Vivir la vida como un tonto

I am a very pro choice guy.

This is why I am all for abortion.

Actually I should not even be giving my 2 bit here since I will never have this happen to me but since the world is mostly run by my gender who seems determined to regulate and lay down laws on things they have no experience of, other than how it effects them, I think, I need to come out right and say this.

I am one of the men who think that the choice of abortion should be with the one who intends to do it.

Yeah Yeah...I know what you are screaming. Female infanticide.

Think.

Why are some women aborting female embryos? Hmmm?

Yep. Precisely. Because we have made living difficult for women. They feel a dead girl is better than a live one. A live woman is costly. Dowry. Marriage. No return on Investment. Anything else?

Why do these reasoning exists? We put it there.

Now how many of these reasons can be solved? Almost every one of them. Hell, it has already started. There will come a time when it won’t matter what gender the child is because both will have the same opportunities or lack of them in life.

Denying a choice is not the answer.

Now the moral questions.

Let me answer this as politely as I can: Your morals are an inward compass. It applies to you. You think something is morally wrong then don’t do it but to apply your morals onto someone else is like rape...keep your morals and allow others to maintain theirs.

Religious reasons.

Damn that. Religion is just politics. It is a frame work build to control people of similar beliefs. In my book it’s like the gang colors. So fuck religion. We really need to keep religion in its proper place. I don’t do religion. You can by all means. Just don’t let it step into my porch uninvited. It works for me not the other way round.

I have heard this respect for life argument. Now this one has me stumped.

When do you think life becomes life?

Is it during conception? Or is it somewhere in the mother’s womb, if so when? Or is it when the child is born?

From what I have seen in The National Geographic Channel, those sperms don’t look dead to me. Man, they seem to have a purpose, a goal and speed. That buddy sure sounds like life to me.

This brings me to my next question.

Can masturbation be a male version of abortion?

Is there an ongoing genocide happening everyday in every man’s life?

I don’t know. I would really like someone to enlighten me about this.

But I really think that people should have the choices. They should be able to choose what they want to wear, who they want to sleep with, who they want to spend a life with or a night with, who they pray to, what they do with their body or even when they want to die.

Small choices that do not in any way interfere or affect someone else’s choices.

Sure some of these will hurt us, make us feel bad, perhaps sad but if we are able to respect the other person's choices and understand the reasons behind it, and then it will be a great world to live in.

It’s not much to ask, is it?

Note about the title: Isn’t Spanish sexy? I mean even the most stupid sentence sounds like a bedroom drawl in Spanish.

Romancing a stone

One of the side effects of being liked for your virtual scribbles in the cyberspace is that you attract attention. Apart from the usual comments like,

'Nice.ROFL.Now visit mine and say the same thing.'

'you &$##**&% , who do you think you are?'

'I named by dog tys and then I kicked him to death. Die motherfucker die.'

, you also tend to get some readers who will mail you and try to get to know you.

This is very flattering.

I am that guy who in college would do the bidding of a girl for a long time, only to be told, while she hooks up with my best friend, how she has always seen me as a brother.

In girl code, that means you are ugly as hell and she won’t be seen dead going around with you.

Why is that no man has ever said to a girl who throws herself at him that he sees her as a sister? If he has ever said that to you, either you really are his sister or you are just plain ugly. I mean really ugly because men, trust me, are not very picky in certain of their requirements.

Or he could possibly be gay.

Either way it doesn’t flatter you, nor does it improve your self esteem.


So having a stray admirer, who is a woman, who thinks that you are worth getting to know does a lot for your deflated ego. You also know that this person has seen your profile picture which looks as I am lighting fire to my beard, and did not report it to BlogSpot.

For a guy who has, perhaps a handful of friends who I can treat like shit and still count on, I seem to have made some good friends through my blogging. I have met some of them and they are not the weirdoes I thought one normally meets in the cyber world. They are, in fact, really nice.

And they all prefer my wife to me, once they meet us.

I have no idea why, but apart from one male blogger, all the rest who have contacted me are women. They later on tell me that their husbands are my biggest fans.

Bastards.

I take the plunge and spend about 90% of my married life sleeping on the sofa and these guys probably download my site and leave it accidently on for the wifeys to 'discover'. Women being women will always sympathize with a man who is probably going through the same things her husband is going through, as long as it’s not her husband.

You don’t believe me? Let me see how you react when your husband says that he think pms is just a monthly get out of jail free card for a woman.

Now, please drop that knife and give the poor man his balls back. And, do call for the ambulance.

It’s easier when there’s a fall guy.

That’s me.

I still don’t get it when women say they like me and my writing. There must be something seriously wrong somewhere. I am a bloke.

But I aint complaining.

It’s not every day; someone contacts you and says that she admires your writing. Who doesn’t like that?

So this must be how Brad Pitt feels.

Wonder if this ever made Angelina Jolie feel insecure?

Now my marriage is based on trust. She trusts me not to do anything to jeopardize our relationship and I trust her not to take me up on that.

But being an idiot, I end up telling her everything.

Word of advice to all men who are on the threshold of marriage. Do not discuss your past with your soon to be wife. When she asks you if you have been with other women, trust me, she’s not asking you to confirm. You pulling out your sexual conquest souvenir book to give her an exact figure is not going to help your case either.


Ask yourself first; if you were in her shoes, would you have liked to know? And now that you know, do you sleep better at night?.Knowing that in today’s world, all the exs can be found in one place, called the face book or the orkut or some such flocking area. Nowadays old flames are like those trick candles, it just keeps lighting up no matter how hard you try to blow it out. So you can’t blame her insecurity.

That’s one of the reason I don’t do face book. It makes life too complicated and crowded.

Now I am one of those possessive kinds. But I am also that kind who doesn’t notice anything until my wife comes and tells me about it.

While we drive home after a party, me drunk and happy, wife, cold and distant, I turn and ask her the question which men asks that takes them down the rabbit hole: What’s wrong?

What’s wrong with you? She will retort

I try to surface my consciousness from the lake of alcoholic lanquidity, where it had been peacefully swimming in, to find a reason for that question or the answer to it (if it really requires one).

The sound that comes out from me while it’s being coaxed ashore is a perplexedly spluttered:

What did I do?

'It’s what you didn't do, you big oaf,' she says, ' you didn't even notice that guy who was hitting on me. What’s wrong with you? Do you even love me?'

Now, folks, this is tricky area.

You didn't notice. That much is true. But if you had and had reacted like a gorilla on a war path, which I had done once, things will not change much for you. The question will still be asked.

What’s wrong with you?

So I continue driving. Quietly. My chin hardened. With a grim look on my face. This is my fierce some look. It also looks a lot like my constipated look. This forces her to ask again.

What’s wrong with you?

So I reply. Each word measured. I had seen this being done with convincing effect in Terminator by the governer who has helped himself to the help.

I.will.kill.him.

I continue looking ahead. I can almost feel that smile on her face.

Yeah. They don't want us to fight for them, but they just like to be told we will, and when the shit does hit the ceiling, most of us actually will.

Trust me on that.

Can somebody tell why the women like that song : Hold a grenade?

" To give me all your love is all I ever asked cause
what you don’t understand, is id catch a grenade for ya.
Throw my hand on the blade for ya,
Id jump in front of a train for ya.
You know I’d do anything for ya.
See I would go through all this pain take a bullet straight through my brain.
Yes I would die for ya baby, but you won’t do the same."


This is not romantic man, its macabre. Not only do you want to kill yourself, you want the poor girl to do that for you. Shes probably right now getting a restraining order against you. Go find a small corner, curl up and die you fool. Let me not hear you giving my girl any more stupid ideas.

Hold a grenade. Really.

Bring it Home

I must be the oldest Indian man staying with his parents now.

Age: 42.

Domicile: With Amma and Achan.

Now, I might as well chop my balls off and feed it to a camel.

As you might have noticed, I have not been very regular here for the last month. I am of course assuming that there are millions around the world, who finds my absence disturbing. There must be a whole bunch of twitters, twitting around desperately asking: whatever happened to tys?

One can dream in a self inflicted delusion of one’s own importance.

Anyhow.

Truth is my wife and children have gone back to India for good.

Now those who have been regulars here, (yep, you two), this is a regular occurrence in my house hold. My wife leaves me once in every 3 years. The reasons are mostly to do with children's education, illness in her family etc...

Truth is , anyone who has had the misfortune to be with me on a continuous basis will understand the desire for a long, really long vacation. Why do you think my parents put me in a boarding school when I was 4?

But I am kind of addictive like a bad habit, so she always comes back.

During the few days that she’s away, I run around like R.K.Laxman's dog. I walk around in my boxer shorts, eating directly from the fridge, peeing in the sink ...well, behaving more or less like a bloke.

3 days later it gets boring. There’s no fun in being undisciplined if there’s no one to thwack you on the head.

But this time she’s really gone for good. To make the point clear we have even shipped off everything from our apartment back to India. This time it’s really about the children's education.

Most Indians like salmons, return to their country of birth for education, marriage and death. Well, not entirely like salmons, since they just come back home to lay their eggs and to perhaps shop for banana chips.

That left me in an empty apartment with a mattress on a pallet, a table lamp, a table for the lamp, 15 books, one bottle of Jack Daniel, 1 glass ,a cat and a turtle called , wait for it, Shelly.

Paradise.

Living in an empty flat is like being a squatter. You occupy a tiny corner in a large place. When the night falls, with the curtain drawn, you feel almost like Robert Neville of I am Legend. Tanked up with enough booze, one can feel truly alone. As if you are the last man on the planet.

I have the flat till the end of the month.

The plan was to move in with my parents after that. Being parents, they couldn’t resist the idea of having their errant middle child back home, even though he now sports grey chin brush and a humongous beer belly. So I was forced to move in earlier than I thought. My lil bachelor pad remained there as a place of refuge if things got outta hand.

Outta hand it did.

You know what’s the scariest thing to happen to you when you are middle aged? No, it’s not waking up to find Angelina Jolie sleeping next to you.

It’s waking up one day to realize that you have turned into your father/mother.

Somewhere between 5 and 14, most parents would have already fallen from their children’s pedestal. From super mums and my daddy the strongest, they tend to become a bothersome necessity, then an embarressment, that slowly evolves into everything wrong the society stands for and finally a liability.

By the time, we reach adulthood and have our own family, our parents become the vacation place, or they in their bid to cling on to the only life they by now know, (you), will become your children’s nanny. This is how it is. It’s not a sad state of affairs; it’s just a kink in the wheel. There was a reason why in ancient times, the old , after having dispensed with their responsibilities as parents , retired to the jungles to spend the last of their days immersed in self enquiry.

Which probably would have been repeatedly asking themselves: Why?

Now, in absence of jungles, we have retirement homes.

Now, in my case, things were different. We never did spend too much time with our parents. My brothers and I lived a major part of our lives in boarding schools and spending most of our vacations shuttling from relatives to relatives. It was by no means a deprived childhood. In fact it was a rich experience. We were loved and parented by so many people. So it was pretty cool. Moreover it gave us a perfect weapon to hurt our parents with our so called abandonment issues. Yeah right.

Spending time with parents was the high light of our lives. For short periods. After having spent a lifetime being independent, there’s only so much one is willing to bear in the name of love. We were probably, that minority, who could not wait for the schools to open after 20 days of being with our parents. It’s not we that we were not enjoying the time we had with them. It’s just that we were not used to it.

So you grow up watching your parents and promising yourself that you will never become like them. It’s not meant in a mean way. It’s like knowing that there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet and you can become a limerick if you want, even if your parents are novels. It’s like you are aware what you are dealt with, by just observing your parents.

And you may be proud of them, you may love them to bits, but whatever happens you do not want to become like them.

I didn’t too.

So my first day in my parents’ house, brought the weirdest news home to me. I am my father's twin.

This is scary. I had spent 42 years consciously trying not to end up like him. He’s a great father, but he looks like a silverback on a good day. He overindulges himself on every habit he has. When he drinks, he drains the bar. When he had a heart attack, he lit up the moment he was out of the ICU. He feels that his life has to be lived according to his own yardstick. He is self centered, arrogant, given to sudden flare ups that can make you run a mile, and can surprise you with great acts of kindness and sacrifices when he’s in the mood for it.

The worst part is he even looks like me.

And to clinch the deal, we can’t spend 15 minutes in the same room together. This man is me. I totally can’t stand me.

That bachelor pad of mine is beginning to look more and more attractive.

Even that stupid cat.

Probably Shelly too.