What’s love got to do with it?

Foreword: No, I have not relegated my cynicism; and no I am not going to launch into a laboured diatribe for or against relationships. Also, I am not going to dole out advice for the broken hearted. I’m going to tell you a story and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. If you know me, you wont expect it to be saccharine sweet and it will not be, trust me. But then again, this will perhaps be less caustic than most of what I write. Am I mellowing down? Hell, no! This is just the exception that proves the rule.

A couple of days ago, I met a friend who got married recently. Lets call the couple ‘He’ and ‘She’, for the purposes of discussion. He is a friend from college, a true genius, an uber geek, if there ever was one. He is the kind of person who can talk to a single flip-flop within the memory, cajole the hard disk to voluntarily disclose some piece of information it is zealously guarding, and cause the computer to generally behave like an intelligent, faithful dog. However, beyond the virtual world, his obvious poise and panache begin to falter. He is not the best person to give you a minute-by-minute account of the Brazil vs. Croatia game. He cannot even locate his newly rented house, without first knocking on every door in the locality.

She is a software engineer too. She knows which game is on when, and who are the favourites and why it is completely stupid. By self-admission, she can execute any allotted task at work in a zillionth of the allotted time frame. She is worldly-wise too, at least she can locate the newly rented apartment, monitor his replies and translate them for lesser mortals, in between juggling armfuls of sudoku and other such intellectual pursuits.

They are more ‘need each other’ than made for each other. While he fulfills the creative, motive aspect of the couple, she takes charge of the practical. While he explains the DCOM based communication framework he has been designing, only to be interrupted by the driver to ask whether they would like to go left or right at a busy intersection, and immediately gives a perfect geometric idea of the directions he would like him to take, she patiently says, “Left”. You can see the pride in her eyes when he is explaining something like that, and you can see it in his when she skillfully answers the waiter’s questions at the restaurant.

I have had the chance to have dinner with them, and watched him order with aplomb (he is a major foodie) and get completely confused about the quantities and the dishes he has ordered. I have seen her rescue him from the situation with equal zeal. Between all this, they did not hold hands, or gaze into each others’ eyes, or even sigh. Yet, I could see that they were plainly in love.

Sometimes I think love is more about respecting the other person for what (s)he is and compensating for their shortcomings than anything else, but then I watch “Sex and the City” and go “nah!”.

Despite all that, Mrs. and Mr. Baba, take a bow! I think you guys make a wonderful couple. I’m sure you will have a beautiful life together in between numerous communication frameworks and sudoku challenges and traffic directions. Let chaos (theory) reign.