Marry-Go-Round

A colleague of mine got married recently. An entire swarm of IT company employees, enthralled at the prospect of free food descended upon the wedding, and made the people who actually served the food reduce their serving size, ensuring that all of us genuine invitees that knew the groom as well as the bride were actually deprived of the food that was in high demand.

He passed out of college the same time as I did, and is of my age. His wife is also his contemporary, age-wise. I wish them the very best for their future lives together.

This post is not centered around them, or as usual, around anything or anyone in general.

A lot of people I know are getting married left, right and center - friends, colleagues, cousins that fall in the same age bracket as me, some people younger and so on and so forth.

In this entire sea of marital madness, I feel a little overwhelmed by my absolute lack of prospects. Its not like I want to get married in the immediate future, but the very fact that all these people are taking the marital plunge is just bringing me closer to realizing that, someday, somehow, I will also need to get married to some unfortunate woman, who will be made to read all my blogposts AND livejournal entries from the beginning onwards, and will be quizzed about it, and will be accepted ONLY after she answers all my quiz questions to a reasonable degree of success. In the spirit of fairness, I will be more than happy to watch my favourite football games, movies and TV shows with headphones on if it gets too late in the night.

In conversation with a few friends, I came up with a marriage function model that will make the entire exercise so much more nicer for the blessed couple. It involves a certain degree of management and a few processes to be put into place, but once implemented, it is guaranteed to work like a charm.

In this dream wedding function, guests are supposed to pass through a certain number of barriers before they can get into the hall. The first barrier is where their names will be cross-referenced with a guest list, so that they can be admitted into the hall. In the event that their names are not present, they may be allowed within if they either possess a good wedding gift, or are willing to buy one inside. The guests that don't fulfill this criteria will, regretfully, have to go to some other wedding.

The next barrier is based on the sort of wedding presents that the guests have along with them. Those that have presents will be admitted to the third barrier, while those without gifts are given the option of purchasing a gift voucher of their choice, counters for which will be present at the second barrier, to make the process so much more smoother. Those guests wishing to go into the hall empty-handed, must, regretfully, have to go to some other wedding.

After ensuring that all guests have presents, they are further segregated into separate queues based on the sort of gifts they have. A trusted bunch of people, close to the bride and/or groom can evaluate the presents and assign them ratings, depending on how the bride and groom would like their presents to be. The default defining criteria in this case would be the monetary value of the gifts, though utility and sentimental value may be other criteria as well. The latter parameters would be adopted by those who don't believe that money can buy them love.

Once the presents are evaluated, the guests are then made to stand in line or made to step into specific areas reserved for them, based on the ratings given to the presents. The ones that have presents rated lower, will get to see the blessed couple from a slight distance, and be fed some decent food, that will just about fill their stomachs, after which they will be given a return gift, that is again determined by their present, and then will be escorted to the parking lot.

The cooler gifters will be privileged enough to go meet the bride and groom, shake them by the hand and get photographs clicked. They can purchase these photos later on for a nominal sum, so that the photographer gets to make his cut. They will be fed lavishly and will be given better treatment vis-a-vis the uncool gifters, after which, they too will get their return gifts after which valets will retrieve their cars for them to see them off.

This is not a model that I will be using for my wedding however, because I am a poor cheap guy and so are most of the people I know and like a lot. The like a lot part was added to soften the blow of having cast aspersions on your spending abilities, but I know it works anyway.

If you like this idea, please feel free to contact me for more such wonderful and innovative concepts to make your life better, and I shall be more than glad to oblige.

New Blade Has Come

Personal grooming and the owner of this blog are generally mutually exclusive, because grooming is something people undertake to impress members of the opposite sex, and I have decided to take up the life of a hedonistic ascetic (latest in the list of my corny oxymorons) or rather, take a brief hiatus from the entire grooming ritual for its actual purpose until I deem it fit for its next resurrection, whenever it may happen.

However, the need to prevent my face from itching on a constant basis due to an abundance of facial hair prompts me to shave at regular intervals. Every single time I shave and nick myself (which pretty much happens everytime I shave, incidentally), I am reminded of an incident that took place in class 12, that shall forever be stuck in my mind forever.

In class 12, yours truly was sitting along with 34 other droopy-eyed students in class on a lazy wednesday afternoon and pretending to listen intently to our biology teacher talk to us about the facts of life and the male and female reproductive systems. She was a brilliant teacher, because she managed to ensure effective information dissipation onto us students, but at the same time, the manner in which she actually drew the pleasure centers and the organs that us horny class 12 kids wanted to see actually put most of us off the urge or inclination to you-might-just-know-what.

One of the topics she was covering was the female reproductive system, and she was telling us about menstruation and the monthly cycle of women, when two of my classmates, who were generally inattentive about the whole thing and were sharing their own private (dirty) joke giggled softly.

The teacher looked up and caught them red-handed (and red-faced for having laughed so much) and assumed that these guys were laughing because of something that was being taught in class. Since women are presumably very touchy about such issues, our biology teacher then said something that will remain etched in my memory all my life.

"You men, you're laughing at our plight. Just wait for a couple more years until you start shaving, and lets see who has the last laugh. Our troubles last only for a few days a month, and will stop at menopause, but you will have to shave all the time, till you die." (ha ha haa ha ha haa ha ha - this bit of evil laughter that echoed from within her was something I imagined, and hence can't be attributed as being part of the quote.)

What my teacher forgot to take into consideration was women that had to shave as well, and do hajjar waxing and stuff, but that is beyond the scope of expertise of the poor blog author who is flying solo.

In any case, I am very averse to shaving, and do it as a last resort whenever good appearance (another oxymoron in my case) is a matter of life and death, or if I have a function to go to, or if my Mum nags me about looking like a hobo that people would give coins to so that I could get my next fix, and my teacher's words ring in my mind making me think of alternatives to this problem.

Some suggestions that are out there include undertaking laser treatment for permanent hair removal, but then it eliminates the stubbly look that might hold me in good stead with a certain percentage of the target population.

There is also this talk in the R&D labs of a famous razor blade putting company about coming up with a shaving razor that can have as many blades on it in a progressively modular fashion. The guy who came up with this concept was watching his son play lego, while he nicked himself for shaving his face repeatedly (with a mach 3, no less), and his previous experience in object-oriented programming within the Indian software industry, where everything is done in copy+paste mode prompted him to come up with this revolutionary concept.

The new and revolutionary razor uses the concept of modularity, based on which the end user can actually insert upto a max of 20 blades and shave with them all - at the same time. This means that people that want to commit suicide needn't go to the extent of buying rat poision or hanging themselves. All they need to do is to do 1/20th the work that is necessary towards either slitting their wrists or throats, and they can conveniently achieve their objectives.

The ability of a person to 'put blade' will increase in direct proportion to the number of blades used for shaving, or so the company claims. A certain 'God's Own Boy', who is one of my best pals, will benefit immensely from this product.

With reality TV being such a way of life for us now, this company also plans to have a cable telecast of case studies whose lives have transformed after 'putting new blade', and their as-yet unnamed show will use the Big Boss / Big Brother idea of trying to resurrect the failing careers of the superstars that have now been relegated into oblivion. This show will also have a ladies' special, to coincide with International Wooomance Day on 8th march, apparently. Some lucky hirsute lady celebrity will have her life transformed, so that she can meet Prince Charming and live happily ever after with him.

Here's to good grooming, and to putting new blade.

(Maybe I'd have written this better after worshipping the Hemp Gods, but I'll never know.)

The Paradox of Our Age

Its a weird start to blogging this year, after a hiatus of almost three months, but I saw something pertinent and I figured that reproducing it here might be a nice way to get into first gear.

The Paradox of Our Age

We have bigger houses, but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
We have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgement;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness(sic);
We've been all the way to the moon and back
but have trouble crossing the street to meet
the new neighbour.
We build more computers to hold more
information to produce more copies than ever,
but have less communication;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods,
but slow digestion;
Tall man but short character;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
Its time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.

-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

If you've sort of reached the end of this post without actually reading the whole thing, I request you to please do so. I know this is a major deviation from the crap that I have been writing so far, but I will be back to bullshit as usual in some time.