Tag: girlfriend

The success and failure of Coupling, this blog and the Benjarong Conference

One of the few sitcoms that has remotely managed to hold my attention is Coupling, the series on BBC. I don’t think it runs “live” any more, and even when it did, the quality of the episodes fell off sharply in season three, and even more sharply in season four. Episodes of those two seasons simply cannot compare to the episodes of the earlier seasons. In possibly related news, a number of blog readers and commentators mentioned to me that they saw a sharp fall in quality in posts on this blog sometime in late 2009. None of them have told me that the blog has made any “comeback” of sorts. And given this theory, it is unlikely to.

Back in March 2009, there was a meeting of six great minds at Benjarong Restaurant on Ulsoor Road, which has come to be known as the Benjarong Conference. The main topic of discussion that evening was about chick-hunting, and more so in the controlled environment of South Indian Brahmin arranged marriages. The conference was a grand success in terms of the quality of discussion, and left lasting impressions on the minds of the participants. Kodhi, who is going to be arranged married later this year, mentions that over two years on, it was the proceedings of this conference that helped him make his decision.

The main attraction of Coupling, for me, was the theories that the character Jeff used to propound. Starting in Episode One of Season One, where he comes up with the concept of “Unflushable” as his best friend Steve repeatedly tries to dump his girlfriend Jane, and fails. And in subsequent episodes, when the three male leads (Steve, Patrick and Jeff) meet at the bar, Jeff always has a theory to explain why things happen the way they happen. Masterful theories, at a similar intellectual level that was exhibited at the Benjarong Conference. Jeff has a theory for everything, except that he is unable to implement his own theories and get hooked up. And what happens in Season Three? He gets hooked up (to his boss, as it happens)! And starts falling off the social radar, and even when he is there at the bar, he is incapable of coming up with theories like he used to. And in Season Four, he disappears from the show altogether, thus robbing it of its main attraction.

Four of the six participants at the Benjarong conference were single, with three of those having never been in a relationship. The two that were married were married less than a month, and one of them had met his wife not too long before. The conference drew its strength from this “singularity”. Single people, especially those that have never been in a relationship, have a unique knack of being able to dispassionately talk about relationships. The problem once you get committed, as readers of this blog might have noticed, is that there is now one person that you can’t disrespect when you talk or write. So every time you concoct a theory, you have to pass it through a filter, about whether your WAG will find it distasteful (most singletons’ theories on relationships have a distasteful component, as a rule). Soon, this muddles your thinking on these theories so much that you stop coming up with them altogether.

One of the pillars of strength of this blog between 2006 and 2009 was the dispassionate treatment of relationships. Then, in late 2009, fortunately for myself and unfortunately for my readers, I met Priyanka, with whom I have subsequently established a long term gene-propagating (no we haven’t started propagating, yet) relationship. And on came the “distaste filter”. And off went the quality of my posts on relationships. A large section of the readership of this blog knew me as a gossip-monger, and they would now be sorely disappointed to not find such juicy material on this blog any more. The only good relationship posts subsequent to that, you might notice, would have been on the back of some little domestic fights, which would have led to temporary suspension of the distaste filter.

Sometimes, though not in public forums, I do get my old distasteful sense back. Not so recently, I was counselling my little sister-in-law about relationship issues. After thoroughly examining her case history and then situation (examining case history and diagnosis is her domain. She’s studying to be a doc), I recommended to her that the solution for her then relationship woes was to get herself a Petromax. While it did help that my wife and her parents weren’t around then, the tough part was to convince her that it was a serious well-researched piece of advice. Maybe I should have packaged it less distastefully. And maybe it is time to accept that the distaste filter in my case is on permanently, and I’ll never be able to spout theories like I used to. And my dear blog reader, it is time you accept that, too, and stop holding this blog against its pre-2010 standards.

Staggered surprises

When you have a number of things to surprise someone with, you can either flood them with that, or present it to them in a staggered manner. And based on recent experience with both forms, on both ends of the divide, I get the feeling that staggered surprises are superior and more effective than flooded surprises.

A year and half back, for my then girlfriend’s (now wife) birthday, I had got a bunch of things. There were clothes, food, a collage and even this laptop I’m writing this post on. And as soon as I entered the girlfriend’s house that day, I started producing these one by one. Before she could react to any of the gifts, I had produced another, and there was a flood. In hindsight, I thought the value of some of the things I’d got her were lost because I didn’t give her enough time to appreciate them while she was still surprised.

She played it differently at my birthday yesterday. Again, there was a bunch of things she had lined up. So at midnight yesterday, she says happy birthday and hands me a kurta. I try it out, and as soon as I’ve finished appreciating it (took a while) she makes me take it off, and gives me another. This way, over the course of the next ten minutes, she gives me five kurtas. And then a leather bag. And a box of tea. And some fancy paper to scribble on.

Giving gifts in a trickle, I think, works because of the expectations it sets. When Pinky produced the first Kurta, the natural thought in my head was, “oh she’s got me a kurta for my birthday”. I had expected one kurta. And when she slowly produced the next, I was surprised. You don’t generally expect someone to get you five kurtas, so each one she produced was met with a fair bit of surprise. The trickle had set my expectations low, and so the degree of surprise was high.

Pinky wasn’t done yet. She had solicited “happy birthday videos” from a number of my friends, from various stages of my life. Due to a personal tragedy (her grandfather passed away on Saturday) she hadn’t had time to put them together in a montage, but that helped her stagger-surprise me again. She first played videos from relatives, and after I had thought that was all to it, she played videos from friends. One by one. Not pushing expectations too high, and continually surprising me.

It was to play out similarly at the surprise party she had organized for me last night (after all the gifts and video messages, the last thing I had expected was a party). I had been told we’d be going out for dinner, when two of my oldest friends (I’ve known them for 25 years now) arrived. “Maybe she’s called my oldest friends to join us for dinner”, I thought. After a while they were followed by a friend from college who lives in the US now. I was truly shocked. He and his wife had dropped in while on their way to a wedding, I was told. I had no idea a party was on.

And then some quizzing friends appeared. And then some most recent colleagues (remember I don’t have any “current” colleagues). And Pinky, who had disappeared a while back, materialized with a cake. Soon enormous quantities of food appeared. I was already drinking by then and it was surreal. The best birthday ever, for sure. No, really! I don’t know if I would have been as happy had the surprises not been staggered.

PS: Ashwin and Vyshnavi responded to Pinky’s call for “happy birthday videos” with this one. It’s total kickass.

The Wife’s Methods

During a particularly acrimonious fight last night, I found that I was losing myself, and had no clue what was happening. Tempers were frayed, voices were raised and a huge towel had become wet from our collective tears and nose-goo. And I was fighting a losing battle, against myself. It seemed like I was consuming myself, and there was no way out.

I walked up to the kitchen and pulled out two New York shot glasses from the shelf. I reached for the top shelf, where we store the stuff, and pulled out the Talisker bottle. And I filled the shot glasses, up to the brim, and we downed it, one glass each. Soon, it seemed like all was going to be fine with the world.

At once we calmed down. We started thinking more rationally now. The fight continued, but the voices got lowered, the collective discharge into the towel ebbed. We weren’t consumed by ourselves any more. Instead, we were now calmly talking to each other, trying to find a way out of the problem we had at hand. Note that we didn’t kiss-and-make-up-and-bury-the-fight like we used to earlier. We didn’t sleep until we’d finished our business and reached an agreement. But life had become so much better.

I must admit that over the last year or more, I’ve consistently underestimated the wife (earlier the girlfriend) and her methods. Sometimes I’ve never understood why she does things in a certain way (and expects me to do things the same way), at other times I’ve been too arrogant in my own thoughts, to give her methods a fair hearing. This was yet another such example.

It was I who had made an irrational decision that Talisker was meant for slow sipping and savouring. It was I who had thought it was “too expensive to be shot down”. And it was I who had made the wife promise she won’t gulp it down before buying the current bottle of Talsker. I admit it, I was wrong. Wrong. The wife, it turns out, had always been right.

Red wine and mirchi

is such an awesome combo. As we just discovered, here in Monastiraki square in Athens. It was this restaurant called Savas. Specializing in one “Sauvlaki”.

So over the last week or so of vacation, the girlfriend has been complaining of not eating spicy enough food. So as we settle down today, and get our can of wine (yeah, you get half a litre of wine in an aluminium can here. Awesome it is), I see this “spicy hot peppers” on the menu.

And given that the girlfriend has been deprived of spicy food, and I like peppers it doesn’t take long for me to order it. And boy was it hot.

I gave up after a couple of bites of the pepper. No amounts of pita bread and Tzatziki (the Greek version of raita – with cucumber and garlic blended into curd) could cure the hotness on my tongue. With there being no water on the table, I went straight for the wine.

I’ve always suspected it when the girlfriend has claimed to have Gult roots. Of course, I’ve seen a lot of Gult being spoken in her family, and had half my pre-wedding dance party inundated with Gult songs, but still find it hard to accept she’s Gult. And did she prove it! She ate four whole peppers, as I struggled to finish half..

A couple of minutes back, we staggered back to the hotel. Absolutely drunk. We’d had 250 ml of red wine each, “house wine” according to the restaurant. And mirchi. Whatta combo. Surprised the “shady bars” of Bangalore haven’t exploited it yet. Maybe no one drinks wine there.

Why I don’t blog about her

The sweetheart has one fundamental problem with my blogging. That I have hardly written about her on my blog. Being the girlfriend of a celebrity blogger she deserves better, she argues. And she pulls up the reams of posts that have been written here about my old crushes and accuses me of not loving her as much, given I don’t write about her.

While I agree that I haven’t written much about her, I believe there are several important reasons behind that. I don’t know if she’ll buy into this reasoning but I believe these points need to be made.

Firstly it must be recognised that angst is a major fuel for writing. When what you thought was a great “deal” (in terms of relationship) falls through, it creates immense angst which needs to be channelled somewhere. And writing about the subject that causes the angst is one of the ways of channelling the angst. There have been occasions where I’ve managed to channelize the angst in other productive ways but in the last few years writing about the source has been a good source of getting rid of it.

Then, there is the time and effort factor ( I think this is the reason she is least likely to buy). Running a successful relationship takes up a large amount of your time and effort, and that’s not necessarily bad. I’m not talking only about tackling fights, misunderstandings, etc. here. When you have found someone to share your life with, there is suddenly so much more to do. Your life changes in ways that you had never imagined. Your life becomes so awesome that trivial pursuits like writing get the short shrift. You might have noticed that my general quantity of output has diminished in the last year.

Lastly but most importantly, there is the issue of not wanting to rock the boat. When a deal falls through, you have nothing to lose from it. You don’t care what the counterparty of the fallen deal thinks about you anymore. And that lets you unleash. When things are good, though, there is a relationship to protect. You just do not want to rock the boat. Every time you write about her, you want to make sure you’re not writing something that might offend her. Or something that will take a great deal of effort to defend.

Every time you sit down to write about her, every line you write, you end up thinking four times what she might think of it. And that disturbs the flow in which you are usually used to writing your posts. And once that flow is disturbed, you don’t want to write anymore. You would rather write about something which you can write “in flow” than thinking four times about every line you write.

On a similar vein, you might have noticed that I hardly blog about my work nowadays. The number of work-related posts since I joined this job would be comfortably in single figures. And that doesn’t compare favourably at all given the volume of work-related posts in my earlier jobs. I love my current job and have settled down nicely into it, and intend to put gaaji here. There is little angst that this job creates. And because I like this, I spend that much more effort doing my job than writing about it.

Defining Teenage Relationships

I got into my first ever romantic relationship at the ripe old age of twenty six. By then I had already got into the “settling down mode” (you might remember i was already in the arranged scissors market before that) and so essentially I was looking for a long-term settlement. I was essentially looking for “someone who’ll need me, someone who’ll feed me when i’m sixty four” and fortunately things have worked out well and I’m due to get married sometime later this year.

Looking at people around me – friends, cousins, friends’ cousins and cousins’ friends, I realize that people get into this “relationship industry” fairly young. You have people who are barely out of middle school who have “boyfriends” and “girlfriends”. Actually there’s nothing new in this phenomenon. I remember wanting to have a girlfriend when I was twelve years old. That it took fourteen years to find one is another matter. However, the point is I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten what I’d’ve imagined regarding my possible romantic life back then. I’ve grown so old now that I don’t remember at all why I wanted a girlfriend when I was younger.

Possible reasons I can think of:

  • It’s cool to be in a relationship. Its cool to have someone proclaim you as their significant other. It elevates your social status, makes you a more confident person and generally improves your outlook towards life.
  • It is good to have one person with whom you spend a lot of time. It is good to have one person with whom you share everything and who knows more about you than anyone else. It is good to have that one person who you know will always be there with you, beside you, through times happy and sad, and it helps that if you get addicted to each other you have the option of living together for life. Hence you want to get into a relationship.
  • You have a default partner for every activity that you want to do. There is one person with apprximately similar tastes whom you can bug to acccompany you in whatever you want to do. This way you never end up not doing something just because you couldn’t find someone to do it with
  • Economically it helps since in places such as clubs, discos, concerts, etc. couples get favoured treatment in terms of entry etc. I suppose this won’t be the major reason for getting into a relationship for anyone
  • It shows you as a responsible person who is able to think for himself/herself at a young age; who is able to make potentially life-changing decisions early

Anything else you can think of? On a related note, what do teenage couples do? How do they spend time with each other? If you get into a relationship in your twenties you can start planning for a shared future, etc. But what do you do when you’re still young?