(STBOB #1) Women

For all the literature in the world on women, there is still some scope for improvement. There are still millions of unmated men and women out there. All because they dont know the rules. Strange but True.

Well, in this edition of spewnotes, i try and cast some light on the matter. My locus standi? fuck knows. At any rate, here we go.

Women switch between two basic states, and if men have a hope of getting any, they need to cater to two of these all the time. Yes. All the time.

Woman to Child (W2C)....(HEIL THE HENPECK)
Basically, a Mom state. Very strongly defined in most women, its a simple state of mind needing to arrange the world in a pre-determined order. (The order itself is common to most women, but let's not get into that.) All you need to do is fall in with this order For eg: Bathing before Sunday lunch or some such.

If you try and be ultra-cool, and want your space, be careful. You may get it. For me, and most guys, i suspect, this is the state most difficult to get used to. It is like getting your maleness pounded into flaccid submission. Painful.

There is an upside to this though. (This note, written as it is being by an enlightened male, aims to share the cheerful state of existence of "been there, done that".)

If you time it right, you might get your fortnight's laundry done at bristling pace by woman in the throes of getting her world to look exactly like the way she wants it to look. All you have to do, is observe the frequency of above state. (This is very specific to each woman, but you might find that this eruption usually happens at the time of your favourite game on TV. You see, finding you in the middle of bristling constructive activity takes the fizz out of the whole exercise. Finding you somnolent watching "John Snead's amazing pool trickshots" is much more satisfying. Who said women werent logical?). Well anyways, it is important to let the woman squeeze as much satisfaction out of the entire episode. If this means that you hold on to your TV Couch, against all your gentlemanly instincts, do not budge. Secondly, try and leave all your unwashed laundry / cigarette butts / expired porno in one massive pile. Concentrate on the game. You'll find a squeaky clean den and a happily martyr like woman the next day.

(NOTE: A dangerous refinement - actually trying to incite this "W2C" state, when too lazy to do your laundry- is something best left to married men.)

Woman To Dad(W2D)...(CUDDLE THE COBRA)
A Child state. At times, the best part of women, its the state where they want to be hugged and protected. It brings out the Male instinct, and is a bit like alcohol in that respect. It fills you with that warm woozy feeling, suffusing every fibre of your being with a warm glow, makes you think you are the First Emperor, when all you are really doing is dissolving your insides in some harsh liquids and killing some brain cells. Women, really, are hardly any different.

Of course, there exists this particular brand of refined male, who having been through countless encounters of a similar type, and having had to deal with the aftermath, now know what this is. A heaven-sent opportunity to make out. And that's what it is. Just follow steps 1-3.
1. Do the cuddle.
2. Don't solve problems.
3. Whisper sweet nothings (And that's not as hypocritical as it sounds. Might sound like a paradox to males, but it is really a meaningful routine that works for women. A bit like the psychiatrist's couch).
4. Make out

Wonderful approach. Highly recommended.

Of course, there have been well-intentioned men, who have dismissed above approach as farcical. There are few of them left to tout the positives of their approach. (Most of them are either dead, single or temporarily gay). But some hieroglyphs have yielded the fact that their approach may have been not as wise as they had hoped.

Apparently, They followed the following steps:

1. Cuddled. (Honestly, this is instinctive)
2. Listened. (Apparently, this is where the disaster began.)
3. Reacted. ( One of the rare moments which was satisfying to both parties concerned)
4. Set out a plan to solve the problem (Ouch)
5. Went to bed with a plan and determined clench of the jaw.
6. Woke up to find woman considerably less victimized than she seemed the night before."AH! she's being brave! Attagirl." (Poor man. Clueless.)
7. Met woman the next evening. Expecting to be gazed at with loving adoration. Almost expecting the Final Token Of Male superiority - The Blow Job. Things dont go quite according to plan. Woman arrives somewhat peevish. Allegations of "running my life" ; "control freak" ; "obsessive" pile on late through the night.
8. Next morning, finds said male run over by bus. (Apparently didn't read the sign "Crossing the road while Wondering about why-girlfriend-dumped-me is Strictly Prohibited.")

On the whole, its a state that's responsible for keeping most relationships and marriages going.

These are the two states, that i like to think, are the ones that one needs to be aware of, if one is looking to get some. There are other more superficial states. Periods, Marriages and Engagements, that bring out some interesting shades in women.

We'll get into that sometime. Its late and i gotta get home!

STBOTB

Between you and me and our loyal viewership of about three people, I have to admit I love the stuff i write. I know I know....it just isn't fashionable to do that these days. But I spend hours going over my stuff, and to my incisively unbiased eye, some of my writes are truly magnificent.

In fact so good that....well... read on..

" For hundreds of weeks, spewnotes has been spewing away touching issues that affect us deeply..from broken hearts to torn pockets, nose hairclipper maintenance to moody eggs.... and now..spewnotes returns to you in a unique special edition called "Scraping the Bottom Of the Barrel in Spewnotes (STBOTB)" which will carry those spews that have received the strongest reactions, in no way discriminating between positive (of which, remarkably enough, there were few), and negative (where we've had a problem of plenty) reaction-inducing posts.

We, however will try to factor in the social upliftment angle to spewnotes, and apart from unintentional entertainment, we choose spews that carry serious views that may a remote chance of redeeming humanity at some later date. Launching the STBOTB.."

Insightful Bollywood

"Tum Sarkar ko maarna chaahthe ho ya Subhash Naagre ko maarna chaahthe ho?
Dono alag alag hain, Vishraam…..Subhaash Naagre ek insaan hain ……aur Sarkar ek soch."
- "Sarkar", 2005


Wow. I mean..wow.

I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair

This from a song By Sandi Thom - couldn't have put it better myself.

Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair
In '77 and '69 revolution was in the air
I was born too late into a world that doesn't care
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair

When the head of state didn't play guitar
Not everybody drove a car
When music really mattered and when radio was king
When accountants didn't have control
And the media couldn't buy your soul
And computers were still scary and we didn't know everything

When pop stars still remained a myth
And ignorance could still be bliss
And when god saved the queen she turned a whiter shade of pale
My mom and dad were in their teens
And anarchy was still a dream
And the only way to stay in touch was a letter in the mail

When record shops were still on top
And vinyl was all that they stocked
And the super info highway was still drifting out in space
Kids were wearing hand me downs
And playing games meant kick arounds
And footballers still had long hair and dirt across their face

I was born too late into a world that doesn't care
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair.


Wonder what our song will be forty years on.

Another one from susie..

Unbeknownst to Susie, the last post is doing the rounds, and in pitches in Daddy with another one from her in her Dilbertian mood...


"am not doing too much!!!
Still following the policy...look busy, take it easy!
Have tons to do, but no enthu!"

She's rich, that one!

Susie....

Susie is not usually big on spouting truisms, but this one was too rich for me to let go.

" ........and howz work going?"

" Oh the same old deal! you know? Meet clients - act intelligent......Meet Boss - act stupid, Meet colleagues - act competent..."

I think this is what is going to be my career's epitaph.

Out of the mouths of babes and ...bosses

In my new avataar as mint-fresh b-grad, i rather too wholeheartedly took to the job of designing a new channel structure for a widget product offer from Acme Global. Ol' John Silver warned me about how important this was to Acme global, and sternly demanded rigorous detail in the research and analysis. "We like to think we hire the best people, and here's your chance to show we did right!!"


Followed weeks of dust-filled days of interviewing customers and consumers (aha!), gathering data, wringing out all my meagre knowledge to squeeze out sensible conclusions on the channel structure, crunching the distribution cost figures into respectable looking excel sheets -complete with linked sheets,modify-able assumption figures each neatly fonted in red, with comments in the important cells.




Two weeks later, Ol' John Silver beckons me into the meeting room "Slave - you ready with the numbers?" "ulp!..eh..sure" ... I stumble into the glassed in meeting room.....begin gaining confidence as i open my laptop like a an egyptian peddler about to show off his new range of aprodisiacs .....the screen blinks into life...and emerges my tabbed, highlighted, commented 17days, twenty two hours and 3 zillion grey cell worth excel file - row upon row of gleaming ratios and percentages.....kilos and tons of product....hundreds of thousands of consumers...just waiting to make millions for Acme Global....I launch into my spiel....take care to bring out the nuances in the channel structure - different options i'd considered but discarded in the face of crystal clear consumer insights before arriving on this gleaming model, different combinations of which are laid out in the shining specimen now awaiting his razor-sharp, analytical brain's incisive attention.


....pause..


Ol' John narrows his brows, scratches his chin thoughtfully ....." I am not interested in numbers, slave". "Eh, Lord John?" (they are quite informal around here..no tedious usage of full names unlike other stuffy companies. Even a cheery "your highness" could pass muster on saturdays)


"I said i am not interested in the numbers.." leans back in sleek, ergonomic chair....and looks at the ceiling..."I want to know what exactly is the moral ground holding your channel structure together?"


Kerrrr-whump!...... "eh, what?"


"I said what exactly is the MORAL GROUND HOLDING YOUR CHANNEL TOGETHER?"


"eh? ....er...moral..uh..well...economic incentives?" (this while cursing myself for the classes i've slept through.)


Ol' John is in into his stride now "You mean to say that the only thing holding your channel together is economic rationale?"


"err....well...no...i mean..there is ..umm..bonding.. mutual resp--"


"blah blah blah ........anyway, we'll talk about this tomorrow -it is too important to ignore in our business. Channel members must be morally bound as well as economically incentivized and you should have thought of this".


May the sweet lord help me.

A pub conversation between an MBA and..well..read on

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon and I was sittin' in a pub with a rollercoaster depressive-creative woman in one of her more stable moods and getting introduced to this succession of wonderful women (esther, karen, zoe, tang and sowmya -I hope you're readin' this) absolutely lolling happily in the high spot of post-pubescent male life (its been a calmish life so far, I must say), lunchin' on pork and swimming in beer, I was a content man. Until he happened. (if you think HE's going to be turn out to be handsome hunk with honey drop eyes….you should be reading cosmo!).

He turned out to be this bearded man with a booming laugh and a seemingly inimitable air of dope and genius about him (I am sorry but this one is NOT gonna be about the women!) and the conversation inevitably veered to love and sex, and to my liberally middle-classed mind- the astonishing exclusivity of these two. (nope - its not about love and sex either - I did recommend the damn cosmo, right?). Anyway, said bearded person was holding forth on some theory that involved him making quadrants with love and sex as the dimensions - the theory itself is another story - but suddenly he thundered ".........this sort of denial is well explained by a term called cognitive dissonance!!!" implying by his tone that us mere mortals couldn't possibly know what it meant. Reading my open-mouthed shock as an unquenched thirst for knowledge, he went on to explain it as "post-decision rationalizing" to feel better about the decision .

OW! I managed to gather my senses and stutter that CD was actually "post decision (purchase) concern/dissatisfaction about decision and possible looking at alternatives at next purchase". (this may not have been the best way i could put it but i was a few down myself).

He looked down his bushy beard to locate the mortal who had dared voice doubts

"ARE YOU FROM MARKETING, BOY?" .... "er..yes" ...." I AM A BEHAVIOURAL SCIENTIST, AND NOT ONE IN A PARTICULARLY ARGUMENTATIVE MOOD EITHER BUT I WILL SAY THIS - ALL YOU MARKETING BOYS DO IS READ STUFF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND FULLY AND TRY TO USE IT TO MAKE SILLY THEORIES TO TRY AND SELL MORE TOOTHPASTE".

Well - he may have had something there but my sunny sunday afternoon had graduated gently to a pleasant evening but my mood had a taken an arc rather more steep and a hue much deeper. Of course, it improved with some unselfish ego massage by karen but that wasn't enough to gloss over the painful fact that my own smugness could be shattered by another's rather more deeply set one.

But what was good about the damn tiff is that the realization that b-school can take you within a sniffer's distance of actual knowledge - and that can be pretty rewarding - as long as you don't think of it as the last bloody word on anything.

Post this sordid episode, I can only fantasize about how that evening would have turned out if he was wrong and ended up grovelling at my feet for more knowledge or - at the opposite end of this miniscule spectrum of knowing and not knowing - wonder about how I would have felt about my existence I hadnt a damn clue about whatever he was talkin' about!

"Absolute knowledge" - utter fiction, I tell you,

Banned!

This is rich..It really is. And I've got to record this. Today is July 18, 2006, and for the last 11:42:32 hours (not really but being absurdly specific seems to add a certain sense of drama), this blog stands banned in India! (Actually, I think blogspot has been banned but it doesn't hurt to do a lil credit hoggin', does it?).

I always knew my inane chatter about holey pockets and white-trousered women were mildly offensive, but to have it banned by the powers-that-be adds a dash of credibility like a shot of vodka to a cocktail. All ye mere mortals, do not lose hope..i stand unshakeable for the towering values of mundane chatter about irrelevant areas that touch our lives in hugely uncertain ways.

PS: I am so struck by the drama of it all - this post has a certain war-like air of strife-stricken scratchy voices sending messages out to the world listening with bated breath.

Over and out, so to speak,