Tuesday 1 December 2009

How to 'Bangalore' Your Love-Life if You Live in Bangalore

Being a diligent denizen of the corporate world, every once in a while I surf the net for ways to make myself more productive and achieve a better 'work-life' balance (first thing I've learnt: surfing the net for that sort of stuff sucks time away from both work and life), I happened to read about Tim Ferriss and his book (and blog) 'The Four-Hour Work Week'. There are some pretty fun hacks and stuff that he goes over while talking about 'Lifestyle Design', but what caught my attention was the section on 'Outsourcing Life'. An abridged form of version of the chapter, with a case-study, is available on-line here. It's not just about out-sourcing your work or your appointments calendar, but also stuff like having bed-time stories read to your kids or even having someone else take up the effort of finding women online and setting up dates:

Now while this sounds very cool, you've got to feel for the poor guy sitting in Bangalore who has to go through all those profiles and send out mails and stuff. After all, it's not like he'll be in a position to hand over his Orkut and Facebook profiles to someone in the Philippines or China, and he's too busy with writing code, setting up dates or running errands online to go hit on women himself. So if you're a good Bangalorean ITES employee, what do you do?
Mom-source the work, of course. Delegate all the work of finding the right girl to your mom (and if required, other family members) and let her handle the profiles on the matrimonial websites, the background checks, the meetings etc. You get a fully committed personal assistant and PR rep, so to speak, and all at the fantastic price of zero rupees. It also means that you don't have to spend time actually learning any social skills or etiquette.
Having delegated all that difficult work, you can then devote the extra time you've gained to all those exciting things you've always wanted to do in life, like drinking too much beer, nailing down the code for that pesky macro at work, or even proving conclusively to all those heathens on the the Cricinfo comment pages that Sachin Tendulkar really and truly is God. So what are you waiting for? Life, as John Lennon would have told you, is what happens to you while your mother is busy making other plans.

No comments:

Post a Comment