Dear Goddess,

I’m pretty sure you must be a woman created by women because no sensible man would ever conceive you unless they were drunk, brain dead or bewitched by some woman. Let me ask you straight up. What, in all that is good in this beautiful world’s name, is the life threatening, earth shattering necessity to marry? More than that, why on earth are Indians, in particular, so bent on getting married as soon as the number 2 enters in front of their age? Is it some national cultural genetic switch that gets turned on as soon as we enter our twenties? And then every woman and man transforms into this partner seeking missile that will not rest until it has homed in on its equally clueless but activated target.

I understand marriage is an important legal institution that is perhaps the backbone of modern civilization. But please, my dear relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues, family friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, uncles and aunties, and random well wishers, let me choose the time when I want to marry. Do not hound me at every random marriage of the second cousin of my mother’s first cousin with questions about how I’ve not settled down yet! Please stop pestering my parents too. And please, pretty please with nice Belgian black chocolate wafers on top, do not offer to look for women for me or upload my profile on some random matrimonial website. I’m all of 31 years old and therefore an adult by every possible legal, biological, social and cultural definition. Let me find my own woman, dammit!

It is another point entirely that sensible women who do not melt at the very thought of marriage and do not go weak kneed at the very sight of a child are so rare to find in India. I mean, for god’s sake, maine pure Hindustan mein chaan bheen kar liya, but so far only have inflated travel bills and a carbon footprint that will scare the bejesus out of the climate change advocates to show for my efforts.

Let me ask you dear goddess, since you being of the other sex, why are almost all Indian women so enamored to commit themselves to the slavery of man and become factories of reproduction? I’ve seen women give up their careers, their individuality nay their very freedom to satisfy their man and keep some archaic institution called marriage going. Have they really been brain washed by all the brainless bollywood Shah Rukh/Karan Johar combo romances into blind submission?

And men, my poor dear comrades-in-gender. Alas! What is wrong with you? On one hand you sing paeans to the joys of bachelorhood and beer drinking and then in an instant you bind yourself to the boring, mundane anonymity of marriage. And your stock answer is, “Mummy ne bola tho shadhi kar liya, aur kya karoon?” Aur kya karoon? Don’t you have a brain crazy person?

You see dear goddess, there is no hope left in this world. One ofter the other, I’ve seen my friends take the plunge and disappear into some strange alternate universe that is peopled with only other married people who all speak the same weird language of “nahi yaar, aaj nahi, ghar mein wife wait kar rahi hai”, “no dude, I’m no longer lucky like you, she will have my balls if I go home late” and the saddest of all “arrey, woh din tho gaye ab, home minister wait kar rahi hai ghar par, jaana padega dost”.

Is this what I also have to look forward to? A life of rigid discipline, unending nagging and constant arguments? Whatever happened to companionship, mutual space, trust, and those two most abused four letter words in the world – true love? Call me old fashioned, foolishly romantic or if you are being very uncharitable a ch***ya or a f**king stupid idiot but I firmly believe that if you cannot find the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with then you have no right to get married, leave alone let your parents find you your life partner!

You must be wondering, dear goddess, after reading about 700 words so far, what is the blooming point of this letter? Worry not madam…point pe aa raha hoon main. Please spare me dear goddess from this torture until I want it! Since even the gods need a lit bit of give and take, let’s make a simple deal…I’ll find all the bakras you need from both sides of the gender divide to keep your business going. In return you spare me from the stupidity of never ending questions from all and sundry. Isn’t this a win-win deal?

Thanking you for your earliest attention.

Yours gratefully,
A

By the side of a fallen branch I found my little heart,
covered by a coat of newly fallen leaves. So surprised
was I that for a second I forgot to breathe. But when he
started to labor in his patient beating I knew I was wrong
in holding my breath. So I let the summer air into my
lungs and offered him some succor.

I asked him, “My dear heart, what are you doing under
these leaves in these woods? Why are you not behind my
heaving ribs?”

He glowed as red as a virgin’s cheek. Was it the shame of
suffering or the anger of abandonment?

But he replied in the voice of a strutting Jagger, “I’ve divested
myself from you. You heartbreaker! Always, you punished me
for your inadequacies. Every time you stared at a woman, it
was I who suffered. It was I who burnt words onto your stubbornly
silent tongue. It was I who was filled with feelings most profound.
But you, with your asymmetrical ass and crooked jaw, you never
noticed the difference between rhythm and beat. You never ever
grasped the yawning gap between lust and love.”

I hung my head with shame upon hearing words so true and precise
but could not help asking, “But dear heart, how will I live without
you? Nay, how will I ever love without you?”

Upon hearing my words filled with a sadness most real my heart stopped for
a moment, formed a council with the leaves and pondered for a minute. They
twittered. They murmured. They even burped. And finally my heart squealed
with joy and offered this unique compromise, “ Fall in love within a month with
a woman who wears red and has CC cups; I’ll return to your chest
forever.”

So here I’m, dear ladies, in search of my very own woman in red with CC cup
size. If you know someone with such dimensions will you ask her to get in
touch with my hopeless heart and save me from a lifetime of heartless love?

(On June 1st this blog turned two years old and adding the two years time I wrote on an older blog elsewhere that makes it a total four years of blogging. So instead of the usual anniversary post I decided to ask four of my favorite bloggers to contribute a guest post here. Happily, they all accepted immediately. So here is the second guest post. The rest will follow roughly in the chronological order in which I came to know them. Each guest blogger will directly respond to your comments to their respective posts.

Australopithecus has been blogging for about three years now and spreading cheer and laughter throughout that time. What I love about his writing is his sharp wit and the keen insights he offers behind what can often seem to be harmless humor. Sarcasm and irony mixed with humor are not easy bedfellows to manage but he makes it all look so easy.)

I get an email from Anil. He wanted me to have a guest post on his blog. More like a pest post I thought. Anyway since it was his blog and therefore his funeral, I asked “What flowers should I send? “

All right. Blogging and all is fine when it’s your own space to abuse. The moment someone else lends you his space to (ab)use…(are you regretting this already Anil?) that’s when you’ve got to think. What does one write about? Anyway since you idiots err… I meant you fine readers are stuck with me…I might as well dish out my usual drivel.

The presidential elections seem to have captured everyone’s imagination. Well at least the alleged imagination of all the chaps down at the mere 141542 X 10234 ****odd news channels that seem to occupy the airways. Before the major parties announced their nominees all these chaps were obsessing over it…like those kids that write the JEE. It’s not half as important. It seems an easy job. All one seems to have to do is to stay awake during the most boring occasions, apply a deft rubber stamp here and there as and when ‘Madamji’ instructs you to…Oh! Wait! Am I getting confused with the office of the Prime Minister? Anyway. One gives out awards to those whom you are told to give out awards…is it just me or does this job sound more like an office peon. The only difference is instead of awards peon hands out salary cheques instead of awards. In fact the peon doesn’t even have to be awake during important functions.

Oh and when there is competition and elections can mudslinging be far behind? Let us take a quick look at the hopefuls. (For the hopeless, please look up Wikipedia for condition of the Indian people)

One of the candidates that seem to have emerged is Ms Pratibha Qatil.

Alone in Kyoto – Air

The first view of anything below was when the clouds cleared briefly to reveal the grey and choppy waters of the North Sea far below. Small waves crowned by foam marked the surface of the huge stretch of water. I remember feeling a curious mixture of awe and fear. Awe at seeing so much water all the way to the horizon, unmarked by mankind. Fear for the sudden silly scenarios that invaded my mind. What if the engines of the plane failed and we plunged into the water below? What were the chances of survival? You get the picture.

The first thing I noticed about Edinburgh was the smell. The city had an all pervasive metallic smell of urine. Was something wrong with my nose? Was it because of the incessant rain washing the streets? Who knows? And yeah, the rain. It was a rainy, grey and blustery Edinburgh, with winds reaching perhaps 30-50 kmph, that I walked into. Yes, the famous Scottish weather was welcoming me in all its irritating splendor. My umbrella was broken by the wind within the first 30 minutes. I was battered and assaulted by the shrieking wind and the pin pricks of a million rain drops. Welcome to Scotland indeed!

Life as a doctoral student sucks. It doesn’t suck in the ordinary nobody loves me suckiness (does that word even exist?) level. No, it takes sucking (pardon my vulgar language) to a different level, a level where you are the lowest form of life in the world. I mean even bacteria have more fun. They are practically immortal. They have sex almost every 20 minutes. They can live on almost anything. And they have the coolest of names. Chlamydia. Nocardia. Vibrio. Contrast that with an average doctoral student. He is a mouse (although even a mouse would be offended to be compared to such a lowly being) like creature, most often with spectacles and irritating habits like trailing off in the middle of a sentence into vague silences. Their only sex appeal lies in their detailed knowledge about how two proteins fold exactly around each other. You get the picture.

What do such specimens of the human species do when a beautiful woman goes up to them and talks? To digress a little, such events do not happen in the real world. The probability of such an event happening, according to knowledgeable sources in the Mathematics department across the road, is 0.00. In fact, apparently, this is the only known event in the world that has such a perfect probability of not happening! So let me add the rider, in a hypothetical world, to the above scenario.

Continuing with the hypothetical situation, the said graduate student will first start perspiring. His pulse will be racing because hormones are being dumped into his blood, leading to rapid changes in his metabolic profile. He starts blushing. When he opens his mouth, either no sound comes out or else mumbled and garbled words pour out, which of course do not make any sense. If that beautiful woman still has any sense she would leave. However, if she is one of those rare beings, who for some insane reason either enjoy tormenting such innocent geeks, feel pity for such lowly life forms or genuinely like disheveled and bespectacled nerds, she will stay and talk further.