Saturday, November 01, 2008

Impropriety

The Beti* and the Babe
(Adapted from ye olde fairy tale, The Beauty and the Beast)

Once upon a time, since well before there were GTalk and Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Flickr, Hi5, WAYN, LinkedIn (let’s call them Snow White and the Seven Fads), people got together in much more social ways than any of the current social networking sites promise to. It was pure and simple and quite efficient as it were. Since it necessitated that there be personal, face-to-face interactions, and that awareness of proximity and hence comfort be developed over a specific period of time, it ensured that all people involved in the social gatherings which eventually led to relationships of some sort being developed, knew beforehand what the score was. To cut a long story short, if both Adam and Eve hadn’t been hot, we would not be here.

But, with the advent of Snow White and the Seven Fads, it is now no longer paramount that the above conditions be met. This is markedly noticeable in the kind of interaction between opposite sexes, especially among the age group of 16-24, the period when all of the human species undergoes what is commonly known as Coupling. This background having been provided, we are now able to introduce the protagonists of our tale- the Beti* and even more importantly, the Babe.

The Beti, by very nature of his being, shouldn’t be able to occupy too much space by means of a description. And yet, in the classic manner of scientific paradoxes, where emptiness usually gets the most attention (Black Holes, Large Hadron Colliders, pretty girls’ heads**), so too shall we devote considerable time and effort into describing the Beti. Basically, every sentence begins with a Basically. But, basically, the Beti is that boy-next-door-but-you-wish-were-million-doors-away type you meet (or just encounter) who makes you realize why the world is so screwed up. Ideally, he wouldn’t be there, wasting the resources that would feed other poor families. But he very much is there, with his short shirt, faded jeans, decidedly tawdry sunglasses and pink sneakers. Sometimes the sneakers are brown, but that’s usually because it’s been raining heavily for the past week and the Beti has to ride through puddles at 60kmph, on his silencer-removed Pulsar. Or Gladiator or Karizma or Apache.

The Beti is someone you’d normally associate with the “Hiiii h r u?????” scraps on one of the seven fads mentioned above. These, it turns out, are not random shots thrown at the world but actually enquiries of well-being. Most of the times, the Betis have prodigiously long contact lists, developed carefully from school, college, classes at Alliance Francais (due apologies to those who actually went there to learn French) and general friends-of-friends and all such other six degrees of separation meetings. While most others with other things to pursue in life, wouldn’t be able to keep track of all the 473 friends gained from such experiences, the Beti, to his credit, does. (This is all the credit I’m going to give him, so there!). Eventually, all other conditions remaining favourable, one of the 473 friends (preferably one from the opposite sex) becomes interested enough in the Beti that they consent to find time to share a cup of a suitable beverage, depending on the average ages involved. This one interested being, is what has been referred to in the title, as The Babe.

The Babe is... well... a babe. All else is irrelevant.

And thus it is, while sharing this suitable beverage in a suitably public spot in the glare of so many other on-lookers, that the title of the fable becomes self-evident. As all passersby notice the distinct lack of a match of any kind between the two people sitting together, as the disharmony of the whole arrangement jars in one’s ear even in the quietest of places, there is only one constant though running through all their heads- “How did a Beti like him get something like that!”**

Well you know what they say, the World, isn’t fair.

*Beti – Short for Beti Ch*** (appropriate Hindi word that rhymes with clothe)
**Women’s Groups needn’t bother suing me. This girl, she took my heart and she took my money. So in a sense, you’ve already won.