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CRANK'S CORNER

        This week I got to experience the most outrageous of male fantasies, which is to be caught single in a women's college. At least this was the fantasy that guys of my generation were waking up to every morning hoping that it would come true at least that day. I am talking about a time when watching from a safe distance girls going to their colleges was roughly the today's equivalent of careering on a motorbike on the ECR with a girl on the pillion for a dirty weekend. Those were obviously antiseptic times when the word fun seemed to have gender-specific meanings and any thought that involved the other sex was almost deemed the height of perversion. Boys and girls moved in their separate orbits, and every one behaved as if auditioning for a role in a regimented monastery. It was evidently abstemious times, and it is a minor miracle that how humanity still continued its onward march. It is fair to say that babies emerged from wombs and population grew more through the genie effect.

        Even in co-education institutions, boys and girls co-existed but were mostly like a husband and wife about to be divorced —— the interactions being functional and cold. But boys being boys, and hormones being hormones, there would occasionally be efforts to attract the girls. In schools, you could come across boys climbing trees, leaping from atop and getting up without any apparent effort. This would have been a nice strategy only if the aim was to impress monkeys. But somehow boys of my generation felt that jumping around and running aimlessly at wild speeds would create a romantic impression on wide-eyed girls. In my belief, it was here that the first seeds of lesbianism were sowed.

        The other major reason that the boys then never got the 'attention' they secretly craved for was what they wore. Tailors then evidently had not finished their graduation, and whatever they had learnt did not involve the process called 'cutting'. Shirts had collars that in darkness could be mistaken for the ears of an African elephant. Every collar, by a conservative estimate, required the rough annual output of Reliance or Bombay Dyeing now. Shirts also ran upto the knees almost obliterating the need for wearing anything below. They were accepted as shirts only because they had headlight-sized buttons and could be draped between the shoulders. But what was covering the legs was even more hideous. The pants went by the name bell bottoms. The bottoms were set to Grand Canyon proportions and quite simply a small-sized family could have happily lived somewhere in between the length of the lower ends of the pant. If at the bottom part of a pant tailors learnt the art of unloosening, they honed their skills in tightening around the hip level. The rule of thumb here was that the pants around the waist must be so tight that the reproductive organs should be squeezed to remain in terminal coma. The belt loops were so wide that a Titanic could have passed through it. But it was just right for the belt that presumably looked as if it needed the slaughtering of an entire herd of cows to make.

        In a show of intuitive style coordination, boys normally had hair the length of a writhing anaconda. Barbers, like tailors, never got around to touch the scissors. If the occasion demanded, like when a boy needed to have a look at his face lest he mistakes some one to be himself, a lawn-mower had to be summoned. The hairstyle came strictly in two flavours: Hirsute and bald. The in-between was waiting for discovery by a blessed barber.

        In such a scenario, girls could have been hard-pressed to spot the man behind the heap of fabric and hair, leave alone harbouring any notions of romance with him. By the time things came down to acceptable levels of style, which is when the tailors and barbers managed to complete their graduation and learnt to use the scissors, it was all too late. The boys of my generation had become men, and style held no meaning for them.

        This week, when I had to be the single male in an all-woman college, my mind went back to the days when we waited for such a happy eventuality. Immediately the boat-sized collars and the yards and the yards of hair also came rushing back into the memory. Suddenly, fantasy was not such fun.

        I came out quickly and went in search of my long lost barber and tailor.