The Shopping Conundrum

One of the keys to a successful marriage is solving the shopping conundrum.

To shop or not to shop, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of insidious retail or to take up arms against outrageous questions and by opposing them end the marriage.

That is the conundrum called shopping. Other husbands might have their own crosses to bear, but I am quite certain that one of them is labelled "shopping".

"Shopping" can take many forms. The wife maybe an alone-or-with-my-girlfriends-only shopper where she is happy, nay keen to go shopping with herself or her friends. She would fix up shopping dates with other similarly inclined members of the sisterhood. All she wants the husband to do during this time is take care of the kids, complete the to-do list she handed him and pay the bills when they come in.

This form, though painful, is at least straightforward and less fraught with mental anguish. The mental stress is mostly of the form of finding ways to pay the bills or to find unobtrusive ways to curb the spending. Or to think up excuses for an inadequate number of checks appearing on the to-do list while she was toiling away in the malls and you caught a nap or worse, watched a game on TV.

You generally end the process with the same number of neurons that you started off with (discounting of course the natural ebb and flow).

A more virulent form that shopping takes is the "collaborative" one.

The logic followed here is "I like shopping; I like spending time with you. Let me combine these two and have twice the fun." This simple bit of logic hides ramifications that can render your mind jelly, your intellect curdled and your will to live slipping away from your tenuous grasp.

It starts with an innocuous "I want to show you some stuff before I buy it." And then the show starts - a succession of clothes, tops, shorts, skirts, trousers, shoes, socks, hairbands, t-shirts, glasses, dark glasses...a parade where she zooms into a shop, swoops down on a bunch of clothes, spies the offers and deals, gathers a bushel of clothes and hops on to the fitting rooms with instructions to me to be "around". And once in there she is like a quick change artist - zooming in and out of clothes and accessories asking me whether it looks nice (it does...everything does) or doesn't (nothing looks not nice). These trifling questions I can manage.

What follows is enough to short circuit your brain.

The first dreaded question is, "Is this nicer than that?" There are two problems to furnishing an answer.

One, I am aesthetically challenged. I can tell colours apart, but am at a loss when asked whether blue goes well with orange or not. My feeble attempts at "matching" clothes left me looking like a runaway member of the Blue Man Group. I have since given it up.

Two, for the life of me I don't know what "that" is. "That" could be anything from what she tried two minutes ago, to something she tried in the last shop to something she tried two weeks ago in a different city to something she bought in the summer of 1994 from a huge sale at an exclusive store at some European city and "that" has not seen the light of day since the autumn of the same year.

Early on in our marriage, I tried to bluff my way through. "Yes, this is nicer."

"Nicer than the blue? Are you sure? Could you get me the blue? I want to see them together."

There. I got caught. I had no clue what "Blue" was now. I once gathered every piece of blue clothing I could see. But "Blue" wasn't there.

The general routine is: go into a shop, gather about 17 pieces of clothing. Wear one, ask my opinion, pirouette in front of the mirror. Change. The questions run thus:

"Does this make me look fat?" I learnt the answer to this one early - Nothing makes a woman look fat.

"Do I need this?" Again the answer to this has been learnt the hard way, but now is committed to my memory. "It looks nice."

This deflects from the question while being something in the vicinity of the context of the conversation. Usually it works. Sometimes it doesn't.

When it doesn't, there is an insistent, "Do I need it?"

The second answer is a careful pause (I count to 15 in my head and crease my forehead while staring at the item in question) "I think you should buy it." This is the last card I have.

Because on rare occasions there is the final counter to this answer "Where will I wear it?"

I still have not mastered the correct answer to this one...I have tried "When you go out", "When we go out", "To Office", "When we go dancing", to whatever.

After years of analyzing the questions and answers, I have reached the conclusion that there is no correct answer to this question. It is a sounder. It is asked to ensure that the answerer is alert and thinking, for the answer can lead to anything. From "When was the last time YOU took me out to a nice place" to "Ok".

The entire shopping experience is one of walking on eggshells. Basically guessing what the answer should be. Since according to the wife, shopping should be a 'shared' experience (I don't see how since the dress bought is not a 'shared' article of clothing). So, ideally we should both like a dress because of the same reasons. She is not content with the only reason I have to like it. That she likes it.

So walking on eggshells it is.

"How is this dress?"

"It is nice"

"Does it show my tummy?"

"No, I don't think so."

The basic conversation comes with two alternate endings:

Ending One: Don't buy dress

"What is this?" (Tries holding said tummy)

"Yeah, you are right, maybe it does show your tummy."

"See, I told you it doesn't fit right." (_ _ _)

Ending Two: Keep dress in consideration set

"I thought it would look nice. Does it look nice?"

"Yeah, I think you should buy it."

"Ok, So I'll keep it - I need to show you two others (in some other store) and then we can decide." (_ _ _)

After all this, we might not end up buying any because of last minute doubts. There has to be a very fine balance between the time spent with a dress else familiarity starts to breed the all too common contempt. So my job essentially is to allow her the bare minimum time with a dress to allow her to like the dress, but not too much to dislike it. After all, a purchase made is a small victory.

But heaven forbid the dress does not meet the exacting standards once we reach home...it immediately and irrevocably becomes my fault, added to the list of things I ought not to have done that I am convinced my wife spends time committing to memory each day - she has them down pat at the drop of a hat. And trust me the hat drops very frequently.

Raajneeti

Went and watched Raajneeti a few days ago. Again, a much anticipated movie, directed by Mr. Prakash Jha who generally turns out movies that are quite watchable. Mrityudand, Damul and Hip Hip Hurray! were others from his stable.

Raajneeti is one of the few movies I know that was well shot, the acting was fine, the story of Mahabharat meets Godfather with a nod to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty was pretty strong as well and yet the movie managed the trick of giving you a hollow feeling tempered with relief that it was over.

There are some things one remembers from a movie and they seem to define what you feel about the movie.

For one, Raajneeti seemed to be full of one shot wonders. Any couple who had sex in the movie ended up with the woman getting pregnant. Awesome! I guess it also to some extent accounts for the 1 billion plus people we have - just means that India is full of crack shots. Coincidentally, shooting also happens to be the only individual gold we have ever won at the Olympics (as of the 2008 Beijng Games).

Another thing is that the movie had no songs. Throughout the movie I do not remember a single instance when folks dropped what they were doing and sang a song. Nobody sang. In my book that alone is worth a star in the rating points.

Third, there is a poignant scene in the movie where a mother faces her long lost son - one she pined for (minorly) and one that she never saw. She reveals the fact that she is his birth mother and asks him to come over to the side of her legitimate sons, his over-my-dead-body opponents. People would recognize him as Karna and the lady in question as Kunti from the Mahabharat. It is a powerful sequence in the epic. In the movie theatre, the entire audience was in splits. Maybe due to the extremely peculiar expression that the actress wore for the duration of the scene. Or due to the fact that the despite the movie being set in Modern India, this one scene had language heard solely on tacky period TV shows.

And then we come to the ending - underwhelming and a bit pointless. After all the Machiavellian manipulations and over-portrayed politico-gangland street violence in the movie I could not figure out why a shootout was engineered to kill the bad guy, why when all they had to do was to wait and he'd do the job himself. Maybe it was a nod to Duryodhan's slaying in the Mahabharat. Maybe it was something else. But I missed the point of it.

Compressing something of the scale of the Mahabharat into a couple of hours takes some doing and while Mr. Jha's attempt is commendable, you come away with the feeling that it is not 'done'. I can't put my finger on what is missing, but the major drawback is that the movie doesn't compel me to look for it either. I am glad it is over and that's that.

Katrina does well, but they could have hired a better speechwriter.
Nana Patekar for a change does not play himself.
Arjun Rampal does a good Sonny Corleone.
Manoj Bajpai starts off well, as always, but his slide into caricature-dom is terminal in the latter half of the movie.
Ajay Devgun plays himself. expected, I guess.

In all the movie there was one bit that I really liked - the lure for getting Manoj Bajpai to the shootout: they are changing ballot results from the new electronic voting machines over the internet. Awesome!

The Relationship Scorecard

Women keep a scorecard. There is a mental checklist that keeps ticking in their head and there are points assigned to each and every thing you do. If you are in a relationship with a woman, you have probably encountered this. Maybe you caught on, maybe you didn't. To me it was like an epiphany - sort of what happened to Jake in the Blues Brothers, minus the light at the end. I just realized that the system is unbeatable. It is made for you to lose.

The basic tenets of the system are that you can win a maximum of 10 points for something outrageously outstanding that you did. 10 points. Sounds like a perfect score.
So you get up in the morning, go to the 24 hour store (nothing else is open at this unearthly hour) and buy stuff to make a pancake. You come back home and spend the next hour or so making pancakes instead of joyous slumber (oh! what a glorious start to the weekend) and serve pancakes in bed. Of course assuming she happens to like pancakes and you don't spill anything in bed bringing them over. If all goes well, you will earn 10 points. Yes, the perfect score - the number that made umpteen footballers and Nadia Comaneci famous. You feel good - for the next 3 seconds.

The points you earned have not won you anything. They have possibly been used to cancel out the black marks you earned or continuously earn.

Black marks have the same inherent value as a positive point. But they can only be earned in multiples of 50 or 100 or 500. you can never earn one black mark. If you do something that warrants a black mark, you will earn 50 at the very least. One black mark is strictly a theoretical concept.

Earning black marks is a ridiculously easy thing to do. You can earn black marks simply by being sometimes. For example you bought a new home theatre system. You spent the next couple of hours setting it up so that the TV, the cable, the game console and the home theatre are all linked. You stand back to admire your work, looking forward to a well earned spell on the couch when you are informed that there are wires.
"Of course there are wires. The thing needs wires to function." (-50 points)
"I mean I can see the wires."
"There are wires, that's why you can see them" (Clever, but -50 again)
"They look ugly"
"All wires look the same - these are the normal black wires" (-100 points)
"I don't want to see them"
"Ok, I'll remove them" (0 points since you were asked to do it anyway)

To me, this would be a single incident. I have gained 200 black marks for ugly wires been seen. If I make the wires disappear at that very moment, I will stand at -200 points. If I take my well-deserved (according to me) rest and watch TV for a while with the new sound effects, my negative points will go into an exponential negative points generator.
So fast forward to next week and the wires are still visible. My feeble attempts at pushing them behind the TV console with the TV remote (after telekinesis failed) have been stoutly resisted by the wires.

Wife walks in. "I can still see the ugly wires. We are having guests tomorrow. They better not have to see the wires."

I get visions of the guests walking in and being transfixed by the wires, forgetting to eat and drink and when we finally pry them off the furniture and make them leave our apartment they leave their souls behind horribly entangled in the wires. Oh and by the way, I have earned 500 black marks for her having to see the wires again. The protection afforded by the previous 200 having expired.

If the guests so happen to "see" the wires (tell me, do you go looking for wires in folks' living rooms when you go meet people?) it would be -5,000 points. And from then on each time she sees the wires it would be a negative 1000 points and then a while later every time you breathe it will remind her of the wires that everyone can see and the counter becomes unstoppable. So you see, if you have been married, you have no hopes whatsoever of staying in the black as far as points are concerned.

The same principle does not work with positive points though. There is no 'positive point accelerator'. Even though both positive points and negative points share the same inherent value, their behaviour could not be more different. While black marks go at it like rabbits in heat with a single mating pair capable of covering the earth with it's progeny in a relatively short period of time, positive points are solitary monks. They don't bond, don't procreate and have an amazing ability to get lost in the hustle and bustle of modern living.

Taking the pancake example further, the first weekend you made pancakes, you might earn 10 points. The next weekend, the same nifty trick would earn you only 5 (even if the pancakes were much better). the weekend after that you'd be lucky to get one. The following weekend, if you made pancakes again, you'd be in the red. If you slept on and didn't make anything. You'd be in the red too.

So face it you cannot win.

This then brings us to the question of how to keep women happy once you have acquired them (or truth be told, you have been acquired).

No one knows the answer to this.

Note: throughout this piece I have used the terms 'black mark' and 'negative points' interchangeably.