Soon after our first “date” (we didn’t know when we were going to meet that it was going to be a “date” that would ultimately lead to marriage), the person who is now my wife wrote a cute blogpost titled “Karabath Series“.
In that she had written about “arranged louvvu”, and went on to write this:
First step is to keep your eyes open to delicious and nutritious tharkaris(potential marriage material girls/boys). Then, somehow through some network, make someone set you two up. Third, interact. with tact. Fourth, put meet. or beat. Fifth, this can go in three ways now. First, is a no. Definite no. Second, yes. Full yes. Third, Yes, but not yet. This is a lucrative possibility which gives super scope to put more meets, learn about each others funny faces, food tastes, sense of humour, patience, sense of dressing, chappliying, smells, etc
The fourth point is key, and it was amply clear to me after reading it that it was aimed at me. For a few days before this was written, we had met, and “put beat” (as they say in Bangalore parlance).
We had sort of been “google talk friends” for two years then, and “orkut friends” for three. I had been in the arranged marriage market, and I had out of the blue suggested that we meet. After a little song and dance about whether meeting would be appropriate or not, the discussion went on to where to meet.
This is when she mentioned we could “simply walk around Gandhi Bazaar together”. Things moved fast after that. We met in front of Vidyarthi Bhavan at 4 o’clock on the long weekend Monday, and then started walking. Two hours of walking around Basavanagudi later, we stopped at a Cafe Coffee Day (now closed) to sit for a bit and have coffee. Five years later I documented what we’ve now retrofitted as our “first date” here.
This is not a “personal” post. This is yet another post about how the world might change after the covid crisis. It just has a long preamble, that’s all.
One of the things that is going to suffer after the crisis is over is cafes. I’d written in my post on verandahs about how cafes have served well as good “third places” to meet people. That option is not going to be too much of an option going forward, for even after cafes reopen, people will be loathe to go there and sit in close proximity to strangers.
now i'm worried. will people continue to want to go to CCD once we restart fully?
i suspect we'll (at least in Bnagalore) have more open-air CCDs.
— Karthik (@karthiks) May 9, 2020
So how do we do “general catchups”? How do we do dates? How do we discuss business ideas with people? The solution for all this lies in what we ended up doing on our first date. I don’t claim we invented it. Well before we went on this date, journalist Shekhar Gupta had started this series on NDTV called “walk the talk”.
What do you do? You just meet at an agreed place, pick up something to munch on or drink, and start walking. You can take side roads to make sure there isn’t too much traffic. The length of the walk can vary based on how interesting you find each other, and how much time you have.
The best part of meeting someone while walking is that there are no awkward silences. Rather, since you aren’t looking at each other constantly, the silences won’t be awkward. When you run out of things to talk about, there will be some visual stimulus by something you walk by. What’s not to like?
The only issue with walking and talking is that it might be an excellent idea for Bangalore, but not so much for a lot of other cities. Delhi and Bombay, for example, are impossible to step outside in for at least the summer. Maybe in those places we’ll end up having heavily “air cooled” or heavily fanned outdoor places.
It’s not for nothing that the phrase “putting beat” (for aimlessly walking around) was invented in Bangalore.