Love ‘Guru’s tips the stand-up style

Underneath the fun and frolic that is the epitome of Broacha’s wit, there is an aptness to his words, and he takes up male awkwardness and foibles with as much affection as satirical intent
Funny-man Cyrus Broacha
Funny-man Cyrus Broacha

Indian men need help in the romance department, this is no secret, and funny-man Cyrus Broacha rushes to their aid, with his heart in the right place but his advice on amour all gobbledygook.

In the re-introduction to his latest book, 23 1/2 Ways To Make a Girl Fall For You, he describes Indian men as ‘dancing with each other, feverishly, while the seventeen women at the do look on... These, mind you, are all heterosexual men, yet they form a mob’. Only in India, he says, will you see men walking holding each other’s hand whilst ogling the ladies. “They check the women out, mouths agape, pupils dilated in the time-honoured tradition of the village lout, but lo and behold, whilst always, always holding each other’s hands tenderly.”

And Broacha bases his authority on the fact that he can pick out the Indian male from a line-up of four other species, say a dog, a sheep, a log and a snake. With such deep research and long years of study does this dissertation comes to us. Indian men who see a woman every day at the bus stop, ‘but she is not seeing me’, who wave at a woman 27 times and the one time they feel she has waved back, she might have been ‘pushing her hair back’, who lie that they can race cars when they cannot even drive, and who are virgins at 27.

Broacha’s response is psychologically bang on and unfailingly absurd. Since stalking is a big first move in these parts, courtesy Bollywood, he has his hands full stopping the have-feet-will-follow Romeos from chasing after women who are not Juliets, thank you.

To a woman whose husband drools and walks always in front of her, he says: “Since there is no cure for drooling, I would allow him to walk a little ahead in public, so you are spared the sight.” Always practical, he gently disabuses some men of the notion they are ‘dating’ just because some woman has passed by them, even as he quotes from imaginary literary classics to buttress his findings.

Though the blurb describes this book ‘the most incorrect piece of work ever written’, underneath the fun and frolic and Broacha’s wit there is an aptness to the words. The tongue-in-cheek style is never politically incorrect, instead it takes up male awkwardness and foibles with as much affection as satirical intent.

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The New Indian Express
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