right to information

my love-life went into a coma after my last break-up with the lover, but that’s precisely what necessitates an examination. hopefully this is a just a diagnostic biopsy and not a post-mortem.

here’s what happens. i meet a guy i like. out comes the checklist and i start ticking off. since i like him already, i check most things anyway. like ‘he even notices the patterns on the insoles of my shoes. wow!’ or ‘he’s so oblivious to external appearances – especially his own. wow!’. ‘he likes rabbi shergill too. we are so meant to be!’ or ‘oh, he’s never heard of rabbi but who cares - he likes ani difranco’. and so this poor guy, without his knowledge or consent, gets burdened with being the most-perfect-for-me guy in the whole wide milky way.

what happens next is even crueler. while i get my cheap thrills from daydreams, i’m also doing the mathematics of forever and beyond. ‘will he love me even when my buttocks can’t fight the G-force anymore?’. but there’s no live-feed and i’m getting bored very fast of the same old file pictures. and soon, it’s time to close the case. out comes the other checklist. ‘he notices the shoes of every woman that passes by’ or ‘his annual bath is two years overdue’ or ‘all he talks of is dams. yaawn’. and so he gets dumped in my head. besides, he’s not eternity material.

isn’t that unscientific? one just can’t speculate about the future when one doesn’t have any baseline data for the present.

more importantly, it’s so unfair that all the while, the poor dude has had no say in the whole matter – because he doesn’t have access to information. because i’m holding it back from him. today, even the world bank has learnt that prior and informed consent/dissent is man-date-ory. i, as a defender of social justice, cannot be blind to my own hypocrisies no more.

so, when my traveler is in town en route to very-far-away, i must tell him how perfect he could have been for me.