Heat.

Having moved well into the more mature side of the 20s, it comes as no surprise that every Tommy uncle, Dick cousin and Harry aunty has just one item on their agenda - get this boy married!  Every phone call or casual visit transforms into either of three things - One, a prolonged lecture on how your younger brother is also in line to get married, Two, a spat of expletives coaxing you to "get real" and accept arranged marriage as a viable option, Three, and the most annoying, a pity-talk of how you're balding and the proposition of you being a fresh IIM-A grad is fast fading away.  The worst part is, you build immunity over a period of time, become hard-pressed to revolt against marriage as an institution in its own right, even if till this point of time you cherished the idea of a long term commitment to one person.   What becomes of you, is subjective.  Am going to present here, before you, a facet of such a subliminal metamorphosis.

I pride myself, probably a little too narcissistically at times, of not objectifying women.  To be honest, I might have gone "Ay Carumba" or "Habba Habba" when a smoking hot chick walks past by, but that was more out of knee-jerk-why-did-god-give-us-so-much-testosterone-involuntary-appreciation than out of a perversion to drool at anything with smooth legs or skin showing! But herein lies the catch.  When your aunt walks up to you, every single time, shoving the SAME OLD monotone-thought down you, "what kind of girl do you want beta?", you just can't help it, but wonder about the answer to that question.  Ironically, the more you think about it, the more murky the image gets, and the more you begin to idealise.  And trust me, simply closing your eyes won't reveal her face to you - its a load of bullcrap!

Such indecision drives you to the brink of embarrassment when, aboard the train, you accidentally bump into a "nice" girl - I frankly have no clue what "nice" means, but its my choice to be as vague as possible here for want of better description.  You might have the most harmless of intentions, you might be one of the last few survivors of the chivalry clan, yet in that momentary lapse, you become a dog in heat, and you simply stare, blankly, not even judging, or analysing the girl, but just trying to fit her in on the "what kind of girl do you want beta" scale.  And you simply forget how obviously, in-your-face you appear at that time, coming across as the very vilification of perverseness you detest in all middle-aged men!  The girl looks back, not with the usual smile you used to get, but with a scorching detesting stare, a slap across the face that wakes you up and brings you back to reality.  Appreciation is just not what it used to be anymore. *sigh*

Unlike before, you listen in on girls making small talk.  You feel this weird eagerness to get to know the female psyche better.  The more you get involved, the more confusing it gets.  Rationality and reason take a plunge out the window.  I don't remember being this way when I fell in love a long time back - this shit is scary!  No wonder guys get scared at the very proposition of marriage.  Experts have it all wrong.  It never was the impossibility of being with just one woman all your life, but the inevitability of how peer pressure and marriage would change the way you perceive the opposite sex that drove us men to abandon so many at the altar!

On the flipside, there is always the silver lining of such an arrangement that is thrust upon you, of dreaming big and believing there is just that outside chance of having Sonam Kapoor by your side in some sort of parallel universe.  Heat - the imagination it lends you! :)