A bright, sunny day one seldom sees these days. As they weaved their way through traffic, they unsurprisingly attracted admiring looks. Heads turned at the sight of the big white car.[break]
At this point, I turn to my colleague and ask him if his client realized that having taken the trouble to buy a so-called chick magnet, the only people stopping in their tracks and probably staring were men. And that truly is the trouble with boy toys.
Fortunately or unfortunately, they get better, faster and bigger with each passing model. Thus, it is a rather sad but true saga that the only thing that separates men from boys is the price of their toys. It is another sad but true fact that we don’t buy these to stun women.
We buy them to make an impression on other men. Women should understand this. After all, they don’t dress for men, they dress for other women.
Of course, psychologists, although I prefer to call them quacks, will run through their theories about recompense to disagree with what is already right. As always, they are unnecessarily expensive and so completely wrong. This desire streak in men has nothing to do with an insufficient composition.
The only recompense that comes into play is the amount we’re willing to pay for what we want while we search for an admissible excuse to justify the spending.
The trouble of course is that having bought an implausible piece of stuff, there’s always someone you know who goes out and spends more on an even fancier and trendiest stuff. This sort of makes your stuff look vintage and leaves you wanting for another better model.
The first time I drove a car, it was an abandoned Datsun which, to no one’s surprise, didn’t run. Sometimes, I would generously offer my friends rides back home only to be prudently dismissed. They would rather choose to go back home in the microbus.
Look at what we have now. If you stand in front of Sherpa Mall in the evenings, you’ll notice that every sane guy with a six-figure salary has access to a Land Rover.
The real estate-wallahs, now that the good times are over, no longer seem to have the need to constantly upgrade their Freelanders. Sure, a Land Rover is good, but it’s always hard to beat a Mercedes.
This is what we see running around on the newly razed and widened streets of Kathmandu. This, I’m sure, is temporary until someone decides it’s about time they bought the new Evoque to town.
I have a lot of friends who are rich. To be honest, I’m not really fond of them. Not because they’re not nice, but because they make me feel poor. My friend Rohan and I both studied in Bombay.
Rohan wasn’t a smart boy. He wasn’t dumb, either; but he sure wasn’t a smart fellow. Rohan now makes boats. I can count boats.
Unfortunately, Rohan doesn’t yet make cars I could borrow, but he’s recently bought himself a BMW which can comfortably cruise from Chobar to Hetauda without anyone actually realizing all the miles traveled. Does it stop? Don’t be silly.
As long as there are men who can be the first amongst their friends to buy the car no one else has, there’s no end. The Hummer with the sound and mileage worse than Enfield, the phone that will make the super computer seem like a battery-operated calculator, and the Ducati that can seemingly fly men to the moon.
You see, the problem with today’s world is that there’s an unseen race between inventors and engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof gadgets and the rest of the world trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the rest of the world is winning.
But apparently, life isn’t all about being materialistic. For those of us who can’t afford a Range Rover, we have the bathtub. The bathtub was invented in 1850 and the telephone in 1875.
In other words, if you had been living in 1850, you could have sat in the bathtub for 25 years without having to ever answer the phone. Go figure.
The writer is a banker by profession. He enjoys single malts and other good things in life.
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