Right Mr.Wrong

I am very grateful to the God for not making me a young woman, because all young women go through a very difficult problem in life. How do they select a right man as their companion? If I were a young woman, I would have found it extremely difficult to choose such a person. As the image above says, most of the women today settle with the rightest person from the whole lot of Mr.Wrongs. "He is not good, but he is the best, what to do" etc.

But, I may also be wrong. What do I know about today's young women? Nothing. In my good old days, all the young women wanted from their man was to be good! As long as they don't drink and have decent income and can take care of the family (which means just hanging around the house), the women are fine with their man.

But, I am afraid, the expectations of today's young woman are quite high. On the one hand, they want their men to share responsibility in the kitchen (preposterous!) and in raising kids (dangerous!!). On the other hand, I also learnt recently that most of the young women studying in colleges want their men to work somewhere in North America or Australia (even after racial attacks?). They also want their men to be independent (read Live as far away as possible from his parents). I would not have believed such notions, but I talked to a girl who mentioned that almost all their classmates shared her view and this is the most popular choice. And, she was from a Grade-B town only, and not from any metro, mind you!

With these expectations, all they have to settle for is a right Mr.Wrong that is all. "He is working only in Kenya, but what to do, that is as far away as we can go!" or "He is in West Coast. All my friends are in the East Coast, what to do; I will somehow adjust..." etc.

New Look for Musings

Chose a new look for Musings. Hope all of you like it. Hoping to keep it changing once in a while. Just to confuse you all.

Argentina will win world cup!

World cup fever is every where. Got this information from one of the IRMA classmates, with an advice to quit stressing over the winner of the FIFA World Cup! Read it!

A Zulu sangoma, after a night of dreams and consultations with the ancestors, looks into the future to see the winner of the 2010 World Cup.
The 70-year-old fortune teller, a cheerful lady called Constance, plays a critical role in Zulu culture, blessed with special powers to heal and divine the future. But she was mighty hard to find.

A two-day search aided by street sellers and shop owners in the southern city of Port Elizabeth had produced nothing but a series of false dawns.

It appeared one needed a sangoma to find a sangoma.

Then a toothless lady of indeterminate age kneading dough on a pavement beside a taxi rank suggested trying a muthi herbal specialist off Govan Mbeki Road. The shop, an Aladdin's cave of pills and potions and ointments, had a high counter behind which were two people. One, a man, had his face painted in tribal warpaint. The other, a woman, was Constance.

"You've made it," she smiled, as if she had been expecting the visit all the time.

After negotiating her fee, Constance opened a door into a storeroom packed with sacks of dried roots and animal hides hanging from a makeshift washing line. Through a curtain at the back was her "office" -- with a frayed floral couch, more bags of herbs and plant extracts, and shelves crammed with somewhat incongruous tins of Jeyes Fluid household cleaner.

"I use all this to make my medicines," she said, easing her generous frame into a chair beside, which was a small table with incense and a yellow candle. "When someone comes to me and wants me to help them with trouble in their life or look into the future, I get them to light this candle. That way I can see through them, I can see what the problem is," she explained.

"I help cure people who are mad or who have AIDS using 'muthi'."

Constance has been a sangoma for 12 years. "My father and my sister were sangomas, and when they died they came to me in a dream and told me 'you have to be a sangoma now'," she said.

"I didn't want to, but they made me ill. They hit me with sticks, I couldn't walk. They sent me into the sea for seven days to sleep. When I woke up I accepted to become a sangoma. I went away to train for one year. Then my ancestors came back to me and said 'you can finish the training now, you are a sangoma'. I then slaughtered five goats and one cow."

Asked about the World Cup, Constance shuts her eyes, as if asleep, in meditation, then opens them sharply. "All the teams here are strong, but I have to consult my ancestors, I have to ask them what they think, and they will tell me in my dream tonight. Come back tomorrow, and I will have your answer."


The next day, Constance is again waiting behind the counter, with the answer not to eternity but almost as important.

"Argentina will win the World Cup."

Let us see if this Sangoma was right...

Man and Wife

Men are too selfish. And insensitive too, I am told. For all the love and affection poured on them by their (respective) wives, see how they reciprocate that. They dare not say such things to their wives in their faces, I am sure.

This is how all their woes seem to have started ...

An old man goes to the Wizard to ask him if he can remove a curse he has been living with for the last 40 years.

The Wizard says, 'Maybe, but you will have to tell me the exact words that were used to put the curse on you.'

The old man says without hesitation, 'I now pronounce you man and wife.'

Nor do they say some kind words even after their wives are gone.

The graveside service just barely finished, when there was massive clap of thunder, followed by a tremendous bolt of lightning, accompanied by even more thunder rumbling in the distance...

The little old man looked at the pastor and calmly said, 'Well, she's there.'

But, some men seem to have got spirituality from their wives.

'My wife got me to believe in religion.'

'Really?'

'Yeah. Until I married her I didn't believe in Hell.'

But, the most atrocious thing is that they even think that everyone else thinks like them!!

A doctor examining a woman who had been rushed to the Emergency Room, took the husband aside, and said, 'I don't like the looks of your wife at all.'

'Me neither doc,' said the husband. 'But she's a great cook and really good with the kids.'

Do you agree that these men are quite representative of all the other males in the world?

Asking for Directions

While growing up as a child, I did not know about this peculiar trait of men - Not asking for directions! We did not have any cars in the world. There were only ambassador cars and they were all owned by Government officials. Otherwise only super rich people had cars. What went on in their world is beyong our reach.

But, now that every house seems to be having a car, this handicap of men is becoming all too obvious. While women are accused of 'back seat driving' and 'instructing the husband to drive this way or that', men seem to have a pathological aversion to admit that they are lost.


Is it ego or we don't want to admit our deficiencies in front of the wife and kids? Whatever it is, poor souls normally end up having a fit when finally you land up in alaska or somewhere, when you actually intended to go to the other end of Bangalore. I don't know how to drive a vehicle; and I don't think in this incarnation, I am going to learn it. But, I don't have this hang up of not asking directions - in spite of being a male species.

As a young man, while doing project work in unknown big places, I used to love the challenge of reaching any place just with an address. Travelling hundreds of kilometres by bus-hopping and finally ending up in the required office at Mumbai once and then, giving a surprise darshan to Gouthami and Rema in Kadapa and Madanapalli respectively, yes, reaching Rema's house in Alleppey for her wedding... all with just a piece of paper with the postal address - asking numerous people in my broken Hindi, Telugu and Malayalam as the case may be ... those adventures and successes still are fresh in my mind.

Does the feathered world also has this gender disparity? One of the amazing things about nature is birds flying thousands of kilometres (non-stop, mind it!) and reaching the exact tree in which they stayed the previous year. The one in the cartoon below may be a male pigeon, may be...

Elephants and many other animals too are known to migrate over long distances. I am sure there will be lot of acrimonious exchanges between the wife-elephant and the husband-elephant about taking the wrong turns, not asking the passing deer about the correct location or 'doesn't this dry bush look familiar?' or ' last time, when I came, there was a purple tree in this corner. It seems to have been eaten up by the jungle goat' or some such thing. And, finally, the wife-elephant dejectedly telling the son-elephant and daughter-elephant, "this is why I never come with your father; if we had listened to my mother's directions, we would have reached home long ago, finished dinner and gone off to sleep by now!"

I wonder who is asking direction in the photograph above? The driver or the bear?