themselves vicariously with the ongoings of celebrity lives- Abhishek Bacchan's new hairdo or Preity Zinta's broken foot, they know about them all. The PR-driven hypocrisy of these "icons" of our society doesn't ever faze their enthusiasm- they are our country's starry-eyed's, the couch potatoes. We dont have a shortage of role models to look upto, but whose to look beyond Bollywood? I think they (and there are many of them) are the bane of modern India.

And, finally not to forget those, for whom there is no black or white, but just various shades of greys. No thought excites them, and no action disgusts them. Existence for them is a clinical and emotion-less duty that they fulfil- they are the impassionates, the fence-sitters. I get frustated by their lack of passion for anything, by their inability to stand up for any cause or attitude.

And oh, by the way, I also judge diplomats, cunning foxes, backbitchers, sweet-talkers, boasters....:)

(And I tag Ariel to air her judgements!)