It is absolutely a dismal understanding by women to think that they can handle their husbands/boyfriends with sex alone. Sometimes they also need food.
(Well, to appreciate this entry’s brevity and content be sure to read Cleverly tackling a wife/girlfriend… 
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I get all nettled when I see most men going clueless about tackling a woman, especially if this unfortunate creature happens to share a long-term romantic relationship with her. I have seen some men who would more readily volunteer to watch ten vijay movies back-to-back seated in front row than mess around with his woman when she has a tantrum. All his efforts to get the problem to end soon makes him wish he could turn himself into a superpower Tortoise coil for women and incapacitate her with just his fumes! For these true warriors whose battles never end, whose praises never get sung, who are forever in the delirium of dealing with the maiden’s madness, I have now set upon a task of providing the knack of going about a woman’s emotions.
Fore warned is fore-armed. It always helps to expect a problem than be surprised by it out of the blue. Certain words announce trouble much before it actually arrives. “your mother”, “your-sister”, “your house”, “that girl”, “lonely”, “sad”, “no-time”, “Am I beautiful”, “love me?”, “respect” and only a thousand other words that you will come to know later. When you hear them, simply know that the cyclone may strike anytime and prepare yourself. Be careful though, opening the subject before she does will only fetch an additional night of battle and an extra desire to be the ultimate tortoise coil.
Once she has started talking about the problem which might or might not have anything to do with you, bring on to your face that look which you reserved for the times when you were a student, gazing earnestly as though you were the next Einstein, while all the time dreaming of Katrina Kaif or being a Sachin Tendulkar in your mental bio-scope. And for heaven’s sake look at her instead of the model on the TV. After you have this look on place, now listen to her.
What can be said in one short sentence according to you, she will begin to say in excruciatingly painstaking detail. After ten sentences is the point were you will most likely take up the suicide mission of uttering these fatal words, “matterukku vaama…”(Come to the point)..many a great soul has signed his divorce warrant with just these two ill-chosen words.
If you utter this curse on yourself, the problem, whatever it was originally, is now a personal crusade she takes up against you. Yet she will not declare the war immediately. She will simply say, “listen..” and begin all over again with greater details right from the colour of the dress she wore when such and such an incident happened and the stain on it and the shop in which she bought. No, she does not bother about your itching to facebook your thoughts on the upcoming match tonight.
After she deliberately repeats the scenario twice and you still are the same moron, repeatedly trying to cut her short, she will now raise her voice and come close to a scream, but not exactly scream – that comes later when you begin offering her solutions to the problem. This is two-three notches less than a scream, she will say, “you don’t understand…”. Since most men are fools as is proven by the fact that only a few are bachelors, You will now say you perfectly understand the problem and force her to precisely tell the problem in a single statement just so that both of you can be clear! A medical equivalent to this situation is Third-degree-burns!
When she complies with you and tells you the problem, You heave a sigh of relief and sport a triumphant smile and awaken the super-man sleeping within. However complex the problem, to you the solution is so simple, “Get up early and you dont have to hurry…”, “Don’t talk to your sister if she makes you feel bad..” “My mother can be changed very easily if you do these simple things…”, “Exercise and become fit…” “Use fair and lovely if you think you are dark..” .Oh, the length and breath of all the solutions you can offer!!
This is the point when she says, again, “YOU NEVER EVER UNDERSTAND MY FEELINGS!!” Only thing is, it has become a blood-curdling scream now. And you are equally pissed off!! Here you are, saving the wretched creature from her own problems with such brilliant solutions, trying to make her feel better inspite of the facebook status and what do you get in return? Phew!! Women!!!
Well, dude!! For starters, you will do better if you will kill the superman within when a woman comes to you with her problems. She is not talking with you so that you can give her solutions and instantly make her feel better. Infact you dont have to help her at all, if you are giving solutions like (*rubs wound on shoulder), “actually my people are very good people it only takes a little bit to convince them” and so on…
Get this into your head…‘Problem’ in a man’s world is different from what it is in a woman’s world. You guys go crazy when faced with a problem and are like Anna hazare on a fast unto death for janlokpal, until you find a solution to that problem, implement and make the situation better. Where as all that your woman wants when she comes to you with a problem is a nice sounding board. She wants to talk! how simple can she get!!? She just wants to talk! But you have to make it all complex by becoming a I-know-it-all,-stick-with-me-baby,-i-will-make-it-better.
And all the while she hears only one statement behind all your brilliant solutions, “your feelings are not valid” And a woman, any woman, goes crazy when you invalidate her feelings.
The reason lies in biology. Man, his primary need being power, is concerned with solutions. Woman, her primary need being relationships, is concerned with establishing bonds.* Talking builds bonds. When you nudge her to come to the point, you are disturbing a biological process to bond with you and thus frustrate her. And, no, she does not get to see the divine love you have in wanting to make her feel better. All that she sees is the unforgivable sin of making her problems look small.
The female brain, it seems, simulates a feeling akin to the one of having the problem solved, merely by talking about it in great detail. The problem is very much still present, but Ahhh.. the mystery of nature, the woman can deal with it effortlessly or will simply be not bothered about it any longer and move on to the next one if only she gets to talk with her beloved.
Adipaavigala… Am I then doomed to go on listening to her meaningless banters at one thirty in the night?
After the bonding processes are over unhindered by your “come to the points” she will no longer trouble you.
So my warrior friends, the next time your girl begins talking something with you, dont commit the crime of invalidating her feelings by calling them silly. If you are a chronic problem solving addict, please wait at least until her emotions sober up before you give her a taste of your brilliance. Simply have that Einstein look on face and punctuate her with “Oh!s.. Ah!ss… “You must have felt terrible!!s.. and finish it off by taking her closer… (If you are married that is 
. You will reduce your trouble-time to 1/10th.
Save Your Child from yourself...
I made this cartoon with Zoho Toondoo to save myself a long rant about how parents are doing things all wrong. But still I should rant a little at least!
We tend to tell our children what to do all the time by giving them orders. If you notice, this leads to a lot of arguments, resistance and rebellion. You will easily get your child to do what you want if only you learn one skill…Instead of tearing your hair off by blaming and accusing and topping it up by commanding them what to do, simply describe the problem, let them decide what ought to be done, and do it!
With this skill, you will first of all save yourself a nasty mood, and better still not screw up your child’s emotional world by reinforcing his/her attitude.
When you see your child walk in without closing the door, Instead of bellowing ” HOW CARELESS CAN YOU GET?! CLOSE THE DOOR!!!”, Just say, “Priya, The door.” Just One word. Nothing more. Well, Why should you do this? First of all you are letting your child think for herself “what’s wrong with the door?!” And find a solution herself. When you command, naturally there is resistance. She might obey you but with silent resentment. When you simply point the problem, her brain visualizes the solution and takes voluntary action. You have no hostility in the bargain.
Happy you, Happy kid!
Light your hair on fire.
Swallow a caterpillar.
Bite down your ipad.
Put your finger on a live-wire.
Bad ideas, isn’t it?! But not so to teens. As you imagined the above tasks, if you were a adult and your brain were to be connected to a scanner, your distress and danger area will glow screaming automatically at the mental imagery. You will say these are bad ideas!
Supposing you were a teen-ager, you will still say these are bad ideas. But there is a difference. You will answer a moment later and it will not be a automatic response. No distress! Instead the cognitive parts of your brain will glow as if you were deliberating as to what dress to wear next day for college. You are actually thinking about them. There is no aversion that gets triggered automatically.
Now lets use this study* to bring into perspective the turbulent times of the teens. I was a terror in my teens to most people who knew me. There was the time when I was thirteen and I challenged my friend that I will break a slate, “palagai” as it is called in Tamil (A small writing tablet made of sandstone I guess) over my enemy (a classmate who complained on me to the teacher) and I actually broke it on her head and let the frame hang on her neck. And everyone kept throwing this question at me,
“Why did you have to try it? Didn’t you know it was a bad idea?”
I stubbornly stood my ground though guilt crept in later. But now in retrospect I can see that I knew it was a bad idea, But I couldn’t “feel” it as a bad idea. And ‘feeling it’ as a bad idea is what will keep you from doing it. I didn’t have enough life experience to draw upon then for the feeling part to be triggered by my topbox.
There must be some kid somewhere who is in the same position as I was, going through hell for attempting a bad idea. When I was in your shoes, for some time I was very scared about all the scoldings. Later I took it to heart. They branded me as troublesome and I really believed them. In every situation I enacted the role that was given to me like a programmed robot. I attracted trouble like a magnet. The truth was I was just passing through a phase which I would have outgrown naturally sooner, if I was not branded. Maybe you are in the same boat as I was. And wasting your precious self, in meaningless role-plays. Just a word to you, you cannot expect everyyone to understand what is happening to your biology. But YOU can understand and not get stuck there.
Don’t take any name that is given to you or a behavior that is attributed to you into your personality. Don’t feel compelled to act them out and make it your comfort zone. Life is just too beautiful to waste out being fixated into a personality. Explore yourself beyond that tag.
If you are a adult and are flabbergasted at your teen’s behavior and now after reading this post are wondering if you should or should not scold your teen, here is something to keep in mind. You should definitely correct any reprehensible behavior, but make sure to condemn the behavior and not the person. Do not character-assassinate the child, and give him a ‘cross’ to carry forward into life. For these derogatory names will be duly registered by your child and he will use it as a weapon against himself at some later point in life.
*Experiments by Dr. Abigail Baird at Vassar
This movie was just plain DISASTER. Coming from me, this is really something since I usually tend to find any mythical epic, historical war film utterly fascinating. I Just love them, the settings, the dresses, the stories, the values, the grandiosity everything transports me to another time and another world from which I am ever reluctant to return. However bad the movie you will find me enjoying it! Immortals is the only exception to this long held love of mine.
Half the scenes were so dark that you wondered if you were watching a new style – the black movies, you imagine what you want to see!! The next half was so grizzly violent that you felt like throwing up, brutally sticky images of the young oracles butchered and locked into the minotaur’s metal statue and roasted alive, plucking out eyes with bare fingers, making a man open his legs wide and hammering him, My God! not to add the special effects of flying blood and flesh in the name of 3D. Well, technically sometimes it was superlative 3D effects, but when you repeatedly get to see the same bloodthirst again and again it becomes boring and sadistical. I especially liked the fancy hairdos of the gods and their elegant costumes. And I can go as far as to say the epirus bow looked very interesting.
As to the story itself, well, I guess the dream industry does give you the right to distort stories but this hideous a cook up is simply unforgivable. Theseus in the original version is the son of king Aegeus and princess Aethra who proves himself a hero by lifting an unliftable boulder under which was buried a weapon which his father had left him. After knowing the identity of his father, he goes to claim his rightful place as the heir, encounters many adventures on the way and finally battles with Minotaur-the bull monster in a maze. Princess Ariadne helps him conquer the monster and all is well in the end.
It was pathetic to see the central theme of Theseus’s story, Minotaur, reduced to a small statue serving as a hot metal cage to torture young girls. Atleast they could have stuck to some facts in the original story or they should have called this story by another name, not the story of Theseus. And someone please enlighten me, why the hell did they name the movie ‘immortals’ when an angry God can commit suicide and the almighty Zeus’s daughter-god, Athena can be killed in a war?? Am I missing something?
Suppose you were fired today from your job or a dear one broke up with you. You are pained to the core. What happens? Tears spring to your eyes isn’t it? Now let’s say your friend treated you to a surprise gift. You felt so special and happy. You smile naturally, right? Again, suppose you are in love with someone. What do you do in a moment of tenderness? Most often, you spontaneously hug and kiss that person? Now from all this it is obvious that certain feelings are programmed in our subconscious to cause certain fixed behaviours. Cry during pain, smile during happiness, violence during rage and so on…
Just like the age-old riddle, what came first – chicken or egg; let me ask you a question. Does happiness make you smile or the smile makes you happy? Does pain make you cry or crying make you pained? You will be quick to say, “Ofcourse only because I am happy, I can smile. Why would I smile other wise? And, am I mad to be crying without pain?” But you know what? An area of research known as proprioceptive psychology totally disagrees with you. It says the process works well in reverse too. Get people to behave in certain ways and you can cause them to feel certain emotions and certain thoughts.
I first came across this in Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point’. In one chapter where he discusses the three kinds of people and talks about the ‘Salesmen’ he quotes a study concerning a college fee hike. A group of students were recruited for a study and it was told to them that the research was to test the quality of audio for a radio station while in reality it is about body mind synchronisation. Each student was given a headphone and made to listen to a news about increasing the college fee drastically. Some of them were asked to nod their head vertically as though they were saying yes and some were asked to shake their head sideways, in ‘No’ motion as they listened to the fifteen minutes long news. At the end they were given a questionnaire to fill in and among the many questions concerning the audio there was one unrelated question, asking the students, if they thought the hike of fees was reasonable and were they willing to pay it? Well, isn’t it surprising that almost everyone who listened with a mechanical ‘yes’ nodding to the news, actually agreed happily to the steep increase in fees while those who shook their head, even the rich ones, did not agree to the hike?
Since then I have come across various material that clearly points to the fact that facial movements are in a major sense responsible for the feeling factor. Like one classical study in which two groups of people were made to watch a funny cartoon with a pencil in their mouth. One group was made to hold the pencil with their front teeth, and that pulls the persons mouth into a mechanical smile-like posture without their noticing it and another group was made to hold the pencil just with their lips which pushes the mouth in to a pout as though they are unhappy. Surprisingly the first group enjoyed the cartoon much more than the frowning group though they really didn’t know what was going on.
Yet another test where a group was given a basic mathematics test and were asked to do it with their eye brows furrowed into a tight frown and another was asked to do the same test with a slight grin. Should I even say that the first group felt they put in much more effort than the second who reported they did it with great ease?
Well, the message from these studies is very simple. If you want to cheer yourself up, behave like a happy person! Don’t wait for situations to change, the feelings to change before you can smile. Smile well and smile often for happiness to start in you. Research says you must hold that pretty smile for atleast 15 seconds to 30 seconds for it to take an effect in your feelings world. It also says that effects of that smile doesn’t wear off once people stop smiling. Its effects linger on affecting many areas of behaviour and interactions with people in a positive manner. You will be all the more successful if you can make that smile more convincing. This you can do by thinking of a genuinely happy situation.
And in case if you hate your lot in life as you constantly crib that you don’t love your wife/husband and are stuck with her/him for the rest of your life, just simply begin by hugging them more often and expressing all love type behaviour and lo you might actually begin loving them all over again. Now that’s a happy thought!
Is Man the only senseless creature on the planet?
Read about an interesting research that a Canadian national crew undertook – to study the habits of the wild wolves along with their prey, the reindeer. The research lasted for a year and the crew had a couple of helicopters to film their habits 24/7 along their route of migration. Now, we are normally led to believe that the deer and the wolf are enemies of each other, you know, the picture of the wolf as the big bad villain and the deer swooning away in mortal fright??
Surprise, surprise!! The reality was anything but this. These two animals, polar opposites that they are, were found to be great friends of each other. They travelled together, played together and mixed freely with each other. You could almost say that the only thing lacking was romance. When the wolf in their normal course felt hungry, they gave a signal to the deer by freezing all over. The deers took the cue and ran like hell for the next ten minutes. As soon as the wolves caught their prey, everything was back to normal. As opposed to the popular myth, the prey was not always the weakest animal of the herd or a baby animal. Manytimes it was a healthy normal animal. Sometimes the wolves succeeded in catching their food, but sometimes they failed miserably. But you know what, when they did fail, when the prey outlasted the ten minute chase, the wolves didn’t make a fuss. They simply stopped, let go and went hungry until it is time for next hunt. They were friends with the deer for as long as the next signal was given.
However this is not the best part. Once the pilot spotted a carcass of a big animal, about a kilometer from the route of the wolves. A big She-wolf caught the scent and deviated towards the food. About the same time as she reached the carcass, a wolverine and a bear reached there from different directions with the same intention, to have a feast. Three powerful animals, three different directions, each with their own strengths, each wanting to satiate their hunger and there is only one carcass.
Now you predict,, what could have happened there? Given their ‘beastly’ nature you would expect them to pounce on each other and fight it out. But no!! What happened could only be described as breath taking.
The three animals sat without moving a hair in their body for about half an hour. And then the She-wolf carefully took a tiny step, became still and intently observed the other two’s reaction. When none was forthcoming, the animal carefully went up to the carcass, all the time keenly observing its opponents, took a bite that was neither too small nor too big, just one bite mind you, and returned back to its place. Now it was the bear’s turn. he went step by step, took exactly the same amount as the wolf and returned. The wolverine did the same too. Our wolf went again, took exactly one mouth and returned back to wait for its turn. These three animals repeated this procedure untill all three were satisfied and each walked away the way it came.
Amazing, isn’t it?! Each of these animals were perfectly aware of its strength. They knew they had a perfect chance to win if they fight and the winner can have all. But still, each had the innate wisdom that, even if it were to win, the wounds sustained in the process would be painful and take a long time to heal. And so they decided on a mutually win-win situation.
And here we are, calling them ‘beastly’! Irony.
I am sick of hearing the words ‘Justice’ and ‘Being good’ and ‘Being noble’ and ‘moving on’’ Come on, open your eyes and you will see that we are certainly not living in a just world! Well, you can always fight for justice in our appointed court of law for certain crimes, when someone has stolen your wallet or beaten you to a pulp or for corruption and a few other issues. These are accepted as crime because they are in some manner objectively measurable like finance or bodily harm or discrimination.
But what about the many crimes that remain socially unlegislated, undocumented, and unrecognized? People constantly hurt each other in ways that various societies cannot yet afford to acknowledge. In many societies personal abuse of a wife or a husband or a lover still goes unpunished. Even in supposedly advanced cultures, the social resources do not yet exist to document and punish parents who verbally abuse their children. Yet children are damaged for life after this type of abuse. What about suicide which causes unbearable sorrow to those left behind?
There are many kinds of pain, misery, and grief which must remain deeply private. So, due to either society’s inability to recognize the crime or the inherently private nature of the damage, there are many ways for one person to be hurt by another person which may never be publicly redressed. Especially those that happen within a marriage or a core partnership.
Is there a payback for these crimes? Philosophically you can always talk of karma, and about a divine justice that will visit the perpetrator either in this life time or many life times hence. No one knows who or what decides the timing of these paybacks though. But what happens NOW, in the present life time? As the mind again and again returns to the memory of the abuse? Can one blithely think of ‘moving on’ when faced with inner disaster of resentment and grief and guilt and anger and sorrow from the past? Is it as easy as that? Isn’t it natural that you are filled with a rage that wishes to see some punishment action by you or a black depression that has no fire to it but which all the same binds you to these people with invisible chords?
Whether easy or not, whether justice or not, whether you are trying to do be noble and ‘forgive’ or not, whether you think this-is-the-right-thing-to-do kind of nonsense or not my point is that it isn’t about any of these crap. My point is that you are punishing yourself! You are royally screwing yourself because you are insisting on holding on to resentment, guilt, anger and sorrow from the past! It is a mental disaster. Why?
It takes a HUGE amount of creative energy to manage our detailed inventory of past hurts and grievances. Each review of a small disappointment takes a little bit of energy. Maintaining the very deepest memories of catastrophically horrible abuse – whether from war, or starvation, or vicious private crimes – also drains off a massive amount of our internal energy.
If I am to feel personally responsible for binding the perpetrator(s) to myself using chains of angry blame to ensure that they cannot escape until they are properly punished – then I must find the energy to maintain those chains. The amount of psycho-emotional energy required to hold negative memories is similar to the amount of electricity needed to run a massive deep-freezer.Emotionally one is always on duty, always on guard to ensure that the prisoner does not escape. Now where do you think this kind of energy comes from?
The energy needed to maintain the deep-freeze is taken out of reserves that could be used for attracting love, developing creativity, and building wealth. Those energy reserves could fund education, travel, and romance. But the more deeply one invests in the commitment to hold the perpetrator until they are properly punished, the less energy one has to do anything creative at all. In the end, clinging to memories of injustice is so debilitating and exhausting that it not only drains off most of our creative, joyful potential — this clinging also robs the body’s life force and makes one physically sick.
It is critically important that we understand what is happening. Holding the memory, repeating the crime in one’s mind over and over, creates bondage to the crime. Both the harmer and the harmed are enslaved to a bond of guilt until the perpetrator suffers an equal type and amount of pain, as the victim.
So what do we do to break this bond? What do I do to get out of this lifetime exhaustion and imprisonment in anger and guilt and grief?
That will be our next discussion!
(I request you to share your thoughts on the subjects so that it can be a discussion instead of my thoughts)
I happened to meet a friend of mine quiet by accident after a very long time. She had joined a spiritual movement when she was very young. Back then she was totally convinced she will be a tool to “save the world”. Well, according to the original plan they were supposed to have saved it some two years ago. You and I both know, for heaven’s sake, they haven’t even begun saving themselves! And she says to me, “You know it was such a great idea. What a great vision to have. Too bad it didn’t work out. But I still want to embrace the true essence of the cause.”
That was a ‘come-alive’ moment to me. This is exactly how people make a fatal mistake, a grievous error that could cost them their life, be it in career or romance or business or personal life. Do you see the thread?
Let me draw a parallel. The American company Enron’s meteoric rise to popularity and its even faster bankruptcy was quiet popular a few years ago. the sailiant feature of its great fall was that its executives never admitted to having made a large mistake. When it reached unmanageable proportions and required an actual policy change they only said, “too bad that didn’t work out – it was such a good idea – how are we going to hide it in our balance sheet” while they should have actually said “Oh how stupid we have been”, they should have said, “it now seems obvious in retrospect that it has been a terrible mistake from the beginning.” But No! Its CEO even testified that Enron had been a great company.
In the face of our blunders most of us do not admit to them. Oh yes, we admit to small local errors not to big global mistakes. When we admit only small local errors, we only make small local changes. The motivation for a big change comes from acknowledging a big mistake.
I had made two very big, really big mistakes in my life. The two were similar and i was not thinking clear enough in the aftermath of the first one, so I repeated it the second time around. After I had finally and fully admitted my mistakes, I looked back upon the path I had travelled upto my awful realization. And I saw that all along I was making a series of small concessions, grudgingly conceding each opinion, realizing as little as possible of my actual mistake on each occasion, admitting failure only in small tolerable bites. I would have been so much ahead by now if I had only screamed “OOPS!” sooner. And each time I cheated myself: “I must raise the level of my game” was my thought. I would never accept it was a wrong game.
The realisation was humbling. Sometimes it is very important to acknowledge a fundamental problem, instead of dividing it into tinier and more palatable mistakes. There is a very powerful incentive in admitting to big mistakes. It is painful. It can also change your whole life. Well, I dont mean we should feel great here and be proud of “admitting to mistakes”. It is obviously a much superior thing to get things right the first time around. But when you do slip, it is easier to take one great fall and turn tail than many smaller falls that lead you deeper and deeper into the swamp.
It is very important to have this ton-of-bricks-falling-over-your-head- moment.
Since my”awakening” to my own stupidity I am watching a lot of people go through the same motions, make their small concessions, grudgingly concede each millimeter of their ground, never admitting a big mistake when they could a small one and enduring misery. Instead of taking one terrible blow they would like to be beaten around endlessly with lesser pain.
Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t stretch out the battle with yourself for years to come. Don’t say “It was a great idea. Too bad it didn’t work out. I still want to embrace the essence of whatever I am attached to”, when you can say “I have been a fool!”
Take it in one terrible blow. Say “oops!!” And move on!