Real Men Don8217;t Cry

Poetry. Somehow, whenever Ms HQ8217;s name cropped up metres of meter crossed your mind. She was the kind of woman who inspired poetry. All the men in her life were the sensitive kind. The sort who understood PMS, understood that a rose needed a thorn and always wore their hearts on their sleeves. Guys, that we wouldn8217;t touch with a barge pole because they just weren8217;t real men. The seeds of the nineties man were laid way back then, in college. What advertisers coined as The Nineties Man8217;. They wore pastel shirts, trousers not jeans, read literature, wrote poetry, played the guitar and knew all the words from the main song in the Eric Segal barf-fest Love Story. And yes, they were not afraid to cry. In fact they like to weep, big fat tears 8212; rolling down their cheeks. Teary-eyed sensitive men, clutching at their girlfriends8217; handkerchiefs, could be seen crying at movies, cryingthrough novels and crying at the sight of cruelty.

Somewhere in the midst of wiping their tears, in the nineties, we too joined them in a crying blitzkrieg. What else can you do when the cruel fact hit you that men had turned nice? Worse sensitive. Worst soulful. It seemed that men had forgotten that when we needed a dose of getting in touch with the child inside us, we had our women friends. We certainly didn8217;t need men for that. We needed men to make us cry. Mean men, boorish men, sweaty men and men who belched 8212; please, spare us from guys who subtly burped into Winnie the Pooh handkerchiefs. Or, boys who delicately lifted their pinkies while sipping coffee from Takete Muluma azure-coloured mugs. We needed the lads to be lads. And we needed them to break our hearts. So that they could leave us to get on with the business of writing poetry. After all, if Ted Hughes hadn8217;t subjected Sylvia Plath to angst where would we have got poetry to die for.

We needed men who would not faint when they donated blood8211; Ms HQ8217;s pastel-pink panted admirers collapsed about in delicate heaps whenever they saw blood donation camps being set up. We, on the other hand, willingly had needles stuck into ourselves so that we could drink a cola and eat glucose biscuits at the expense of the college.

We needed men who would not be sensitive, soulful or sensate. So that when we ran across these traits in our female friends we could appreciate them more for these rare qualities. We needed men so that we could know the difference between the boys and the girls without turning them over to check for gender.

But, hey! May be the nineties man is the fault of this century. A malaise that is bigger than all our collective destinies 8212; that might, just might, be righted with the onset on the new century. Maybe the Millennium Man will be a real man 8212; it8217;s about time.

Nonita Kalra is features editor, The Indian Express.