Travel: Hope Floats…

Just back from the most perfect holiday… well as the title says it was almost perfect… I am still unsure what was missing but I am sure that as I recount my experiences I will find it…

You know that scene when Rajnikanth finds out that he has two villains to kill but is left with only one bullet… yeah, I know life’s a bitch… so… what are you gonna do?

Something like that happened with me too… I had been planning for a vacation for a long, long, long time and nothing interesting was forthcoming… Some or the other thing always got messed up… sometimes my friends weren’t free, sometimes I wasn’t available, and sometimes the wallets did not permit… I mean going on an intergalactic ride needs a space shuttle and building a spacecraft does not exactly cost peanuts which my company pays… so… I was doomed…

But then one of the training that I went thru’ came to my rescue… the training was pretty unique too… It was about ‘around the world, without a penny’… and that is what I did… I spent rupees… lots of them… the amount would have been enough to pay for a dinner of four at Tandoor (an upscale restaurant) at Bangalore….

So I went home got out all the wedding invitations I had received and did that ‘inky-pinky-ponky’ routine and hooray! I won a chance to visit Mumbai and attend a friend’s wedding (Not my first choice but I was sure that I did not want to spend a fortune on attending a wedding in US)… it was a blessing in disguise… I could visit the glam cap of India… (glam cap means glamour capital which means spaghetti tops and micro minis, stilleto heels and lacy underthings… I am getting ahead of myself here…) So… I was excited…(I am talking about my mood here…)

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A Social Klutz…

Although I am nearly perfect in all ways, I do have one minor flaw: I can’t pull off a proper introductory handshake. Being able to conduct a firm, effective hand clasp is a basic requirement for manhood, which is why I still ride a bike with training wheels at the age of twenty-two (just kidding I drive the new and improved 150cc Pulsar…) A proper handshake has more than a dozen steps, but I seldom manage to pull off more than one or two of them before my attempt at an assertive, masculine greeting degrades into little more than awkward hand-holding. The problem lies mostly with my total lack of social grace, but I also place some of the blame on whoever decided that such a complicated process was the best way to introduce yourself to another human being. If it was up to me, the official way to make a new acquaintance would be to point at them from a safe distance and possibly offer a friendly grunt or a chuckle. Alternatively a namaste should also do. Unfortunately, mankind’s need to form an instant opinion of a new contact would still be present, meaning that even my point-and-grunt/point-and-chuckle technique or the namaste thing would eventually become just as nuanced and overanalyzed as the current handshake system. The rigidness of the pointing finger and the manliness of the grunt or the funniness of the chuckle would be under the microscope or the symmetry of the hands folded in case of namaste. It would be used to assess your value as a human being, which quite frankly seems a lot more fair than evaluating irrelevant factors like the content of one’s character. The more someone knows about me, the more likely they are to join one of the many groups devoted to my destruction. My best chance at survival is to deceive people into forming a good first impression of me and then never talking to them again. In this, at times, I succeed; not of my choice ofcourse…

Unfortunately, making a good first impression is nearly impossible for me to do under the current  greeting system. I’m not stranger to failure, but I still manage to impress myself with how I manage to come up short in every stage of the handshake process. I know trained dogs that can navigate the ritual better than I can, but they get a treat for their trouble whereas I just get another name I’m forced to remember. My problems typically begin when I encounter either a new person or a person who I’ve met only briefly in the past or has been recently introduced. When said person holds out his or her hand, my fight or flight reflexes instantly kick in. I need minutes of advanced warning and a few helpful diagrams to pull off even a marginally successful handshake.

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Spin Doctors…

You spin. You put things in the best possible light. You fail to mention those four hours you spent devoted to checking out mail from your friends marked ‘careful’ or ‘open when alone’, those two hours you slipped out to have an extended lunch with your friends (I can’t believe they schedule these lunch timings - how do you know when you will be hungry…), and that 1 hour period every day after lunch when you sit at your desk in a massive food coma. You don’t mention these things, because they call-in to question your job performance. You highlight the good stuff that you have done, or you highlight the reasons why you haven’t produced more good stuff - i.e. you felt alien presence in the room where you were working on the papers or you were thinking about why your co-worker is never at her desk…

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