Is breaking up hard to do ?

This is a public information announcement for all you lovesick Bloggers ! Judging by the number of poems you guys post in your blogs there seems like a fair few of you out there.... (LOL)

This relationship break up formula will now be discussed at length:

Frequency of interaction x Geographic proximity to each other x Emotional investment = difficulty/ease of closure.

Or

FI x GP x EI

Professor Spheric now proceeds to put on a white coat (and white hair wig) and adopt an Einsteinesque persona whilst narrating in a Bavarian-Hannoverian accent:

I vill explain zee formulaic variables above as such. In each case 1 represents the highest difficulty of closure and zero being the easiest:

Frequency of interaction = This is zee the number of times two courting individuals have seen each other in a specified period of time. If you see each other above a certain number of times, then psychologically it starts becomes a part of your personal time schedule. Zee higher the frequency, zee harder it is to break off.

Geographic proximity = Never a truer adage spoken than out of sight out of mind. It is much harder to get closure if two ppl are living very close to each other, as zee probability increases of bumping into each other.

Emotional investment = how much did you invest in that person during the period of the relationship ? If you were relatively independent of each other, and your daily thought processes were not coloured by the presence of that significant other, then it vill be easier to seek closure. If on the hand you could not make a decision without that person and your social status and acceptability was linked to that person, then it vill be harder.

Thus, in the example of a very close couple who have been with each other a long time and live near each other it vill look something like:

0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.729 - high difficulty of closure - you will cry and spend all day listening to the catwailing of Naseebo Lal.

For a casual couple it may look something like:

0.6 x 0.7 x 0.4 = 0.168 - easy to get closure...time to open that bottle of Captain Morgan and mark another notch on that bedpost. :)

You have to assign your subjective variable values in zee formula based on how you perceive the relationship.

In true Looney Tunes Bugs Bunny tradition "That's all folks !" ...cue music...

Women & Politics

Days of the Turban

The following excerpt is from one of my favourite novels. Sadly it is out of print, and I bought my copy from a second hand bookshop in Gloucester, England back in 1994.

"The bus will take you there. Now. But before it was wild. Desolate. The backyard of Punjab. Here, in my village, the men carry guns and anger easily between their quotidian farming chores.

These are the men of the far North born out of the forerunners and morass of all civilizations that attacked India through the Himalayan passes. These are the men born out of and into the war.

They carry their bloodshed lightly between jokes and daily lawful living. They are men and women of the earth, as basic as that - as quick to yield harvests of kindness and goodness, as quick to dry up and turn sullen and destroy. These are my people".

From "Days of The Turban - A Novel" (by Partap Sharma)

The lost art of the handwritten note

When was the last time you ever received a handwritten note ? (And no, I don't mean one of those yellow Post-It with somebody's scribbles either). When was the last time you ever wrote a letter using a pen, or received one ?

It struck me the other day that we live in an age of de-humanized communications, where the medium reflects little about the person. We have the ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard at our fingertips, email and its many variants such as MSN Messenger, we have mobile phones, pagers and wireless PDA devices, we have Microsoft Word attachments, we can insert smiley icons, and we have fax and video-conferencing. Yes I agree, it's so very convenient and almost effortless to use what current technology has to offer, but have we lost something in the process ?

When I think of friends and family, both past and present, of passing acquaintances and strangers, I am struck by the fact that I hardly read anything by them that was actually handwritten....I kind of view this as a lost opportunity to see a uniquely personal facet of their character, of their soul, something that may have revealed to me some aspect of themselves which I never knew. There is something different about putting pen to paper - I can't quite figure it out - but it feels more personal, almost intimate, when you express yourself this way.

Thoughts ?

On marriage and the Oedipal complex

Do desi guys display a sense of attachment to their mothers more than other races, and vice versa mothers to son(s) ? If so, is this state of affairs unhealthy and what is the impact (negative or otherwise) on prospective future daughter-in-laws when dealing with her inlaws ? Do wives feel like outsiders, like being married to the mob ? The south asian psyche is littered with references to the joys of having a son, both in geet and fillum - and likewise, there is little idolization of daughter-in-laws, who at best appear subtly marginalised and at worst, are an unwanted participant in an emotionally intensive 'menage a trois' where the other two players are loathed to give space. Conversely, how difficult is it for guys to maintain the balancing act of spending quality time with their partners without feeling guilty about not interacting as frequently with parents as they did in a pre-married era ?