What The Fuss?

Today, during one of my regular routines of drinking morning coffee at my workplace a good friend of mine shoved her arm across my face and said "Look, Ginger bit me!” She was the lone lady amidst the company of two other guys apart from me, one of whom raised his eyebrows with a look of disbelief whilst the other chided her with his thick Mallu accent "Good da, I should give Gyinger ya treat at Kay Yef Cee four biting yew", she turned and looked towards me expectantly to say something more that involved less eyebrow raising and more of words coated with warmth that radiated a genuine concern. But alas, all I could muster was a shrug of my shoulders that might have translated to "Ok, so?” The next few minutes were spent with me sipping my coffee as she alleged me of being completely self-absorbed with myself and having a complete disregard for the friendship that we had built over the last couple of years. After her tirade I wondered what the fuss was all about.

Ginger was her six-year old dog.... or was he seven? Well, anyway my point is that no dog named "Ginger" could rip you apart in such a way that would leave you inches away from death. By naming your dog "Ginger" you completely take away his ferociousness, you take away his canine-mojo, * Don’t believe Shakespeare, it is all in the name*. Even a Pomeranian named "Tyson" would be more feared than a Basset Hound who is named "Ginger", you negate all the ferocity that he possesses in his claws by christening him with such a limp-dick sounding name (for the lack of a better word) that it reduces him to a pussy (no, not the cat). So when she thrust that minutely scratched hand of hers across my face, I could all but say "Meh" when I heard the name of the culprit. Maybe if it were someone named "Caesar" or "Brute" I might have suggested her to go get a rabies injection, I would have also suggested her to write a novel on how she survived Caesar's assault and maybe sell it to Warner Brothers so that they might make a movie out of it and make her look like Erin Brokovich against the Canine uprising. But then, it was a "Ginger" and not a "Caesar".

I blamed my indifference on the canine's lack of a more masculine name, but as I prodded further into my psyche in my journey back home from work, I realized that maybe it all had to do with my lackadaisical attitude towards relationships with women, which were primarily restricted to friendship (You see if I were in a real relationship, I would not be blogging here). Women are wonderful creatures - graceful, kind, forgiving, and generous in a way that you would love to be more than friends with them. Yet they are nitpicky, petulant, annoying and obstinate that once in a relationship with them you would wonder why you can’t go back to being friends. They love to blow things out of proportion much like that aforementioned incident; they can't take a joke when you say that they want their boyfriends to stop smoking because they would not want to suck his nicotine-laced blood.

Through my teens and into my early twenties I had tried every trick in the book to woo women, be it riding a bicycle without holding the handle bar or topping up a phone number a dozen times in a week or penning a badly written poem in their honor or pretending to nurse a broken heart to get their sympathy. I was pretty much the fox that tried too hard to reach those grapes at the orchard that after my umpteen tries, now in my mid-twenties I have realized that the grapes are sour. I have misread every clean, sexless indicator of friendship from them to be a sign of love - their willingness to get into a relationship with me just because they smiled at me when I held open a door for them or a smiley at the end of their every sms was only a proof of my gullibility.

"What even made you think that I am in love with you!!??"

"But I paused my videogame just to text you back"

"Yeah, so? You expect me to marry YOU!?"

"But that's what was said in that Facebook image"

You get the picture right?

I am now more wizened by my mistakes, from being the "soup boy" - a nomenclature for boys who have ended up heartbroken coined by that Kolaveri video (If you are from the west, do Youtube it) I now have graduated into the "salad king" (pardon the pun) - the guy who may not know how to get into a relationship, but sure knows how to get out of it. A little more than a year ago, I used to believe in Ted Mosby that never-say-die romantic from "How I Met Your Mother". I liked his idea of meeting that special someone in a coffee shop– we might meet as if the whole universe conspired to make us meet, we might exchange our numbers, catch up for a movie, and might spend an evening at Central Park walking around whilst holding hands (I chose New York because there are no good parks in India where you can walk around holding your hands with your girlfriend, without you getting beaten up or her getting molested).

But right now, I don’t see what the fuss about being in a relationship is. I just want to stand in line and get my cup of coffee.

Image courtesy: http://www.buzzfeed.com/koolnewsblog/if-a-guy-pauses-a-video-game-1dgl