There’s a lot of amazing content she puts out through all these channels, but I must say that I got especially blown away by this one video that she has put up recently. It is a conversation with Urvashi Goverdhan, an actor and model, about “how to get the first date”.
So you might be single and wondering how you can chat up someone of the opposite sex (or in the interest of diversity, should I say “gender that you want to partner with”?). And if you are like what I was until 2009, you have no clue how to do it.
Most of the time you play over conservative and miss out on opportunities. Sometimes you might decide to go aggressive, but do it all wrong (as I kept doing through most of the 2000s), and count yourself lucky that your “target” decides that physically harming you or shaming you is not worth their time.
If you are like that (and I was like that till at least August 2009 – if you’re not convinced go read my blog archives. Everything about my life from 2004 onwards is well documented here), then I strongly urge you to listen to this conversation, as these two wonderful ladies talk about what women look out for in men, and what men need to do to get women’s attention in a nice manner.
Watching this now, I so strongly wish that I had seen this 11-15 years back. I would have been able to make very good use of it back then. Then again, if I had seen this video and been able to make good use of it back in the day, then there is a strong likelihood that I may not have met the person who is now my wife at all (some of you might know – we met through this blog, and then Orkut, and then chatted for long enough that when we met, it was a “qualified lead” that I was able to convert).
It is a long video, but completely worth your time. So go ahead and watch it in full. Oh, and you should subscribe to the Marriage Broker Auntie Youtube channel as well, if you haven’t already.
Still not convinced that you should watch the video pasted above? Here are some pointers I gathered, all from the first 10 minutes of the video:
If a boy is in a group that already has girls, then there is a higher chance of other girls wanting to talk to him
Pick up lines don’t work. At all.
When you repeatedly make eye contact with someone, smile. Don’t stare.
Well, you didn’t expect a relationships newsletter named after a game theoretic algorithm, did you? In any case, the wife has started one such, and I strongly urge you to subscribe.
The first edition, published today, is awesome, and I’m not saying this because it was my impression with this kind of awesomeness that took both of us out of the relationship and marriage market. Sample this:
You could just go onto a dating/ matrimonial website, set your preferences and end up with 100s of matches. But it mostly only worked for NRI boys in the US trying to find domestic help from India. It wasn’t too common for resident Indians to find each other on these sites in the 90s.
Or:
They’re the types who’ll be too shy to tell you they met their partner on one of these sites as if it was admission of failure. They’ll pretend like they “dated” for a while and got married, but truly, there’s no way to know who they really dated – the spouse, the parents or the random relative who created their profile on these sites.
You can subscribe to the newsletter here. I’m told this will go out once a week.
It’s a little over seven years ago that we got married. It was a traditional Hindu ceremony. It was so traditional that we began at around 11am and finished with a ceremonial lunch only around 5:30 pm. And tradition meant that the priests hurried through the mantras, not bothering to explain what they were supposed to say (it’s another matter that had they bothered to stop and explain, we would’ve been getting married for another two days).
It was later that I got to know that some of those mantras were rather insightful, though archaic and backward if you go by modern sensibilities. Like this one Mantra the search for which led me to a website titled “6 noble virtues of an ideal wife“. As the website explains, it is from “Neeti Saara”, written by a Telugu poet Baddena in 13th century (yes, some of the wedding rituals are only 800 years old).
I won’t go into explaining these “noble virtues” here, but as I look back at our seven years of marriage, I realise that Pinky has been a brilliant wife. And she has done so while either studying or keeping a (mostly demanding) full time job for most of the duration of our marriage.
I’m reminded of the time when we lived in Rajajinagar, when I was working as an independent management consultant. I would work from home, and having disposed of our cook a few months earlier, I had the task of making my own lunch.
Pinky would have none of it. She would wake up at 5:30 and painstakingly make tall stacks of chapatis (I was going through one of those “I don’t want to eat rice” phases at that time) before she ran to catch her factory bus, so that I could have a good meal. And the dutiful husband I was, I’d finish the full day’s quota in the afternoon itself which meant she would be forced to cook again once she was back after a tiring day and 40-kilometre commute.
I’m also reminded of the time earlier this year when we’d moved to London and I hadn’t yet figured out what I was going to do here. Pinky not only supported our family financially, but also ferry Berry all the way into town each day so that I could figure out life, possibly find a job and finish my book. And on most days it would be Pinky who would cook dinner after another long commute (usually with a screaming baby).
During my consulting life, every time I had to strike a deal or go through a tough negotiation, I would turn to Pinky. Each time she would unfailingly help me sort out my demons and give me sage advice. On several occasions she saved me from pricing too low. When she would see that I was getting into a bad deal, she would firmly pull me back.
She was insanely supportive when in late 2011 I decided to quit my job and lead a portfolio life. She would find her own cute ways of supporting me in every endeavour, like buying me a new fancy notebook when I was going to meet my first prospective big client, or trying to find me a fancy water bottle prior to my bike trip across Rajasthan.
When I would wake up at 4am to catch the first flight out to see outstation clients, she would wake up along with me, make coffee for me and polish my shoes. On two such occasions she wasn’t around. I almost missed my flight on one of those occasions, and missed my flight on the other!
From time to time she plans fun activities for us to do together, like the time she took me to the A-Paul-ogy art gallery, or when she took me for a Japanese meal to Matsuri and totally bossed the menu (before I knew it she’d ordered a host of dishes which made for a wonderful and complete meal!).
In some senses, I feel I haven’t held up my side of the bargain at times. One thing she absolutely enjoys is for us to watch movies together, but we almost never do that since I don’t generally have the patience to watch movies. She would love to spend a Friday evening cuddling on the couch watching something together, but I prefer to be on my computer instead. She loves being surprised, but my ineptitude means that on most occasions I’ve tried it’s been a shock rather than a surprise.
And then I have my occasional bouts of extreme anger, and she’s borne the brunt of it on several occasions. Usually it involves shouting (I’m an absolute shouter and love to went out my frustrations; she’s the quiet types) and I have to try hard to not get violent at times (on some occasions I don’t succeed in restraining myself). On some occasions it starts with something seemingly silly. On others, I fuck up like crazy. Either ways, it occasionally gets ugly – something I’m definitely not proud about.
I know I have driven her insane. I know that my negativity and NED has rubbed off on her. It is normal for a married couple to influence and change each other, and I know I’ve changed her in ways she absolutely hates.
Yet she’s always been the forgiving sorts. She’s stood by me thick and thin through the seven years of our marriage. Thanks to her adventures during her MBA, I’ve managed to increase my country count (and also got to move to a new country!).
And she’s been a wonderful mother to Berry. One old friend who met Pinky for the first time last year later told me, “man, she is so sorted!”. She remains cool, and seemingly without taking much stress, has managed to turn Berry into a bright and naughty toddler – I’ve mostly been a freerider! Oh, and do you know that she writes an absolutely delightful letter to Berry each month?
It’s mostly been a wonderful seven years with Pinky so far! I know we’ve had the odd low moment, and I want to take this opportunity to apologise to her for that. But in my mind, these have been far far outweighed by all the wonderful times we’ve been through, and all the fun we’ve had together! I hope to get another seventy such wonderful years with this wonderful woman!
And for after that, there’s this:
PS: The more perceptive of the readers here will know that this blog (its predecessor, rather) played a not insignificant part in us meeting. One of the posts that drew her attention, and which got us talking was this.
But more practically, I think it’s impossible to louvvu someone unless you have lots of similar interests, and that also means lots of similar ambitions. And in that sense my wife and I have shared quite a few ambitions.
First we wanted to become celebrity bloggers. Then (ok the order gets messed up here) there was the MBA. And before all this there is Ganeshana Maduve (which we re-watched perhaps for the 50th time this weekend).
And adding to all this, there’s the desire to write in newspapers. I remember that over a decade ago I wanted to regularly write in newspapers, and about “policy issues”. I didn’t follow up on that ambition, of course, but through lots of twists and turns and happy coincidences meant that I started writing for Mint in 2013, and some of the stuff I’ve written there are about “policy issues”.
And the wife has had similar ambitions as well, though her methods have been vastly different, and much more focussed. She’s always wanted to write a column on relationships. Rather, she first wanted to be a relationship blogger, and then a relationship columnist, and she’s gone about the process with single-minded ambition.
So, first there was the MarriageBrokerAuntie blog (now hosted here). Then it turned into a Facebook page. It even led to a business that she ran during her maternity and post-childbirth periods (imagine running a business while nursing a tiny baby). And now she’s in the papers. Yay!
It so happens that it’s the same paper that I write for. And it also happens that the edition of the paper where it was published (Mint on Sunday) also happened to carry an excerpt from my book two-three weeks back. And that also happened to be about relationships.
So a long long time ago, a couple of days after we’d first met, she had written about “Arranged Louvvu“. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first piece she’s written for Mint is about “Love, and other arrangements“. It’s about dating apps, and how what they lead to is not “real love” and it’s no different from “other arrangements”. That people think arranged marriage is uncool, but dating apps lead to basically arranged relationships. And so on.
Read the whole thing, it’s damn well written. Oh, and it features 1-6-1 calls, Panchatantra and George Akerlof’s “market for lemons”, among other stud fundaes.
Now the only thing left is for Berry to start writing for Mint. They don’t have a children’s issue (where they feature drawings, poems, etc. written by kids) so I guess she’ll have to wait a while. But I’m damn hopeful!
In any case, for now massive pride is happening on account of the wife!
So I have a problem. I can’t seem to enjoy movies any more. I’ve written about this before. My basic problem is that I end up double-guessing the plots of most movies that I watched (how many storylines are there anyways? According to Kurt Vonnegut, there are six story arcs).
So as I watch movies, I know exactly what is going to happen. And just continuing to watch the movie waiting for that to happen is simply a waste of time – it adds no information content to me.
The result is that I’m extremely selective about the kinds of movies I watch. Some genres, such as Westerns, work because even if the stories may be predictable, the execution and the manner of execution are not, and that makes for interesting watching.
Then, of course, there are directors who have built up a reputation of being “offbeat”, where you can expect that their movies don’t follow expected story arcs – their movies have enough information content to make them worth watching.
And most “classic” movies (take any of the IMDB Top 250, for example) have stories that are told in an extremely compelling fashion – sometimes you might know what happens, but the way things are built up implies that you don’t want to miss watching it happening.
Now, all this is fine, and something I’ve written about before. The point of this post is that while I feel this way about movies, my wife doesn’t feel the same way. She watches pretty much anything, even if the stories are utterly predictable.
For example, she’s watched at least a 100 Telugu movies (though, admittedly, during a particularly jobless stretch in her MBA when she was watching loads of movies, even she got bored of the predictability of Telugu movies and switched to Tamil instead!). She likes to watch endless reruns of 90s Kannada movies that now appear rather lame (to me). She especially loves chick flicks, which I think have excess redundancy built into them for a very specific reason.
I don’t have a problem with any of this! In fact, I’m damn happy that she has a single-player hobby that enables her to keep herself busy when she’s bored. The only little problem I have is that she believes it is romantic to watch movies together. She might sell video for Amazon for a living, but she surely is a fan of “netflix and chill” (more the literal meaning than the euphemistic one).
And that is a problem for me, since I find the vast majority of movies boring and predictable, and she thinks the kind of movies I like are “too serious” and “not suitable for watching together” – an assessment I don’t disagree with (though I did make her watch For a Few Dollars More with me a couple of months back).
I’d prefer to spend our time together not spent in talking doing other activities – reading, for example (reading offers significantly higher throughput than movies, and that, I think, is a result of formats of several lengths being prevalent – newspaper articles, longform articles, books, etc.). I’ve offered to watch movies with her on the condition that I read something at the same time – an offer that has been soundly rejected (and I understand her reasons for that).
And so we reach a deadlock, and it repeats every time when we have time and want to chill. She wants to watch movies together. I initially agree, and then back out when presented with a choice of movies to watch. Sometimes I put myself through it, thoroughly not enjoying the process. Other times, much to her disappointment, we end up not watching.
Every once in a while, we talk about (in some wonder and amazement) how we came to meet each other, and eventually got married. Most of it is usually the same story, (chinese-whispers induced much-mauled) versions of which are known to quite a few people. But each time we talk about it, there’s something new that comes forth, which makes the discussion enlightening.
So the part about how we first got talking is well-established. Priyanka was excited to find Manu, a distant relative of hers, on Orkut. From his Orkut page, she landed at his website, where back then there was a list of “blogs I follow” (in the standard of mid-2000s websites).
And from there she ended up at my blog (the predecessor of this blog), where she chanced upon this one-line post:
noticed a funny thing at the loo in office today. a number of people tie their janavaaras (sacred thread) around their ears while peeing or crapping!!
She got interested and started reading, and presently landed at this post. Then she started her own blog, scrapped me on Orkut and then disappeared after I’d scrapped her back. And so it went.
A year and half later I saw her at Landmark Quiz, and she messaged me a few days later (when I didn’t know it was the same cute chick I’d seen at the quiz) asking if I remembered her and giving me a puzzle, and then we got added to each other on GTalk, and got talking.
Cut the story two years forward, and we met for the first time in Gandhi Bazaar in 2009. A day later, I wrote this blogpost on “Losing Heart“.
Yesterday I met a friend, an extremely awesome woman. Once I was back home, I sent a mail to my relationship advisor, detailing my meeting with this friend. And I described her (the awesome friend) as being “super CMP”. I wrote in the mail “I find her really awesome. In each and every component she clears the CMP cutoff by a long way”. That’s how I’ve become. I’ve lost it. I’ve lost my heart. And I need to find it back. And I don’t know if I should continue in the arranged scissors market.
And a couple of days later I apparently told her I liked her (I don’t remember this, and our GTalk conversations had gone “off the record” then, so there is no evidence).
And today’s conversation revealed that Priyanka completely misunderstood my “losing heart” post and assumed that I didn’t like her. In her hurry of reading my post (perhaps), she had assumed that I had “lost heart” after meeting her, and had taken it to mean that she was unattractive in whatever way.
Then, when I told her a couple of days later that I liked her, it was a massive boost to her confidence, which had been (rather unintentionally) “pushed down” by way of my blog post.
She had been skeptical of meeting me in the first place, afraid that I’d turn out like “another of those online creeps who hits on you the first time he meets you”, and said that if I’d directly told her I liked her after meeting her, she would’ve got similarly creeped out and never married me. But coming after the blog post that had pushed her confidence down, my telling her that I liked her was enough of a confidence boost to her that she stopped seeing me as “yet another online creep”. There’s more to the story, but we ended up getting married.
From my point of view, the moral of this story, or at least the part that I discovered during our conversation today, is that women are like edge-triggered rather than level-triggered flipflops (the wife is an electrical engineer so I can get away with making such comparisons in normal conversation).
The reason Priyanka liked me is that something I told her caused an instant and massive boost in her self-esteem. The level to which it was raised to wasn’t as important as the extent by which it was raised. And she said that it’s a standard case with all women – it’s the delta to their self-esteem that turns them on rather than the level.
She went on to say that this is a rather standard trick in “the game” – to push down the potential partner’s self-esteem or confidence so that you can raise it by a large extent in the next move and win them over. I admit to having no clue of this back in 2009 (or even now). But like in a typical comedy movie, I had unwittingly stumbled into a great strategy!
I might have mentioned multiple times on this blog that my wife thinks I don’t blog enough about her. She has told me that after reading my blog, she had assumed that I’d be writing tomes to her like I did to some of the women I was hitting on earlier in life, and that on this count I’ve severely disappointed her.
In my defence, I’ve said that I don’t write about her because there is “no angst“. On other occasions, I’ve looked at the blogposts I wrote in the early days after I first met her, and found that most of my posts around the time were about her. And despite her protests that I don’t write about her, she gets intermittent mentions on this blog.
So as is my usual habit, I was going through some old blogposts today, and the discovery of the day is that I’d actually blogged about my wife on the day we first saw each other. And this was long long before we had met!
In the early days of our meeting, I remember Priyanka telling me that she had first seen me at the Bangalore Landmark Quiz in 2007, which was incidentally a couple of months before we chatted (on Yahoo! Messenger) for the first time. I’d always maintained that I hadn’t noticed her at that quiz. Until I saw this blogpost today.
Based on some details mentioned in this blogpost, I realise that I had actually seen the-person-who-is-my-wife on that day, and that I had actually found her cute. I had compared her to another cute chick I’d seen at the same quiz two years earlier, however, and this anchor meant I downplayed her on my blog.
From my blogpost:
Both times, there was A cute chick I saw just before the quiz… Both times, the cute chick i’d seen before quiz sat at the same place. Fourth or fifth row from front. Towards the right of the audience. Ideal position for me to put eye contact during the finals…
…
This time I’m not writing any letter to the chick-of-the-day. i didn’t find her as impressive as the one i’d seen two years back. Or maybe the novelty factor of seeing a chick at a quiz has worn off… But I’m unlikely to put blade…
I realise this doesn’t sound terribly charitable to the person who is now my wife, but it is documentary evidence that I did write about her the first time I saw her! So this deserves further documentation!
And apart from providing such documentation, that blogpost is of extremely poor quality, and I’m not proud of it at all. Seems more like a rant than an honest blog-post.
Priyanka has just finished her course at IESE today. She’ll be collecting her degree (and she insists it’s a “proper degree”, unlike my similar “degree” which is actually a diploma) exactly two weeks from now.
Feeling damn proud of her. I remember her telling me in one of our very early phone conversations (this was in 2009, barely a couple of weeks after we had first met) that she wanted to do an MBA, and do it from a top-ranking global business school.
I’m damn happy that she’s overcome all odds (and she faced a lot of them in the last two years) and achieved her life-long dream. She had made a “life plan” for herself when she was 17 which involved her doing an MBA when she was 27 (or something like that). And that’s been ticked off now, and I really admire her ability to plan for a long time!
The other day I was asking her how her MBA had changed her, and she said that the main impact has been that she doesn’t care about bullet points anymore!
Readers of this blog might have noticed that I have an above-average long-term memory, and frequently indulge in “this daythat year” exercises. While I have blogged about it a couple of times in the past, I do this practically every day – wonder what happened on that day in a previous year.
There are some anniversaries that are special, though. And there is no particular number – the special anniversaries are those where both date and day of week coincide. This usually happens at a frequency of five or six years (depending on the leap cycle), though it can be longer at times. For example, I vividly remember all years when my birthday was on a Sunday (1987, 1992, 1998 and 2009), and they were all spectacular (so I’m hoping for a spectacular birthday this year, too).
Anyway, today is the 28th of September, and it is a Monday. The last time 28th September was a Monday was back in 2009, and in hindsight it turned out to be a rather special day. The previous evening my “chat friend” had called me, trying to explain why she didn’t want to meet me. I convinced her to meet me the following day. And we agreed to meet in Basavanagudi (basically I was playing on “home ground”).
We spent some three hours together that day, and for virtual strangers who had only bantered on Orkut and LiveJournal and GTalk earlier, the breadth and depth and ease of conversation was rather spectacular. I remember this rather “special” feeling as I walked back home that day.
Yesterday I met a friend, an extremely awesome woman. Once I was back home, I sent a mail to my relationship advisor, detailing my meeting with this friend. And I described her (the awesome friend) as being “super CMP”. I wrote in the mail “I find her really awesome. In each and every component she clears the CMP cutoff by a long way”. That’s how I’ve become. I’ve lost it. I’ve lost my heart. And I need to find it back. And I don’t know if I should continue in the arranged scissors market.
First step is to keep your eyes open to delicious and nutritious tharkaris(potential marriage material girls/boys). Then, somehow thru some network, make someone set you two up. Third, interact. with tact. Fourth, put meet. or beat. Fifth, this can go in two ways now. Or more. First, is a no. Definite no. Second, yes. Full yes. Okay, there’s a third possibility too. 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. Finally, it’ll end up in louuvu..maybe not the gut churning romantic feeling for the other party like a unit function, out of nowhere. This is more sustainable like a step function built on affection, tolerance, enjoying each others company, comfort, care, etc and if it were to ever fall apart then it would be one step at a time and less painful.
Things moved reasonably fast after that. Exactly fourteen months after we first met, we got married. We had fun. We occasionally fought. We bought a house. And we went long distance. Yet, in the last six years, I’ve never done anything for any of our anniversaries (date or marriage). There have been some customary dinners but nothing spectacular.
So I thought I should make a video this time. I decided to retrace the path of our first date, recalling some memorable bits of the conversation, All photos and videos were shot with a hand-held Nikon D90. I got creepy looks from people around. Lots of people asked me what I was doing. But the photowalk experience helped.
Normally, it’s the wife who stitches up the NED Talks videos, and this was my first experience with iMovies. Both my inexperience and my general lack of attention to detail clearly shows. Commentary was recorded in “synch sound” (along with the video). And I hope youtube doesn’t take down this video citing copyright issues.
So the wife had mentioned to me sometime in the past that many people here in Barcelona mistake her to be Hispanic, and instinctively talk to her in Spanish, which she is not very good at (though she is much better than me, and is taking regular lessons in her university). She claimed that it was because of her skin colour (“fair” by Indian standards, but much darker than white), and “features”.
Now, as far as I can see, she has no Hispanic blood. She is a born and thoroughbred Gult (though her ancestors migrated to Karnataka generations ago). So when she first mentioned this to me a few months back, I didn’t particularly believe her. And then it happened last night.
We were taking a RyanAir flight from Budapest to Barcelona. I was in the aisle seat and she was in the middle seat, and as the drinks cart passed by us, I asked for a Coke (and was offered a Pepsi, and must mentioned that the Pepsi I thus got is nowhere similar to the oversweet Pepsi we get in India. It was actually good), and held a conversation with the steward for over two minutes, speaking in English all the time.
Once the steward had handed me the can of Pepsi and two glasses with ice, the stewardess on the other side of the drinks cart said “that would be two Euros fifty”. Since I wasn’t carrying money (our division of labour (and hedge) during the trip was that I carried the local currency and debit card, while the wife carried Euros), the wife shuffled into her pocket for change.
The stewardess promptly noticed this and immediately said “dos cincuenta” – Spanish for “two fifty”. Clearly she thought the wife was Hispanic! And it is not that the stewardess hadn’t heard me speak to the steward all the time so far, in fairly chaste English!
This must go down as a bizarre occurrence, except that from what the wife tells me this is a rather common issue with her. And she treats this as a feature, not a bug.
Anyway, here is a picture taken on the day that the wife told me that people in Spain mistake her to be Hispanic. This picture was taken in October, on the first day of my first visit to Barcelona.
