For a person like me who takes solace in eating up every bit of a dead chicken including the bones just to let the departed souls rest in peace, the social institution of marriage has not had much of an appeal apart from the food part of it. Post passing out with an MBA degree I have had to change my stance on both these issues (chicken- the important issue and marriage- the not so important issue).
To deal with the important issue at hand, for me eating a chicken is a bit of a spiritual feeling. Though the Dalai Lama would have fainted if he heard such a thing but generally I go into a trance when a chicken is up there on the menu for my gastronomical misadventures. The dish attracts me the same way as a drunk Mika getting attracted towards a revealing Rakhi Sawant for a unsolicited smooch. And after the delightful trance is over you realise that nothing is left of the chicken for the forensic department to carry out any kind of DNA analysis if the Chicken Right's commission ever decides to file a case of a missing chicken whom they beleive to be dead. The horrendous acts have often left people on close by tables during lunch time at my worplace in a state of shock.
Now my workplace has this weired way of torturing already work burdened souls with a number of certifications and training programmes spread out all across the year which apparently are mandatory for the sake of a better performance appraisal. Not that it does help you in anyway apart from the fact that after the training is over you have to burn the midnight oil and return back in the late night shuttles after finishing off with the work for that day. So there I was attending one such training programme on Cross Cultural Sensitivities in which the pretty instructor was supposed to teach us about table ettiquttes. Now for a person like me who had such rustic chicken eating habits, the entire episode was a big disaster. I struggled with the 7 course meal dropping spoons and forks. I was about to cut up somebody's hands when the knife in my hand just decided to jettison away into somebody else's plate failing to cut a loaf of bread. Luckily nothing that disastrous happened though it made me make a mental note of eating in a bit more sophisticated manner....not necessarily with a spoon and a fork but in a more human manner. After all I was in a big multinational and was supposed to be having lunch with well mannered clients and I did not want to scare them with my highly sophisticated table etiquttes. Not that I have become a complete Nirmalya Banerjee who has the unique distinction of having the famous Rajasthani Dal-Bati with a spoon and a fork but still I have decided to imporve my manners so as not to look that cannibalish. So these days I have been resisting myself from murdering the already murdered chicken over and over again and I am yet to get any information from the poultry union about their thoughts on the matter. Though these days an acceptability factor has crept in from the nearby table occupants which till now had been one of disgust.
Now coming on to the not so important issue of marriage. I mean it is not that it is not important otherwise I would have the soon to be married brigade pass me on to the hangman though I guess the married people would think otherwise and try to congratulate me on the due importance that I have given to marriage on my priority list. So marriage has been a typically unimportant issue till now for me. Though I am just 24 (the abhi to main baccha hoon age) yet the realities of it dawned on me thanks to a sequence of events that happened last week. One of my graduation class mates called up to announce in the most inhuman way that the girl I had this huge crush on in college finally got married to somone whose family had been settled in the greener pastures of the United States for quite a few generations. Dil mein jo bache kuche arman they woh bhi sale sab dard bankar beh gaye!! And to top it all he went on announcing the name of girls I knew and the ones I didnt even remember who were all tied by the common thread of marriage. Incidentally some had even borne kids and that somehow made me feel pretty odd about my own age. Is 24 that old that all ur batchmates from college get married? After all that was Gujarat, something about the place makes it pretty common for parents to burden their children with the responsibility of marriage at an early age.
Secondly Ash and Abhishek decided to tie the knot and got engaged. TV channels got into some kind of an overdrive making it seem to be the most important thing in the history of India after India's independence. The newschannel crew having no other phenomenal things to show had started interviewing Junior B's washerman, Ash's bungalow's watchman, the neighbourhood chaiwala etc etc asking them about their opinion about the soon to be held marriage. As if they had been cruical in ensuring the smooth ride of the love affair that is going to culminate in a marriage which is going to break a lot of hearts both male and female. And the ones who have hogged the limelight as a result of this are the many astrologers who seem to be putting in all sorts of equations predicting the match of a Mangli and a non-Mangli and putting across their views on the ideal honeymoon destinations to how many kids are they going to have with so much of conviction as if it was their own marriage. Seeing the way things were working out between the mangli and non mangli jodi my roommate flied back to Delhi to see if he could do anything about his love affair which has turned to be as filmish as the Ash-Abhishek one.
And lastly one of my flatmates left to marry his not so childhood gilfriend whom he had hit on and proposed in the last few days of our MBA days. The poor guy seemed to be all tense about the upcoming imminent disaster in his life. He seemed to have accepted fate the same way as a soon to be sacrificed animal does in the last few days of his at Bangalore as a bachelor. He did not even laugh when Raju Shrivastav was uttering his Gajodhar Bhaiya jokes on TV. The kind of sadist that I am, I made him watch "Pyaar ke side effects" as a parting gift for his bachelorhood and as a revenge for not throwing a bachelor's party.
So finally I have realised that marriage is an imminent disaster that happens in every person's life. Though the ones which are termed as love marriages have their own adventures attached to them which makes them all the more spicy. And considering my inexplicably handsome Tom Cruise looks, I missed the glorious opportunity of a lifetime to find myself a girl in the biggest matrimonial fare ( MBA days). Wonder why these MBA institutes dont publish the number of successful post MBA marriage figures for every batch along with such strategic figures as the average salary and median salary etc. Guess that would be a very good value proposition to make all the more MBA aspirants to buy the exhorbitantly priced forms. At this juncture I have somehow changed my stance on marriage thanks to a girl whom I have been chatting with for the last two months. I hardly know anything about her but I have had these moments of truth with her about how much of magic there is to marriage. So from black magic my perception of marriage has changed to that of a goody good magic. Lets see how reality is, some 3-4 years from now. And lastly all the curses and abuses to my innumerable cousins who have all decided to fall in love and marry. Now for a perenially single guy like me who is not endowed with good looks or a Richard Branson legacy it really has its own misadvantages. After all where am I supposed to look for a girl to fall in love with at this old age when I am losing my hair at an alarming rate. I guess I will break the trend and marry the arranged way.....
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