Adam versus madam - railgaadi feat.

“Dude, F 21, getting in at the next stop!”

I opened a curious eye from under my blanket and looked below. A group of boys, all in the age bracket of 20 to 22 sat hunched in a circle on the lower berths. In perfect synchronization, the train sounded its siren in the background, to give this all important piece of information, the aura and atmosphere it so richly deserved.

“Dude, how does one impress a girl?”

I was fully awake now. It wouldn’t be right to lie down when such worldly noble matters were being discussed. And it really was a question of the ages, one that had troubled most of mankind throughout evolution.

“Dude, you need to be different. She should think you are cool. For eg. Tell her you are a dirt biker or a salsa dancer, she’ll fall head over heels for you”, said one of the species.

I wanted to tell him that all he looked like was a dirty broker but stopped short when the yokel began to gyrate his hips in a supposed seductive fashion. I do not want to be harsh to a young man but I could testify in a court of law that the copulation process between two giant pandas in full heat would be comparatively more graceful than what we were now being witness to.

“No man, who is interested in a biker? One has to be an achiever in college, like a sportsman or an accomplished musician.” I liked this second fellow, he seemed to be talking about people like me. Immediately, I was transported back to my engineering days, aaah the days when I lead my branch team to victories galore. Strangely none of those sequences had any women trying to molest me, nor even tear off their clothes and scream my name in joyful ecstasy, not even give me as much as a platonic hug. Pushing cricket behind, I moved my reverie to the college stage, the platform where I had moved my body just like Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy insisted we all should. But then again. Of course, there was the occasional girl who smiled at me in the corridor, but mostly I was only waltzing with Bashir, or Rohan or Sanjay or Muthuswamy. I was positively glum now.

“It is all in the mind, brothers”, a third hero declared, raising one eyebrow condescendingly. With one eyebrow raised high up on the forehead, he looked like a cross between the Rock and a cock. The poultry variety, not talking of err weapons here. “One should plays the game ofs the minds with the womans.” With that kind of grammar, he was playing good games with my mind too.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with all you guys. Can’t you ever stop talking about women?” the fourth guy denounced. There is always one fellow in every group who believes that by rebelling against popular culture, he can appear cooler. He was nodding his head in a knowing way, agreeing with whatever he had just said himself. Usually, such men take no more than thirty three seconds to keep their hearts on the platform whenever anything remotely close to the xx chromosome walks by. Che Guevera looked on grimly from the tee. The others kept quiet desperately trying to come up with some other topic.

“Anjali Bhatia”, said the one who had masterfully scanned the charts, in a sad voice. “Bhatia? Same surname as mine!” exclaimed the rebel. He was already seeing himself get wedded to her, I just knew it. Che Guevera cannot ever win over Shahrukh in India.

At that moment, she walked into the compartment and so pretty was she it seemed as if time had stilled forever. It was actually the train that had stopped but such occasions demand better metaphors. The rebel had completely given up his stance, and had closed his eyes in blissful submission to the fragrance that had suddenly overwhelmed the surroundings. A gentle breeze started from somewhere under our feet and swirled gently around our cheeks. Outside, a man was screaming at another, but it sounded like twenty one year old Lata Mangeshkar was singing at an opera.

And that’s when a man walked into the compartment, and held her hand. “Brother .. must be brother” each one of us were screaming inside our heads. The ‘brother’ now put his bag next to hers and they sat in a small space that rightfully should have been hers alone. They were not paying any attention to us. Instead, it seemed as if they were oblivious of the entire world, and only had eyes for each other. Must be long separated brothers and sisters. Strangely, the breeze and the fragrance had disappeared too.

I lay back on my berth, and the world was a monstrous place again.

------------------------------------------

Adam versus Madam

Here’s a nice little question for you. What do you think was God’s master plan when social networks were discovered … invented, if you are ready to fall for that. I think She (I am still talking about God here) had had enough of mankind claiming that they were the superior gender, and wanted to create a parallel world where womankind had every single power available.

For a long time, I used to love being a boy, and routinely felt sorry for the girls in my class because while we tore about the football field during games periods like bad football players, they usually huddled under the trees trying to avoid the brunt of an unforgiving sun. The pleasure of momentary ecstasy or agony, something that only sport can provide, was lost on them. Now don’t judge me because in no way am I suggesting that girls do not play sports or are not good at them, but just that they were fewer in number. In my school. There, now you can’t find fault with that even if you want to.

But now, I do feel that it would be rather nice to be a pretty girl and have forty eight people ask you to take care, pray for you, blow ‘muahs’ in concern or send you an sms saying they’ll take the first flight and come over if need be only because you put a status message cribbing that you have a cold. Just yesterday, Gb and I were going through one such profile and either we are cynical stone hearted cavemen, or suddenly, the event of a pretty girl announcing that she has a cold is a matter of national grief and sympathy. On the other hand, if I did dare to put up similar text on my profile page, six men would reply saying how they wished that I had also caught small pox, rabies and chikungunya. And these are the men who were ready to fly down from Mumbai to Delhi to just hold the handkerchief when she sneezed.

Then there is this other very hot girl on my friends list. So hot, that even I feel like declaring my enthusiasm to hold her tightly in my arms and protect her as she battles any grizzly war against innocuous germs who only wanted to make her cough. I want to do more but let’s leave that for another post. Well anyway, miss super hot’s father was turning a year older and she found it mandatory to announce her daughterly affection for him by sharing the birthday message on facebook. The fact that he himself is not on the medium and will never be able to see the message, of course does not mean much to her. Within minutes, there were about fifteen replies. Jat men whose hearts had never ever let them walk into their mothers’ kitchen and who laughed heartily even when SRK ‘finally’ passed away in ‘Kal Ho Na Ho’ suddenly found their hearts melting at this girl’s love and declared that she was the sweetest girl on the planet. This after posting a heart birthday wish to the unsuspecting man (you rock uncle, lol!). He would rock, you baboons, with rage when he finds out that your love for him is sprouting out of that girl’s shapely figure. Lol indeed.

It gets worse when these women are struck by a bout of ‘life’s mystique’. While half of mankind is complimenting her on her profoundness (“well said!”) and themselves offer insightful theories on why exactly life is such, I have passed out because there is only so much banging-on-the-table a head can take. It is only after sharing every updated post’s links on fb, twitter, gmail, city hoardings, three times a day and pleading to supposed best friends that I manage to acquire a grand total of four comments on my blog. That hot friend gets 29 comments for appending her facebook page with two words “I’m bored.”

It must be fun to get so much attention. Amusing at least, to have random souls send you ‘friend requests’ and come and tell you in ways galore how and why they want to befriend you. I wonder if it’s the same high as scoring a goal and running around the ground on a hot summer day.

-----------------------------------------------