Singlophobia-Surviving in your own company

Singlophobia-sounds weird-right.I too thought the same but when I thought about the content it revolves around it appeared less weird and sad.I am sure Websters can sue me tomorrow for creating words on my own without any authorization but then a look at America and they would understand english does not follow protocols.It is the main linking language and does not require accuracy as long as comprehensibility exists between the two communicating parties.Getting back to the topic I would define 'Singlophobia' as the state of survival in solitude.In this condition people try to survive despite of brutal loneliness all around them.You are subjected to different environments and different people with indifferent idiosyncrasies.This is a period in life which comes much before the mid life crisis when you are settled and not married.You try to the best of your abilities to have someone share your life with you but that someone becomes someone else's someone.You lead your life with the hope that one day you definitely would have someone in your life and immerse yourself in career/studies to digress yourself from thinking about that special someone but alas to no avail.
Now I would try to relate the incidents of my life which would show how I turned into a singlophobic.Right from the start the protocol that our Indian society defines for us don't make much sense at all.I too was no different and the protocols defined right from standard tenth were-no girls and only studies,no girls and only studies,no girls and only studies and finally no girls and only studies.I did my schooling in a co-educational medium considered to be a privilege in those days and our non co-educational counterparts would always make it a point to either befriend us or scare us to reveal information about any miss teenage sensation they had hots for.I look back now and find me so dumb that I would help those ‘fuckers’ woo a girl but would do nothing to woo her.If the world works on chance then mathematically I was spending 8/24 hours with a girl compared to the 1/24 hours that my fellow non co educational compatriots were getting but dumbness never makes you feel you are dumb.It makes you believe status quo is still the same.It make you concentrate on other aspects of life like bunking classes to watch a movie,play cricket,hang around in some food outlet(Since I hail from a small town I did not have the privilege of dropping into McDonalds or KFC as I only came to know about these outlets when I started working in metros).As time passed by and we were at the edge of completing our twelfths through serendipity we came across the fact that every single decent girl was hooked up to some fucker or the other.Obviously now the word fucker was applied to a broad category of people,people who could woo girls were called fuckers.I realized later that the term coined for my kind of people was 'suckers'.Everybody had this notion about us.It does not necessarily imply that I was always on the top of the merit list but I was always seen with people who were called 'toppers' and used to get decent marks.It was a perfect symbiotic relationship-I would do all the crap work for the toppers and they in turn would help me understand the complexities of maths and science.The deal was not bad and I did not not care an ounce even when people referred to me as a 'sucker'.My parents were happy-they got what they wanted-an obedient son who would think nothing other than studies.The hypothesis which I was made to swallow every minute of every hour of every day if every week of every month of every year of every decade was that I need to study hard in a place like India-supposedly an underprivileged economy to bag a decent job.At that juncture(1998) we were close to becoming a billion so obviously the competition was stiff be it in any field- meds,engineering or architecture.This marks the end of school where I stood out as a complete loser-I was neither a topper nor was a fucker who had a girl with him.

Like the rest of the crowd I took engineering entrance examinations and got through a college.I would not say it was a glorified college but I would definitely say that the place where the college was built was definitely famous as other famous colleges were there.When I got a seat in the college I was the happiest person alive as engineering in my hometown was considered a hefty position.Call it ignorance or stupidity people even thought that engineers had the power to do anything(excerpts from my conversation with a person in a rural village in UP who thought that engineers were able to create the world just like God-seems this gentleman had heard about cloning from some cheap hindi newspaper).I don't deny the fact that engineers have shaped the way the world works in the 21st century but still you cannot compare them with God.

Anyway before entering college the delicious and blissful dreams I had about college life as a direct resultant of bollywood movies presenting glamorous picturesque were shattered when I saw sad and pathetic crowd all around me.The visualizations of a place where sexy girls hung around in body hugging/revealing clothes,a place where valentine's day was celebrated with more enthusiasm than Independence day, a place where primary objective was to pick up a life partner for yourself or simply have fun fizzled into thin air.All the female herd seem to have come from conservative backgrounds and Salwar kameez or sari were the only two dresses which they thought women in India were allowed to wear.It was like being teleported to some place in India in 1950.Anyway time started rolling and before we could take out time to make a list of the available hotties(rather so called hotties as there were none).I did try to approach a bunch of girls in college looking for ways to befriend them but you know what-these girls had never spoken to some guy and the first guy was the first to fall in the ditch rather dungeon I mean-they would have all weird and sad notions about life and would assume any guy who approaches them first as their husbands.Sounds crazy-isn't it? Well any how you had to lie profusely if you manged to fool them to your intelligence.I did become a killer those days but seriously wanted to hook up with some cute,decent and intelligent girl.I knew it was a fantasy as the girls in my college were not even better than the cows in the meadow.Forgive me for being cynical but this is what I really thought of them as a teenager.Time flew past like hell and I discovered I was where I was 3 years back without a job(Thanks to 9/11 in US) and without a girl.
In fact the scenario was so bad that every now and then we would read stories in the paper about some unemployed engineer who committed suicide as lot of workforce was downsized because of the American economy crashing.Our economy was still dependent on the American economy for survival( I do admit that we are not a nation filled with product development companies).Our core strength is to work for other economies-that is our trade and commerce defined in simple terms if I assume services contribute 75% of the national GDP.Every day would make me more and more nervous and the fact that some really dumb friends of mine were successful in getting jobs through hook or crook filled me with shame and inferiority complex.For the first time in my life I felt I was nothing better than a sucker.Any way six months down the line college came to an abrupt end I mean metamorphically I did have a degree then but again degree does not guarantee a job.
I struggled for couple of months before finally getting a job in a small software company with 6k as a monthly salary.I was kind of feeling better after a brief stint with reality.Though the compensation was meagre the feeling was not.I must admit that in this phase I never thought about a girl but as they say your priorities in life shift your focus towards different things.But again evil things never die they just transform themselves from one form to another just like the law of conservation of energy.At this stage I became the usual me looking for girls but again the crap salary I got was not even good enough to take the girl out to a decent restaurant.I mean financially it was not a big deal as dad was ready to offer money to support me but ego would always take you far away from that thought.Hence I had to sacrifice my woo-the-girl idealogy on the altar of bankruptcy.
Anyway five years down the line I am well settled up in India's silicon city and still single.Now of course you have no option other than getting married.You are like 28 and your parents are trying shit hard to get you married but alas all the decent girls in the marriage market are either booked,married or mothers.Let me not forget to mention I did manage to make a girl friend a girl who was already in a three year old relationship but as it was obvious from the beginning she kicked my butt hard and moved ahead with her 'true love'.I spent months in melancholy and tried to forget her by shedding tears loads and loads of them.I have a theory if that all broken hearted people like me start collecting the tears they have shed then we need not worry about the water shortage predicted by NASA in 2010.
So this is me currently looking for a prospective bride and out of millions of snaps that I come across I short list say a few of them and in that lot say more than half reject me not because I look ugly but because they are already involved with some other guy or they don't like my social structure or physical structure.In some of the cases when out of sheer luck the girl selects me too things screw up at the next stage due to horoscopic problems.Now I am left with nothing except for blaming the heavens for sending me in this immortal world at a wrong time and date.Now this is where Singlophobia starts afflicting me.It is a strange condition.I go everywhere alone it could be a movie theatre,a mall etc etc.Any of these places I visit are resplendent with sights of happy couples arm in arm celebrating their duality.The worst times would be when you are sitting next to a couple in a dark theatre who are passionately involved in making out and you as a dumb guy is thinking hard to decide which spectacle to watch.The only thing I do nowadays is to call up old friends who are settled with beautiful wives and who never give a damn to call you up, to ask them about their whereabouts despite of knowing it to full degree.
I have realized singlophobia makes you a geek.I am sure I sound eccentric but as I said since you have nothing better to do you pick up books and start reading them-books which remind you of your not so glorified youth(Thanks to authors like Chetan Bhagat and Karan Bajaj).Sometimes you feel reading these books is the only way to relive your youth.Watching glamor couples shrieking hard to daunt their relationships turns you distressed.I mean you can of course console yourself as per Dilbert's Principle by assuming people around you are idiots but the brain is logical enough to understand who the real loser is?
Come to think of the only place you tend to rejoice is office space as that is the only place where you find buffoons like you in herds, every single soul who thinks he is going to be the new Bill gates or the Steven Jobs of the silicon valley. Mechanical by nature and buffoons by demeanor. I am dumb but I seriously don't consider myself a buffoon as I know I am dumb but unlike me these buffoons don’t and believe there is nothing in life other than their weirdo talks about how to change the system .What they don't realize is that the system is playing with them(may be they should be confined in a cell for a month and should be given 'The Shock Doctrine' and 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman' to read).The better things in life is to have a family of your own,a person you can share your life with.Someone with whom you can openly voice anything you want plus loads and loads of sex(I am after all a human being so need to specify hormonal urges.I can justify my point by saying procreation is necessary but equally important is bliss).Now office space does not even give you enough opportunity to mingle with the opposite gender as majority are married or engaged.The single ones are usually the sad and pathetic lot left in the market you would never want t invest your time in.If per chance there is a single decent girl available then she would either be ambitious(I should rather say confused) or the ones who make say the entire world drool over them from the managers to the directors-You don't stand a fu***** chance dude? The equation is complex and no matter how many iterations you make the solution is not remotely possible(unlike the software code you write everyday).
The bottom line is this phase is atrocious makes you eccentric and one of the reason is our parent's inability to understand our loneliness. At this juncture I realized why Heath Ledger committed suicide. It is very easy to say a person is a coward if he committed suicide due to a heartbreak but it is again a hard reality that the world only recognizes your importance after your demise(Heath Ledger and Anna Nicole Smith are cults nowadays).This is a delicate phase in life and higher degrees of loneliness can destroy a person completely. I am dealing with it so would be a group of people just like me.I mean this is a stage when parents start accusing you of not being able to find a suitable girl though living in a metro for so many years(mind you these are the same people who made us abstain from thinking about girls ten years back) .
This is a difficult stage and I am sure every six out of ten people in India face the same scenario though I don't claim my data to be statistically accurate.
Anyway before I end my sad story I would like to emphasize upon the simple fact that if we are alone it is because we were meant to be alone.(David A Shiang is right in his book God Does not play Dice. Every thing in nature is in order).No matter how hard you try you are going to end up like a loser afflicted with Singlophobia.As Gorden Geeko puts it in wall street-"If you want a friend get a dog.It is all about the bucks,everything else is conversation" I don't totally agree with him as even though I am quite comfortable on the lucrative side I am still a lonely bastard yearning for solace and serenity.Think it would take a lifetime to achieve what I have lost in these twenty eight years of materialistic life-possibility of a life partner.