The Hot Girl Pseudonym

Back in the 19th and 20th centuries, there were quite a few female writers (like Mary Ann Evans). Most of them had to use male pseudonyms (like George Elliot) to be even taken seriously by the readers! Men and women by definition were not equal then. Even in late twentieth century, Joanne Rowling had to use a gender neutral J. K. Rowling to sell Harry Potter to young boys and men (the reason here being more of economics than social). This only proves that men and women are equal only by a politically correct definition but not in our way of life.

But in early 21st century, social networking and blogging became "the thing" and the tables have turned. My theory is that it is lot easier for a girl to get recognition on the internet than it is for a guy. Be it facebook, blogger, twitter or whatever, it is much easier. Just look around you, look at your facebook wall, you can see some girl making an absolutely asinine status update and she gets two pages worth of likes and lols.

It’s the same with blogs. Even when they write about boring (and often narcissistic) shopping “adventures” or neighbor’s cute puppies, they get hundreds of followers and dozens of comments. But for a guy to have hundred followers! Well I am yet to run into a non-tech, non-celebrity blog with original content written by a guy to have over a hundred followers...

Just to prove my point, I conducted a controlled social experiment in facebook where I picked up one silly status message update of a friend on facebook and I put the same status message to compare the number of reactions.
The result: It is always one up for girls; two up if she is hot and uploads her pic!

52 comments!

No comments, just one like :'(

I am not blaming the girls for the seemingly unfair advantage, I am only blaming HIM (Horny Indian Male) who comments/likes/lols every silly status message and blog! (Even I am occasionally guilty of this offence but this is my redemption).

I have an offer to write my own column for a London based online magazine(yaay!) and I initially toyed with the idea of writing with a hot-girl pseudonym but decided against it for three major reasons. One, I do not want a bunch of desperate HIMs following me. Two, I do not want to lose the chance of a hot girl falling in love with me because I am so funny (highly improbable but not impossible) and three, I respect the intelligence of my readers. So I’ll be writing as g2 everywhere :).

P.S: I did not take permission from my friend on facebook to conduct the experiment because I believe it is always more convenient to ask for apology than permission. (If she is reading this, my apologies)

P.P.S: I can be so sexist.

P.P.P.S: Celebrating over 50 followers :)

Comedy is the Opposite of Poetry

poetry is a destructive force

A lot of people write poetry in their blogs. I don’t read any of them. I don’t read poems at all. It is because I find most of the poems to be incomprehensible, kind of inexplicable, sort of unclear, very unintelligible, sometimes dark and pretty obscure, often puzzling, lost or may be missed.

The problem with poetry lies not in the art but with the artist. It is the poet who wants to be perceived as enigmatic, unfathomable, complicated or lost (often in deep melancholy :p). Poetry is such a self-centered and narcissistic exercise.

The luxury poets have is that you (as the reader) do not understand the poem. You think you do, but you don’t for it is not meant to mean anything. The bigger luxury the poets have is that you are afraid to admit that you do not understand anything. And they exploit it and use it almost like a power that forces you into finding a meaning in something that was intentionally made to be meaningless. In a lot of ways it is no different than the symmetric inkblots psychologists use to experiment on you.

In this respect, comedy is in many ways the opposite of poetry. Comedy has to be approachable, comedy has to be clear and simple, comedy has to be succinct and more importantly, it has to be funny. Comedy has to be all of these in 30 seconds. Thirty seconds is all you have to make a joke.

The primary difference between comedy and poetry is that in poetry, the responsibility of entertainment is transferred back to the reader. Entertainment is a big responsibility, and the comedian has to carry it on his shoulders every thirty seconds.

And so poetry sucks.

P.S: Fans of poetry and amateur poets, you might want to defend your views.

the cartoon

 

Es'sense' of humor

Ever wondered how all those funny guys come up with all the funny stuff? I did... in fact I have been doing research on that for one month now. Now most people I know laugh when I use the words "research" and "me" in the same sentence (even before I finish the sentence). May be it has got to do with my rather offbeat research techniques. For instance my research in humor goes like this. I try to figure out how I come up with funny stuff and then generalize the results on how all the funny people come up with all the funny ideas. "A rather controversial method" you might say. The surprising thing is that this is nothing new. Sigmund Freud did this all his life and he is now considered the father of psychology!

Sense of humor is an interesting paradox. It has no funny definition! Also, the notion of sense of humor changes with the gender. A guy is said to have a good sense of humor if he has the ability to make people laugh. A girl is said to have a good sense of humor if she laughs at whatever the guy-with-good-sense-of-humor says. I know it is unfair but yes, it is pretty easy for the girls, all they have to do is laugh!

Speaking of research, some topics are easier to do research on than others.



I'll illustrate most of my research findings in simple sketches because sketching gives me a lot of pleasure:


Here are some of my research findings illustrated:

Sometimes, giving pep talk to depressed bald people can get quite tricky. Even humor might not help.