Mid-life crisis in your late Twenties

DISCLAIMER :This post is a satirical take on the life and incidents around the life of a Tech Professional in his late 20’s. I have tried my level best to be as impersonal as possible resemblances with real life are purely co incidental. This post has to be taken in a lighter vein rather than as a serious work. The incidents described may or may not have any resemblance to real life incidents in the writer’s life even though the blog is written in first person.

Yes you read the title right. How else could you explain dare devil bachelors wanting to get hitched, commitment phobic boyfriends proposing to their shell shocked girlfriends, married men suddenly wanting kids of their own. Guys out of nowhere find new hobbies. Paying your hard earned money on a super bike for which you can probably get a car or paying for a smart phone for which you can get a two wheeler, buying a SLR camera .Those who have never travelled except for emergencies suddenly take up travelling just for the heck of it. People who have spent all their lives in their hometown want to break the shackles and leave their comfort zone for hip and happening metro cities around the country or even better going overseas. This post is clearly written from a guy's point of view so ladies please excuse, you can continue reading if you want to better understand your boyfriends/husbands/brothers in the same age bracket.

Let's start with the bachelors the most colourful lot of the demography in question here. You realise that unmarried men of your age group are hard to come by. Post marriage the friends you used to hang out with stop answering even your phone calls forget chilling out with you. Even if you end up spending time with them they are no longer interested in discussing about random females but would bore you to death with the challenges they face in their marital life. Finding a roommate is another nightmare because suddenly they are a near extinct species.

Suddenly your girlfriend looks more beautiful than before; the pretty face in the back of your mind is worth pursuing after all. Alternatively it is time to purchase the superbike that you have dreamt off as a boy. It’s too late for your parents to realise what has happened to you before you speed off in your mean machine. From there on your life revolves around every nitty gritty of your new found passion. I have also come across people who take up gluttony as their new hobby for them food is their new best friend.

You realise that you haven't travelled much and have been stuck at your hometown for too long.  You decide to visit your friends who are living in the metro cities across the country just to check out the place and end up in awe of their lives.Now you become tired of living in your hometown and wish for a change. You lobby hard for the overdue onsite assignment and start exploring for opportunities elsewhere in the country.

When it comes to married men you have no more time to hang out with your bachelor friends and the new in thing that is hanging out with other couples can also get boring in course of time. Shopping with your wife is no more cute like it was before. It reminds you of your pre marital days when you would frequent the malls just to check out pretty females, but now you are trying to juggle the shopping bags that are thrust upon you. You realise that you have been a guinea pig to your wife’s cooking for too long and have developed a tummy and extra fat all over the body. You get inspired after watching 300 and Baywatch and it seems to you that post marriage your boyish charm is waning. You decide to become fit and fab out of the blue and hit the gym with a vengeance. You might not have played football a single time in the last 5 years but you think you can be the Ronaldo of your team.  You end up tearing a ligament or the like and end up in the bed for the next 3 months thereby inconveniencing everyone ranging from your wife to your reporting manager.  That is when the truth dawns upon you have ceased growing up long time back and now your body has started ageing.

Photography is your new hobby you might not have even handled a Kodak in your entire life but once you procure a SLR/DSLR after paying an insane amount of money (including lenses) and you are a professional photographer. The limited knowledge that you gained through Google is enough for you to brag about and bore your technologically challenged friends with its jargon. You start a Facebook page and request everyone to like it.  Oh yeah how could I forget the ‘selfie’ phenomenon of recent times every Tom, Dick and Harry starts taking selfies and uploading it in their Facebook profile. I was wondering if it was possible to take a selfie with a SLR, I would love to see someone do that and post a picture of that process.

You would rather spend your hard earned holidays visiting a new place and meeting new people rather than go back to your hometown to your annoying relatives and (un)well-wishers back home. They need to have a say on everything right from the brand of your underwear to the nationality of your boss. Another thing that happens to you at this time is that you become cynical and indifferent regarding anything and everything that happens around you.  Something is always f***ing beautiful and not beautiful to you anymore.  Earlier the choicest abuses were reserved for your native language but nowadays you improvise and start cursing in every language you know. 

The bottom line being that you are staring into a crisis of identity at this point of your life where you try to figure out what exactly you want from life. It is a phase where you no more care about what others think about you, all that matters to you right now is what you think about yourself. You are tired of being the good guy around and want to go crazy that’s all.  Everything that you do at this time would be illogical or even plain stupid to others. But in my opinion you should just go with the flow and do whatever your mind tells you.  Thereby you get to slay the dragons within you and maybe gradually grow out of it.

WAYUGM?

 DISCLAIMER :This post is a satirical take on the life and incidents around the life of a Tech Professional in his late 20’s. I have tried my level best to be as impersonal as possible resemblances with real life are purely co incidental. This post has to be taken in a lighter vein rather than as a serious work. The incidents described may or may not have any resemblance to real life incidents in the writer’s life even though the blog is written in first person.



When Are You Getting Married? is a question that I have been hearing a lot these days. Be it family friends colleagues relatives and all and sundry. Oh boy I miss being unemployed would be my first thought. To tell you the truth initially I was very happy to hear this the simple reason being that it felt good that people realised that you were fit enough to start a family. But after that initial period it started to piss me off. Whenever people start talking with me the end point would be my marriage. The moment I hear the dreaded M-word I would either switch the topic or get the hell out of there. So much so that I hate going for social gatherings these days.

Earlier when you go for a get together of your college mates or school mates only a minority were married and we bachelors use to gang up and start pulling their leg. But nowadays it is the other way round and the married guys would be making our life miserable. But there is always a comeback line for us when we say that we are going to party that night. I have noticed that it is your just married peers who would be nagging you the most by telling you to get hitched sooner than later. The fact being they can’t stand the thought of us being single and happy. There is also the other end of the spectrum who advice us to live life to the fullest and gradually settle down .

It is not that I am averse to get married or anything it is only that I am not too comfortable with the idea of an arranged marriage. How can two total strangers who hardly know each other go on and get hitched one fine day. Maybe it goes over my head when it comes to that let’s not get into that debate now.

Moving on let me talk about the psyche of a Malayalee girl to whom in all probability I would end up getting married to. She would be a huge fan of the evergreen heavyweight hero Mohanlal just like the 60 % of the state’s population but when it comes to a groom they want someone with the body of a Hrithik Roshan. And poor guys like me who are at the receiving end would have to give up almost everything including alcohol, tasty food and what not. And it does not end there it includes sweating it out at the gym hours on end. Hoping to at least to get a lightweight body whereby we don’t get chucked out of the marriage market just because of our weight. And having a sedentary job does not make our job in anyway easier.

Gone are the days when a good job was the only criterion for a groom . Nowadays a lot of factors come into play including habits like your drinking, smoking, partying, being a spendthrift, god fearing and the list is endless. So much so that a prospective groom can be rejected solely on the basis of what appears on his facebook wall. I have known countless instances where the guys have to tweak their FB pages so as to score brownie points in the eyes of a would be bride. I shudder to think what all young men like me have to go through to get a better half.

Without mentioning the role of matrimonial sites this piece would be incomplete .Today the first thing that young people and their parents do when they start looking for a match is to make an attractive profile in some well known site. I am totally uncomfortable with this idea it reignites my reservations about arranged marriage. All it takes for a guy like me is 2 months he needs to regularly workout become a teetotaller eat healthy at the end of it go to a professional photographer or at least someone who has the basic knowledge of photography and bang you have a kickass profile. Or if you are too lazy for that there is always photoshop to your rescue. Here you are marketing your fake ‘self’ rather than the real ‘you’ which I guess is too much of a manipulation for a serious thing like marriage.

Its Good to be Bad-an obituary to someone’s love life

DISCLAIMER :This post is a satirical take on the life and incidents around the life of a Tech Professional in his late 20’s. I have tried my level best to be as impersonal as possible resemblances with real life are purely co incidental. This post has to be taken in a lighter vein rather than as a serious work. The incidents described may or may not have any resemblance to real life incidents in the writer’s life even though the blog is written in first person.




It’s ironic that this post is being written on Valentine’s day let’s say it was intentional in the first place.


Flash back – 10 years ago

I am hearing about Valentine ’s Day for the first time in my life. Its everywhere in the newspapers in the Television channels and what not. Incidentally I have absolutely no idea what it means the only thing that I could infer was it was a day of love. My consultation with an older friend of mine made it clear to me that it was celebration of someone special in your life. Alas! there is hardly anything I can do my interaction with fairer sex is the bare minimum and studying in a boy’s only school is also not helping my cause .Fair enough I’ll give this year a pass, next year I’ll be in college and I definitely will have a Valentine no worries.


Fast forward 1 year later

Have started to get the hang of a co-ed set up but nothing concrete has happened so far. All my trysts in this regard have been like dogs running after the cars that they have no intention of driving. But still I did not lose heart at least I have adjusted well to the new setting and have not been a bummer like countless of my friends who came from girls/boys only schools. It’s only a matter of time before something happens there is always a next time next year it is definite I say to myself.

But for some reason or the other the more I try the farther I go away from my goal. It’s like trying hard to hold sand in your fist the tighter you hold the more it slips out of your hand. But I didn’t lose heart. This ritual continued for some years and finally I grew tired of it and I said to myself screw Valentine’s day it’s not worth it.

Time passes on somewhere down the line after college I think that man is a social animal he needs a companion. Little do I realise that my first heart break is in the pipeline. I make the first proposal of my life to be promptly turned down. Man this is bad I say to myself the explanation is the usual stuff. “I have never seen you like that let’s remain friends”. Great! So much for friendship, oh common give me a break. It wasn’t easy as it sounds. It was my first time so it did take some time to recover from it. But I took it in a true sportsman spirit and moved on.

Luckily life changed a lot I started living on my own. I had far more things to worry than my first lost love. And moreover I was really busy. It was baby steps for me in the transition from a boy to a man. Gradually I got used to living alone and I was seeing people in relationships all around me as well as the former. And thanked my stars that I was single but deep inside me I yearned for companionship.

But alas again my romantic side took the better of me I think as time passes you end up where you started even if you never wanted to be there in the first place. The usual sequence of events started which culminates in the proposal and the heartbreak follows, no prizes for guessing. This time around the the catchphrase was “Even I have to feel it to right you can’t just hold a gun to my head and ask me to love you right “. Believe me guys this time around it wasn’t as hard as the first time, experience is indeed the best teacher.
As I was brooding over it I asked my close friend about it. He made an interesting observation I value his opinion very much because he himself is a player and a very successful one to. Dude you are a goody goody guy girls just see you as a go to guy when their going gets tough, in normal circumstances you are just nonexistent to them. For a change you should be mean. Oh right! I thought the next time around I will start acting mean when I am in a relationship. It reminded me of what Bruce Willis said in the latest Die Hard movie , Girls love to dig on your scars.

On an ending note once it so happened that one of my close friend had a pretty bad accident and I was visiting him in hospital he was pretty much bandaged up from head to toe . After seeing me and he requested us not to make him laugh because that would aggravate his pain. To which my friend retorted “let’s talk about Angelo’s love life which we all know is a tragedy”. To my amusement I found my bedridden friend in splits his folks were thankful to me saying that it was the first time that they saw him that happy after the accident. I think RIP my love life.