A passing glance

I was on my way to the market and after getting off from the auto was taking a walk towards the shops that I was supposed to visit in order to buy the required stuffs. As usual, the streets were flocked by people of all ages. From a distance I could see a young girl who appeared to be of my age coming from the opposite direction. I won’t claim her to be extremely pretty or something out of this world but would say she was decent enough for an average guy like me to take notice. (And yeah, we guys do take notice of every random girl that comes our way). She walked passed by me and our eyes met for a while. A fraction of a second it was and then she looked down which is the norm in these parts of the world. I kept walking and never looked back and neither did she for sure.

Now, any young man, generally and preferably single and not accompanied by a girlfriend or wife (who would be otherwise threatening to burst his eyeballs for staring at another woman) can identify with this situation and it’s not like what I described above happened for just once. Really I can’t keep count of the number of times there has been these fraction-of-a-second eye contacts. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe in love at first sight. That’s one of the crappiest things to have been ever coined by the romantics. It’s plain uncomplicated attraction that can happen at the first sight with a possibility of leading to love or a relationship in the future. And for that to happen, the girl has to be a friend of your friend, a colleague or simply an acquaintance with whom there are possibilities of future interactions (read: second, third, fourth…..and nth ‘sights’)

But what about these kind of situations as mentioned in the beginning? What about the ones that you meet at the bus stops, ticket counters, bank queues or shopping malls? Now you can’t really stop someone who is just passing by you saying “Hey listen, I just got dazzled by your enchanting looks and would you mind letting me decide over a cup of coffee if its love or just mere attraction?”. Okay, this might work and is quite a pick-up line considering it would really take some courage for someone to do such an act and with girls having their notions of shining armor clad princes, it might just hit the right note. But then there is every chance that you might get labeled as a stalker (the paranoid ones might even immediately move their hands into the purse to draw out those pepper sprays or an umbrella, the quintessential Weapon of Male Destruction) when actually you never knew if she existed until that very moment, leave alone stalking!

But do girls really like being approached in that manner? I guess in 90% of the cases they would get uncomfortable if not scared, being approached by a total stranger, no matter how modulated is your voice or even if you are the poor man’s Tom Cruise. If not verbal, her immediate facial expressions would just mean two words -“Get lost!!”. Though you might stumble upon the rare kind who would jump around with joy at being approached like that and might even end up treating you with all bills paid. But generally, those are not the ones you fall for. Just to get to the other side of the perception,. I even once went to the extent of asking a female friend of mine about what I should do in such a situation. She blatantly replied, “Nothing! Just move ahead and carry on with whatever you are doing”. Her reply further confirmed my notions.

So, I continue to see those beautiful creatures on the road, stare at their assets for a mili-second or so with a faint hope of being stared back (which they actually do in the most discreet manner and a guy would never notice her doing that) and then just walk ahead. Our male kind has been already in the news over the years for all the wrong reasons and with the ever-growing number of feminists all the time raring to go at our throats, I would rather prefer to ‘be a nice guy and not get the girl’. But then, that would be a loss on the other side of the table too!!