Season 1, Episode 0
Backstory
I thought it’d take a couple of months.
A quarter, tops. It’s been a year.
So far, no good. It should’ve been a routine, run-of-the-mill, pick-the-best-of-the-bunch sorta affair. It wasn’t.
I’ve been balls-deep in the “process” for a year.
Vying, wooing, Whatsapping, right-swiping, gas-lighting, sweet-talking. I’ve hired obsequious agents, reconnected with long-lost relatives, trotted the globe, fallen out of love, committed my birth chart to memory, made a foolproof Excel questionnaire and even had a professional picture taken.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained right?
Bollocks.
I colossally overestimated my “demand” and comically underestimated the “supply”.
As a solid-6 on the dateability index — bang-average height, dimpled-smile, curly coif (meticulously oiled each night while fervently hoping the dormant bald gene doesn’t get expressed), early-30s, “non-vegetarian”, upper-caste bloke — my chances were decent, at best. The eclectic background –schooled in Bangalore & London, fluent Hindi, passable Kannada and subtitled Marathi, an Irish passport, a stable-if-boring day job and an active blogger by night — seemed to scare off more women than a glimpse of Shakti Kapoor’s nipples (you’ve seen the picture).
Now, a year older, with a rounder midsection, an inflation-beating salary bump, wispy streaks of grey in the ‘fro and firmly ensconced in my mid-30s, I am teetering on the edge of premature unclehood.
Needless to say: I am #singleAF.
But being an insufferable optimist — I continue to reach for the stars. Must be the rollicking ’70s RDB soundtracks I love, subliminally infecting me with the “do not settle for what’s available, strive for what you want” bug. No vaccine for stupidity, eh? But screw it — I’ve decided to go big or go home.
I am a doer with get-up-and-go. A bit anal about organization and punctuality. A tad too eager about becoming a dad. Always on the charm offensive. Outgoing, flirtatious, unfiltered. Pushing boundaries, putting myself out there, taking rejection in my stride and making things happen. Shoot first, apologise later. See, I am the guy who’d buy you a drink, make you laugh, charm your dad, and pre-emptively put our unconceived kids’ names on the private school waiting list.
And yet, nobody is ringing my doorbell and asking me to marry them.
What follows in these pages are some escapades of my life that actually happened in my seemingly eternal pursuit of the purest of all our traditions: an arranged marriage.
Passivity is a bore. So, I am metaphorically squeezing into my LBD, flashing some thigh and like all self-aggrandized Dilwalas, going to find my Dulhaniya.
