Shifting parameters: the standards of “acceptable”

I am very fond of social networks.  I have already said why in an earlier blog, but apart from how it helps my work, there’s another, more voyeuristic reason why I like them. I find it interesting and entertaining to see what other people are reading, thinking, saying and count as important, and compare their preferences with mine. Not that it matters much, but it can be very educational.

For example, a teenager from the town I grew up in recently posted an open invitation to her friends, asking “who all want to bunk class tomorrow”? Many responses and comments followed.

I know times are changing and I also know some tuition classes can be mind-numbingly boring and that because sending kids to classes for extra help is like a contagious disease where I come from, students are often forced to attend. Parents, peer pressure, and a bunch of the usual issues.

 I too was at a place once where I had taken to giving a particular teacher’s classes the miss pretty regularly, because spending an hour in the same room as this man who thought everything else in a student’s life that wasn’t Chemistry was automatically useless annoyed me. And because he was extremely boring and I never had much patience for Carbon and its many avatars anyway.  I learnt more Physics and Chemistry from my Biology teacher, I swear. Mostly because she had a magical way of making equations and refraction interesting even to me. And I now suspect,  also because she would offer me samosas, my favorite Indian snack, when I would have to attend her classes directly from my dance practice and also allow me 5 minute breaks when I complained about having to solve too many Physics problems in a day.

 Eventually, thankfully, I saw good sense and officially stopped wasting time and money at the Chemistry teacher’s class. And I passed both Chemistry and Physics, thank god.  My best friend from school can take some credit for that.

Apart from my English tutor, who and whose classes were by far the best thing that happened to me while growing up (and here we are moving very far from the realms of just learning about Shakespeare), I think my Biology teacher’s was the only other class that actually made me want to attend.

Diversions aside, I have no complaints or judgment against this young girl at all.

But the fact that she can plan bunking classes so openly on a network that her elder brother also uses actively did make me wonder: would I have done the same if these networks had been invented while I was in high school? No one knows for sure, but I think not.

I also wonder, did her brother, who is a grown, married adult, notice this? If he did, why is the post still up?  

In my late twenties, I’ve been called “quaint” and more recently, "a vestige of a long-ago time" by friends, who insist they mean them as compliments. Frankly, because I know these people are fond of me in varying degrees, I quite like it. Plus, late twenties is old. Anyhow, despite my very strong resolutions about accepting things as they come, sometimes I am amazed by what we have come to accept as acceptable and how we react to the constant lowering of expectations.

The other day, I sent my girlfriends an article in the NYT that talked about how dating as a ritual was vanishing from the world because of online dating sites. You can look it up; it isn’t ahead of the curve in terms of trend-spotting, but like all things NYT, is written very well and makes some very valid points.

The point here being that because there are online dating sites,  young and single men (and women) know they have many options and hence they put in less effort when they’re asking people out. I’m not an active member of the dating club but my friends are, and I thought it would be interesting to know what they think. 

My pet peeve in here was/is that very few men actually know how to decently ask a girl out (ok, I’m not an active member, but I do have a social life. What, you thought I sit in front of my computer and rant all day?). Random, haphazard invites of “let me know if you are free sometime this week” do not make the cut, and I’ll never be free for you, even if I am. It’s not just about a boy asking a girl, I would think it is basic decency. Even when I ask my girlfriends out, the least I would do is pick a time/day. “Are you free Wednesday” is so much more compelling than “let me know if you are free at some vague time during the course of the week or month, for I don’t really care.”

What my very active-in-the-dating-club friend had to tell me, however, made me feel like a Victorian prude. Here’s what I learnt: texting last minute and open ended invitations that mean mostly nothing is de rigueur and perfectly acceptable.  I also had a sneaking suspicion the people I talked to have no idea they could ask for more. I’m going to make a broad generalization here and say I think my single and dating friends in India have it better than those here: there is still some flowers and dinner prevalent there. But we also rape, kill and harass our women a lot and brand people sluts if they sleep with more than one person, so it’s a tough call.

 But to each her own, and as a non-active member of the community, I don’t really have much say. I don’t have much say anywhere anyway, which is why I blog.

By the way, if you’re still with me through all the rambling, here’s a heartfelt thank you. 

I was in a bus some time ago, travelling from my parents’ house to Calcutta. Now due to some unfathomable reason, buses (at least in India) insist on screening movies that a) have a lot of raunchy humour that does not make me laugh at all (Victorian prude, I accept it) b) have what I think are sleazy songs with starlets shaking their booty in front of the camera . I love dancing and am a trained Indian classical dancer. I appreciate that Helen’s movements to “Yeh Mera Dil” and Katrina’s movements to “Mashallah” are very difficult feats to achieve. But there is a difference between dancing and randomly shaking your booty in front of the camera, please accept it.

There was this other family- mom, dad and kid – who were travelling with me. The bus screened “Rowdy Rathore”, which fits the play-on-the-bus bill perfectly and has a song that goes “Pallu ke neechey daba ke rakhkha hain utha doon to hungama ho.”  (I have a problem with this movie. If you’ve watched it, you’ll know why.)

While I could feel my ears turn red as I shifted a little uncomfortably as the song played on, kiddo stood up on his seat and started singing and dancing to the song with total abandon.  Mom seemed embarrassed; dad was not, or was making a good show of not being embarrassed and none of them were able to hush up the little boy. He knew the lyrics by heart, so it clearly wasn't the first time he was listening to it.

Other co passengers laughed, some even encouragingly. How did it become acceptable for a 10 (my random guess, he looked about 9-10) year old to sing these songs? But then fully grown men apparently blast “Aaja Teri Ch##t Maru” from their car stereos in Delhi, so who can blame a 10 year old? Women allegedly have come to accept it, they pretend they don’t hear. Because know what? If you react, you could get killed. Or if you are Sushma Swaraj, you’d say worse, raped.

It is also acceptable for the upwardly mobile and rich women and men to mistreat their partners openly at parties, even hit each other. For the gentleman to beat his wife because he’s “had a difficult day at work and just snapped”, for intelligent and smart young women living in the emancipated first world to accept that men can “rate” them at a club or call them “fat” and other names when they feel like it. For people to “go along” with relationships they know are dead just because they don’t want to tackle the entire world and their questions.

All acceptable. Even murder or shooting people randomly is. But if you’re in India, kiss in public, and watch the fun. If you’re in the US, you’re probably still wading through various versions of “let’s meet up…at some point”. More on that later.