Stalker Chronicles

During the Infosys Mysore training days, even while “living on the edge”, I did two things very often. Checking out boys and checking out girls. The latter was for our desperate enthusiastic guy-friends.

Bhai..don’t look now. Blue tee at 10 o’clock

Dude! To my left. Square diagonal. White shirt and..wait...shorts *cheesy grin*

And me being this magnanimous creature *smug look*, took the latter part a bit too seriously. Finding efficient eye-exercise regimens for my male friends seemed to be my top-priority back then. Apart from trying not to flunk, that is. So the things being as they were, we got posted to Hyderabad and the batch was scattered all over the existing Infosys DC’s. By random providence or fate, I got the city closest to my hometown and I was pretty happy (actually 3 years down the line; I’m still figuring out if it is a good thing or a bad thing). Even though Hyderabad DC’s ‘homely’ look paled in comparison to Mysore DC’s opulence, I tried to console myself by going back to square one – checking out population of male variety that is

I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm marshalling such an useful time pass is this dashed difficult problem - a certain kind of girl in the group (there is one in every group I suppose), who would consider this act as utter blasphemy. They will kick you under the tables when you are knee-deep in the said process, they will try to make useless small talk to distract you from following the object* of the regimen, or worse they will sometimes cover your eye-angle such that the object is not in focus. These women are usually of the married variety or the more evil-y committed array who don’t quite understand the benefits of this exercise regimen.

B is one such lady.

Now B has been married as soon as we landed ourselves at Mysore and is of the not-false opinion that I haven’t outgrown my college persona yet. So, when B stares open-mouthed not once pausing to breath, for a full minute, I HAD to follow her eyes. And I saw the object who had readily converted the dastardly B. Tall, lanky guy in the adjacent cubicle, explaining something over IP phone. Great! Irrationally handsome plus we already know where the guy sits. Awesome!

But just to get the an-eye-for-an-eye thing straight, I snapped my fingers in front of her eyes to get her back from la-la land. “Oye..chupa rusthum! What just happened there?”

And so it followed.
Being the liberated, novae convert, B took to exercise regimen as a duck to water. She was a natural. We were pretty discrete and efficient at the same time.

In the days that followed, we timed our lunches appropriately ;-), made sure we had our snacks in the pantry (in high-chairs, mind you) from where we could have a good view of the cubicle and even timed our juice-time after thorough homework. If you do these sorts of things so meticulously, the chances of not being spotted by the object are pretty slim. Hence - his blushing, when we were in vicinity, was hard to miss. That we don’t want. We wanted operation to be as discrete as possible. Having failed miserably, we decided to move on.

To another regimen...

One fine day after gorging ourselves on abomination that is the FC food, we were cooling our heels outside the FC, lazily eyeing the folks going in and going out. It was then we saw another tall, lanky guy who was walking into the FC. He was talking on his phone. We spotted him some days later, while sitting in the same spot, him talking on the phone.

And the third time we saw him, owing to our utter boredom or screwed up neurons, we decided to follow him. To his building. And follow we did, but not with discretion of CIA agents. But, with the bumbling enthusiasm of Amazon orangutans. Doing the trying-not-to-giggle-but-bursting-out-laughing in the most miserable way. Object does a head-turn, eyes the culprits and smiles. Operation Failed at first lap itself! Abort mission.

Needless to say, we moved on....

This was two years ago. B and A (another accomplice) are no longer with Infosys.
B is about to complete her Masters and now pings me to tell about the cute Iranian guy in her class. And another accomplice A is now happily married and in another organization, she says she hadn't stalked anyone at all since she moved away. Sad, I know!

Yesterday, when I was on my way out to catch the bus home, I saw TallLankyGuy1 playing ping-pong with TallLankyGuy2. Life has suddenly come full-circle.

I slinked away as discreetly as possible.

And, tried not to think of the conversation they’d have, had they seen me.

Seen that girl going there, she used to stalk me...

What no kidding, she used to stalk me too.

Girls these days...



DC-Development Center
*kindly excuse the blatant male-objectification. It is fun though :D