Most people should be taught that marriage is an exercise in irony. Wilde put it succinctly when he said that women marry because they are curious and men because they are tired and both are eventually disappointed. In that sense, it is less irony and more linear misfortune.
When Will Smith donned that black suit for the last time, again, and stepped on to the screen, and the aliens broke into a dance sequence as they cued the title track, it was one of the best moments of my growing up life. Either I was easy to please as a child or else my parents really held back on the love. However, since then, the term MIB has come to mean something totally different for me. Allow me to explain.
“The recent incident where 1,300 men of the working class from a purvey of fine chewing tobacco were called rude and obnoxious for merely enjoying an after-work drink, which merely happened to linger on beyond a few hours, and lasting a good few days, has made much news. Given the closed-quarter nature of the ship they were confined on, their period dancers (bunnies reliving the era of Free Love 70s and the Roaring Can-Can risqué 30s) had to be accommodated in public areas where they had more room to strut their stuff.”
If you allow that a story can have two sides, this is how the news could have also read. But it didn’t, anywhere! Because nobody was gullible enough to imagine that a boat-load of Indian men on a work trip were even remotely capable of keeping it in their cabins, let alone their pants.
For this, ladies and, well, for lack of a more suitable term, gentlemen, is the reality of the males of our country; it has risen to the top of the sleaze chain, becoming the most predatory of all out there. An unleashed Indian man is a loose cannon. I have been to bars in Thailand where even the unthinkable is acceptable and yet they don’t allow Indian men in, or at least slap a heavy cover charge on them as if to ensure indemnity and adequate compensation for the general mayhem they will let loose.
Indian men possibly see marriage as a leash, one which they put on willingly, but love to doff at any and every instance. Nothing wrong with a boys’ night on town, but with us, it often verges on turning into a debauched display of antics. The Hangover movie series is mild compared to what a married Indian man on the prowl for a piece of action is capable of.
And here, I am not even alluding to the ‘gutka’ background of the aforementioned news, which risks getting into classist boundaries and prejudice; I am sure they could have just as easily been college laureates and wreaked similar havoc. From Dubai to Djakarta, London to LA, when they implement the rule of ‘No Stags’ what they really mean is no ‘Single Indian Men’. Sure there are a few other nations with a similar frenzied lot and we aren’t the only rotten apple in the basket, but that’s a minor consolation really.
But before I sign off, the only problem with the term MIB (Married Indian Bachelor) which I have only just coined, is that it possibly paints bachelors in the wrong shade of decency. So, maybe, to be entirely politically correct, I should have said Married Indian Men who behave like they are out on a flesh-hunt or the Perpetual & Tasteless Stag-night Drama syndrome but PTSD was not only taken, it was exactly what these musketeers were doling out. Now that’s irony!
This column is for anyone who gives an existential toss.