The Fault of Assumptions

I've been quite fascinated by this phrase "To assume means to make an ass of u n me". My manager told me that one of our customers told him that. It's quite a sidey joke, you know the kind that makes you laugh in spite of yourself, and eerily true too. I've been mulling over it for a while, and while I have been reducing my assumptions at work, Ive been noticing it doesn't translate quite as easily into my personal life, as the examples below will demonstrate:

Yesterday I was at my best friend's engagement/sangeet and my mom came there as well. She sat me down and told me I had to leave early because the next day I had to meet some guy and she needed to talk to me at home before she slept. Hello! That was such a shock I didn't even know my parents were enquiring about any guys and I had to meet one at such short notice! And that too at the cost of my extended enjoyment at my best friend's party! I was so mad I can't begin to tell you. That caused me to be somewhat abrupt with my mother, which was VERY unfair of me, though I didn't think so at the time for various reasons (mostly perceived).

Anyway the Sangeet was a blast and our dances went off wonderfully (especially given that we had had only 3 practices!), it felt so good to be cheered and have shouts of Once more! And I think all of us were really comfortable on stage because of how welcome we were made to feel, given that we were in the place of the bride's sisters rather than the sidey friends who hang out in one corner. So TJ and I were there from the beginning and on stage with her and everything. And then sat with her backstage and ate with her and all that, and were looked after so well by her parents! So when I saw a missed call from home at about 9:30 pm I was sure it was my mother calling to ask where I was and why hadn't I left yet. My bad mood returning, I decided against calling her, left at about 10 as soon as our dances ended and returned home. I found my mother waiting for me, and she looked at me in surprise and asked if I had seen her missed call. I said I had, and she said, even more surprised, that she had called to tell me that we had decided against meeting this guy and that I didn't have to come home early if I didn't want to. I threw such a fit, and was so angry that she hadn't thought to message me! So we sat in stony silence before retiring to bed.

Key points: I had assumed, erroneously, that she had called to chastise me for not coming soon, and hence not called her back.
She had assumed I would call her back, and so was up waiting, despite having to leave early in the morning the next day for a trip.
I had assumed she would think to message, and hence was angry at her for not having the foresight to do so.

That was TWO assumptions on my part that led to a rather grave situation, one that caused me the loss of not only not being able to be with my best friend till the end, but also that of yet another little conflict with my mother.

(Oh my god I'm dipping Marie biscuits in machine coffee as I type and they're really yum!!! I'm eating the Vita Mariegold vitamin-enriched energy biscuits hehe. This is the first time I'm dipping biscuits Marie biscuits in coffee I think! I love how they get all soft and hence don't crumble all over the place! Have you seen the Digestive Marie ads? With Kajol starring and the head of the Anti-Marie Bureau, saying 'Sadharan Marie Khana Chhod Do!" Though I never liked Marie when I was younger and a consumer of the sugar-fleeced Bourbon and Nice, and fake cream-filled Embassy Cream and what's the Indian word for Jammy Dodgers - you know the oval biscuits with jam in the middle with sugar on top and a light cream fillin?- , now I can totally see why Marie has been the sweet saviour for the dieting aunties! Oooh, it doesn't get nearly as soft now that the coffee is lukewarm, as I just noticed by the end of this paragraph! Grrr!)

So now I am rejuvenated and ready to roll up my sleeves to do battle with the ideology of this stupid guy I was to see who i didn't end up meeting. He is born and brought up in the US, and has come to India in search of a bride. He is only here till Tuesday and was to go out of town this evening. He wants an intelligent/educated, goodlooking and fashionable girl. He wanted to meet me yesterday but my wonderful mother refused since I had my best friend's engagement. He was going to the suburbs to meet his uncle so he asked that my father and I meet him there for about half an hour. Ok I have so many contentions with this MORON that I don't even know where to begin.

First of all, WHY on earth is he in INDIA to search for a bride???If he is all that he and his family think he is, why couldn't he find a girl or have his parents find one of the many many diasporic girls in the states, from New York to California, many of them educated, smart, slim and sexy as hell? He'd have his pic of a range of girls, much wider than the ones found here. (Actually I think a reader of mine would like to contend with that. I've pasted a parody on ABCD girls that he sent me at the bottom of this entry.)

If he is here in India to find a girl because he doesn't like the girls abroad, he must be very deluded indeed. Either his mother is under some obsolete fantasy from the 60's that Indian girls are submissive and subdued and will do whatever he says, and has conditioned that belief into him, one that gives him sadistic pleasure, or he thinks that Indian girls have better 'values'. As to the first delusion, I conclude that he basically rather blatantly wants an arm candy trophy wife who will be his maid, and as to the second, I'll be very sorry to disillusion him, but after 5 years abroad, I don't find any difference beween Indian girls abroad and Indian girls here. They're both hypocrites, just on different issues maybe, depending on the family and upbringing.

How dare he ask to meet a girl for half an hour? Either he's an idealist who expects to feel some instant ZING in his brain upon even seeing a girl, or he's a robot who has some checklist, or he has an incredibly long list of girls to see. How can anyone judge anyoone in half an hour? How dare he ask that she go out of her way to see him? It's not like anyone is DYING to meet him that they will travel to the ends of the earth for him (trust me, in Bombay it sometimes feels like just that), especially since they know nothing about him, or even theoretically want to meet him.

Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. Maybe he really wanted to meet me once before he left and since he had such a hectic schedule he was sincerely trying to fit me in somehow and only had fair intentions. Maybe it's just the words that have been used that are making me come to this conclusion!

Maybe I'm ASSUMING!!!

Ok, as promised. Here's the story.


Vague Generalizations of some ABCD biyatches in the Big Apple

Kavita Shah just got off the phone with her best friend in the city, Pattie Gupta. (Pattie, actually never went by her real name Pallavi, because she was too goddamn ashamed of it). The girls had a plan to get some drinks at Aitwal and catch up with some college classmates. They also wanted to discuss Kavita’s recent breakup with Anand Bakshi, whose rising career as a neurosurgeon was thwarted by an acute case of ED (erectile dysfunction) that kept Mr. Wilson on the DL (down and low, not to be confused with the other DL, please).

Kavita and Pattie, both in their early thirties, had very typical NYC ABCD jobs. Kavita worked in the Equity group at Bankers Trust and Pattie worked at some hedge fund in midtown. They both resided in the Upper East Side in the eighties and second avenue, for close to eight years now, and as you might have guessed by now, they were both very single and looking for love in the Big Apple. Their location in the upper east side was quite typical of the single scene.

So Kavita donned her new dress that she just bought from some flunkie upper east side boutique, revealing a juicy view of her huge bosom. The sight of these ABCD skanks dressing up in their skinny negligees and going out for a drink on a Friday evening with their nimwitted metrosexual friends is as common as the yellow taxi cabs in the city. So as Kavita was prancing half-naked on the sidewalks of the upper east side looking for a cab to take her to SoHo, Pattie just got off the phone after a heated conversation with her parents, whom she had grown to despise more every passing day in the Big Apple. Reminding her of marriage had become a habit the New Jersey-based Guptas found it very hard to discard, just like the smell of Indian food emanating from their stinky armpits. With their thick desi-accented voices constantly dropping names of eligible Indian bachelors and repeatedly calling her by her real name, the Guptas had become a weekly nuisance that Pattie had to deal with for the past eight years.

While both Pattie and Kavita had registered their names on many ABCD matrimonial websites to keep their confused parents at bay, they had some things they obviously did not share with Mom and Dad. They had both registered on match.com and lavalife, as well. While the crappy desi websites kept alive their hopes to spawn some even more confused ABCDs into the world, match and lavalife kept their mojos alive, well, and kicking.

Kavita and Pattie (fuck, to hell with this, lets call the bitch Pallavi from now on), - So Kavita and Pallavi met at a newly opened bar in SoHo, and after getting their glasses of cosmos, they began their weekly bar-yack. (Its to be noted that a bar-yack is different from a phone-yack!! A bar-yack is done in half-naked attire with a glass of cosmo, in a bar, of course.)

Kavita and Pallavi had both returned from their friend Ami’s wedding in Atlanta, where both the hoes were bridesmaids- another bastardized concept picked up living in the US for too long. Donned in their shiny speckled ghagras, the 2 hoes had made some affected speech about how much they loved Ami, and shared some silly travel experience, where only one-fourths of the contents were true, and can you fucking believe the next thing? Pattie (fuckin A, sorry, Pallavi) in the middle of her speech began choking with affected sentimentality and tears that would put Meryl Streep to shame. After the speech was over, Pattie and Kavita were back on the table, giggling and laughing, making the whole crying on stage incident a joke, or as an objectivist would call it, a lie. Ami had a giant wedding cake, that earned a lot of oohs and aahs from the guests. (A wedding cake is another decadent idea inherited by ABCDs from Uncle Sam). After that of course there were some crappy sentimental speeches from the whole family and extended family and friends, where everyone in the audience was inching to get a hold of their remotes and fast-forward the speeches, if they could. And then, of course, was the dance, another wasteful exercise, at the mercy of some pathetic ABCD DJ, called DJ Bhangra or something like that. After a bastardized apeing of the West, as evidenced in the bridesmaids, fake speeches and tall white cake, was an affected whole-hearted plunge into the East with the ABCDs doing some show-off full-throttled bhangra gyrations on the dance floor. This is, of course, where the suburban young 5-10 year old ABCD kids pick up on their “culture” which they would (hopefully not) be espousing after a decade. Any sane person seeing this showy display performed with unerring repetition, ABCD wedding after ABCD wedding, would likely throw up all the greasy crap he consumed at the wedding. But alas, conformism, comparison, curry, capitalism, one-upsmanship, and stinky armpits seem to thrive in this very fake and confused ABCD world!!!

So anyway, the conversation shifted to Mr. Neurosurgeon with ED, Anand Bakshi. Anand Bakshi was a typical ABCD doctor success story. Hailing from a family filled with successful (I mean, financially) doctors, Dad – head and neck surgeon, and Mom – Anesthesiologist, Anand had received undergrad offers from Princeton, Yale, Harvard and Emory. Telling the whole world that Princeton was his back-up college, and being the type A fuck that he was, he obviously went to Harvard, fully paid by Mom and Dad, of course. Anyway, in spite of his perfect GPA, and excellent neurosurgery practice in Connecticut, he had ED. With an inflated ego but a limp Mr. Wilson, Anand was romping New York city posing as the eligible bachelor stud. Kavita had met him through some friends – False. Kavita met him on an Indian dating website. With her age kicking up and her esteem wallowing down, she certainly saw ample financial security in limpwad Anand. As for Anand, Kavita was a sure thing. Right! Wrong!! While she was enamored by his stable livelihood, ED was certainly coming in the way. I mean if Mr. Wilson cannot stand, how can you spawn the next generation of ABVCD (American Born Very Confused Desi).

As she bitched and ranted about Anand’s lack of mojo to Pallavi, she ran into Raj Sinha, newly crowned MD at Goldman Sachs. Kavita had eyed this rich egotistical prick like a cheetah stalking a gazelle. Just that Raj Sinha was no gazelle today. He wanted to get preyed upon. After some more cosmos, and listening to Raj talk about his (very boring) trip to Japan, Kavita had enough. She was going to try to hit it off with Raj. I mean, shit!!! Shit happens. Maybe, there is a thing called love and who would be a better person to fall in love with than a successful MD at Goldman Sachs. So gulping down her fourth martini, she told Pallavi that she was buzzing off with Mr. Investment Banker, and would call her tomorrow.

They headed off to Raj’s apartment in SoHo. A beautiful 3 bedroom loft, Raj was living it up in style, like a (dead) Kennedy (reference to spoilt brat, JFK, Jr.). Balding and in his later thirties, Raj was a smooth talker and a compulsive liar, like most investment bankers. Kavita waited in eager anticipation to see Raj’s moves. And just like that it was over! While MD Anand was limp, MD Raj had the other killer – PE (not Price-Earnings, silly – I mean Premature Ejaculation). I mean serious PE issues. Raj’s performance lasted a mere thirty seconds. And after his quick performance, he groaned for another minute, like he was some prized Arabian stallion who had finished mating with a Welsh mare. In her semi-inebriated state, Kavita was puzzled as to what was going on. After realizing that she had spent only five minutes at this loser’s place, she realized that it wouldn’t be fair on her to spend her whole life with Raj, I mean Mr. Premature. But being the PC (politically correct) cunt she was, she did the most typical ABCD thing. She praised Raj like he was some major African-lion slayer saying that he was the only man who had given her a pussy-thumping orgasm. Whatever!!! White lies for a sick liar!!! Then she realized that she had to go because she had to be up early in the morning to meet a friend coming to the city. Another lie!! And she was gone from Raj’s place.

She looked for her very trendy cell phone from her handbag. After rummaging through her bag amidst the tampons and condoms, she found it. She was feeling down, but not out. After all, lavalife had to come to some use. She had met this white Irish-American Investment banker Associate, Matt, on lavalife and had hung out with him a few times. Hanging out here means fooled around lightly, and lightly means kissing and mutual arousing. After seeing what 2 very “eligible” Indian bachelors had to offer, she decided it was enough. She called Matt and asked if he was free. Matt, a 6 foot 2 tall well built ex-football player for Rutgers, believed in Equal Opportunity, and could not turn down Kavita’s open offer. So he let her into his bachelor pad which he was sharing with 2 room-mates in the Upper East side (eighties, of course). Kavita was thrilled at Matt’s performance. I mean, unlike limpwad Anand, and PE Raj, Matt went from foreplay plus a double orgasm (both for himself and Kavita) in a very long and lustful 60 minutes.

Kavita was happy, and next morning, she recounted all the details to Pallavi, who had nothing to say because she was not able to score, as usual!!!!!

Moral of the Story: Its safer to pick up an Irish stud-muffin Associate than an Indian MD. It lasts so much longer!!!

- Story written by the Compulsive Objectivist, I mean Objectionist!!

:D