More about women...in white trousers.

Its a Thursday evening, and i am a content man. Monday class is far away. Assignments look humanly possible. I am still reveling in the afterglow of Mclaren's maiden win this year at the Spanish GP. Kimi Raikkonen appears with a halo in my dreams these days.


Reclining lazily on the soft cushions of this peaceable picture, I set my mind to weightier matters - and for this post it is the pleasurable task of detailing my much-applauded (mainly by me) White Trouser Theory.


Or to be more specific. White trousers wearin' women.


I first started on this theory on the airport express from Hong Kong airport to Central. An hour long journey in an air conditioned train (i use the term loosely. To my untrained heart, it ran faster than the plane i had landed in.) That was when i spotted this British woman. Tall. Full. and wearin white trousers. Her long flowing gait, sunglasses perched fashionably on lovely auburn hair, she looked gorgeous. But something bothered me. I couldn't put my finger on it.


My next vision of a white trousered woman was in Bombay. Funnily enough, a similar looking woman, stepping of a sleek black Merc with, almost inevitably, Louis Vuitton shopping bags in her hand.


And then, on that trip in Bombay, I kept running into this succession of white trousers and women in them. Something kept nagging at me right through, and over paani-puri and chicken frankies on Linking road, it hit me. There was a common thread (no pun intended) running through all these women.


And it had to do with white trousers. And unattainability.


What kind of woman wears white trousers? Remember women and their finickiness about appearances? So what kind of woman puts herself up voluntarily to that acid test?


If it hasn't struck you yet - and i don't blame you - it took me long enough - it really is the kind of woman who is supremely confident about what her day is going to dish out to her. The kind of woman who has a handle on almost every factor in her life.


More specifically, it is the kind of woman who knows that her home isn't that kind that springs nasty surprises in the form of an un-vaccumed portion of the sofa. The kind of woman who knows her bags aren't made of the cheap leather that could streak your trouser leg as your bag swishes against it as she walks. The kind of woman who organizes her belongings in such a way that not a single thing need go into her trouser pocket.


Picture, if you will, a white trousered woman's day.


She steps out of a dustless home, into a gleaming elevator that swooshes down to the floor like a molecule beam. She spends all of seven seconds in the sun as she walks to a vacuumed, de-odorized car whose chauffeur has the air-conditioning humming at twenty-two degrees while the tarmac melts on the road he is about to drive her on. Her palms are dry and cool and she smells exactly the way she intended to.


I jerk out of my reverie as the puri disintegrates soggily in my hand, and splooshed down on the pavement, splattering my sneakers. I realized then that this was exactly the kind of woman who a bloke didn't want in his life. The kind of woman, who a man instinctively shies away from making passes at. And I relaxed, as I looked at the another white-trousered tower of feminine intimidation, for a brief moment gleaming whitely in the morning sun, as she glided back into the cool, dark interiors of her car. She may gleam and shine, I am never going to want her to be mine.


Solving life's little puzzles gives me an almost obscenely, disproportionate sense of satisfaction.

About "bein cool"

As i love sayin, Let me explain. Coolness is an abstract concept and carries much more weight than its frivolous wording indicates. It doesn't, as folks tend to infer, hinge upon good looks or a drawl. It could, but that's not the kinda coolness we'll worry about. That's as passe as a local train. It hinges, rather crucially in my opinion, upon two not unrelated things: first, presence of substance, and second, a tenacious ability to cling to your identity.

The first is easy to explain. But before i do that, let me bung in the fundamental characteristic of "cool" here. Its anything that is different from what most blokes do/know/have and yet care about. It'll get clearer as we move on.

Getting back to substance, we need to understand that most folk know a little bit about everything . When people are cool, is when they know a little about everything, but also, in addition to this common denominator, know a hell of a lot about something. Like music. Like sport. Like motorcycles. Like tobacco. Like coffee. Like books. The list is not nearly as endless as i am leading you to think but really it is a very generous criterion.

Identity. This here is a crucial one. It basically flows from our "substance" theory but not in what you would call an obvious manner. Its like this. Picture your self as a flower child hangover from the seventies. You wear sunglasses four inches across, you wear brown corduroy, and dual color sneakers. You dont mind polka dotted shirts with collars that look that could easily be mistaken for a small plane's wings. You wear your hair long and shave once in a week. You smoke three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day, have an ambidextrous talent for rolling joints and eat three cheese rich burgers a day. You listen to Dream theatre and Rush, think nDJ stands for Desk Job and you haven't a clue about Trance.

And you are in B-school.

(Granted this is a nasty picture i draw, but then the greatest breakthoughs could have never come without experiments that refrained from animal testing, right? )

So this here is an uncool situation. (or have i tipped my hand by being too obvious?). Anyway, my point is this. If you cling on to even this time-warp identity for a fair amount of time, you'll be cool. Any step towards modernity, in the face of relentless social cold shouldering, would send you hurtling rather inevitably into the dark abyss of social outcastism.

Why? Like i said, coolness is about being acceptably different. And if you have the second, the first will follow. In due course. The trick here is to cling onto what ever germ of an identity you have, and just wait it out.

Simple enough, eh?

about social life at B-school

Its strange how life chooses the strangest moments to turn you inside out, churn you around and return you to almost the same molecular arrangement that you were in before. This "almost" of a difference could result in either a an improved version or not but its the transition itself that is unnerving.

I am a 28 year old bloke..an age where you are "just right"..neither confused nor abstract. Its a calm unflappable period of time where you are young enough to be cool, and old enough to have the right to look smug occasionally. Like i said, a good age to be. Like i didn't say, its an age that doesn't handle change too well.

B-school is a lot of things and one of the things it also is (like most things which involve more than one human being above the age 14) is a social drama, where you need to have your role and your identity clearly etched out. Its about "bein cool".

And at the crux of this is the "Positioning" issue. Posish is an important deal, if you aint cool. Either you identify with the cool hip crowd or with the riff-raff. Either way, you need a clean posish for a stress-free B-life. In simpler words, you need to find the right crowd to hang out with so the masses can have an ID to match your face to. Its an "Ours" or "Their's" thing.

And here i am. Talking about this, when i am 28. Grief.