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?