caution: when you see couples

I was walking back from office and was thinking if I should get something from the bakery to eat. All of a sudden, I saw a man and a lady standing next to me. They were in their late forties to mid-fifties. The man was tall, well-built, holding a “jhola”(loose-bag) by his side. The lady was thin, short, well-dressed in a chiffon saree and looking at me as if she had found her lost daughter. Both of them spoke to each other in hindi. They said things as if they had rehearsed it n number of times. The story was something like this: “Beta (literal meaning: son but commonly used for addressing people of a younger generation than you), you seem to be a person who will understand hindi and will give consideration to our problem. We are here in Bangalore for a Pilgrim visit but last night we have been looted. All our money is looted and we are left with nothing. We have not eaten anything since morning and have no money left to go to the railway station”. Then they showed me another couple (almost of their age) who were reciting the same story to a group of girls who just seemed uninterested in whatever they were telling. The lady called the couple her brother and sister in law. They came back to me and requested me to believe them. They asked me for 70 rupees so that they could buy something to eat and then buy tickets to go to the railway station. They started surrounding me as if they were going to kidnap me. I started mumbling “hanuman chalisa” in my mouth and ran from the place without letting them complete the story. They came behind me, followed me and pleaded me to help them. I stopped walking only when I found the owner of the home that i was living. Just as they saw him, they stopped following me. Don’t know, if I did the right thing, if I made a poor couple starve, but then I felt very relaxed after reaching home.

Bus-Drivers in bangalore

I was in the bus going to my training center in Bangalore. Both my hands were engaged – one with a plastic bag which had my tiffin box and another with a cotton bag which had – I don’t know items. The second hand was also holding the iron rod in the bus so that people come to less see my dancing skills which are very poor. My eyes were searching for the bus-conductor. I just turned back and my foot stepped on the toe of a young lady who was wearing a big bindi. She gave a light shudder and I apologized for the mistake. I turned back and still could not find the conductor. I was dancing whenever the driver applied a break and then I heard a sound from somewhere which said “hello” to me in a kannada accent. I was taken aback when I found that the bus driver was doing two jobs. One, ofcourse of driving the bus and another of the conductor. This time, I did not admire a person doing multi-tasking but was horrified at his abilities. He was driving and still giving away the tickets. He distributed the tickets as fast as he could on the red signal fairly by not going to people’s seats but by making them give an attendance to him. Keeping the excitement part aside, I felt too scared then because those were my initial experiences of such kinds, i no longer worry. I thanked God when I got down from the bus and just hoped that bus driver's don’t risk their lives and of those innocent people who take public transport as their mode of commutation. From then on, I stopped climbing on to buses where they the driver himself was a conductor.

What if?

I was debating the other day with a colleague of mine on a very abstract topic "why should everything that we think is right should be right and wrong should be wrong". Can there not be a world where everything that we think right is actually wrong and wrong is what is actually right. Taking a hypothetical example, imagine a world where people only spoke lies, killed each other, looted others property and wealth, drank and smoked whenever and wherever they felt like, stayed awake in the nights and slept in the mornings, cheated, corrupted, polluted and the list goes on.

When i write these things, i feel that actually we live really in this hypothetical world, if there was an ideal world, then it was not this.

What do men think?
I took so much interest in reading psychology in my second year that everything in my day to day life then, i used to relate to one or the other theory taught in the class. i bugged my roomate so much that she devised a mechanism to bring down my passion, she started asking me questions. Most of the times i found the questions were one liner, but their answers seemed so complex or unknown. She asked me questions like, ' why do you think the teacher reacted that way that day? ', 'which theory explains the 'losing charm in other person' concept?', 'why do we sometimes dont say things even when we know about them' - i tried managing answering them in the beginning but then i felt i did not know the correct answers most of the time and gave up. Soon realization sprinted upon me that life is too simple and at the same time too complex to be analyzed. Result: I stopped talking about psychology.

Yesterday when i was looking at the spring-summer collection of 'code' in oasis mall, i found a long queue of girls waiting for getting into the rest room. Psychology came back to me. I was astonished at the fact that equal number of men were standing there- cold blooded, similar to statues (or) pillars of stones with absolutely no expressions on their faces (atleast the statues give an everlasting expression). They had accompanied their girls for shopping and now were cursing themselves for having come there (I felt so). I heard one saying 'pick any colour, all look sooo good on you, why are we wasting time here' for which there was some long reply and at the end of the conversation, the guy's face was red.

I have observed the same kind of expression whenever i hav encountered situations like these
a. when the girl is talking to a group of other girls and the guy is standing next to her
b. when she is negotiating for something very important according to her
c. when the girl is asking a long question
d. when she is describing something very abstract
e. when the girl asks for opinions
i really dont know what men think during these times to give such expressions.