One-sided relationships have been the core personality of Telugu boys since the release of 7G Brindavan Colony. If you walk into Madhushala bar and find a guy drinking alone, he is that one-sided lover with a suffering liver.
It’s the most common trait you will find in Telugu boys after engineering and dowry. At least GenZ seems to have a relationship with a famous person from Instagram, but we millennials fictionalised a real person in our minds because duh, no internet.
I was studying at Loyola College, and there was roll no 42M who fell in love with 29F, but he never told her because it’s easier to say ‘I’m a one-side lover’ than to actually walk up to a girl and ask her out for a coffee.
Anyway, one day 19M, who had self-confidence, spoke to 29F, and 42M picked up a fight claiming he is her lover. 29F discovered 42M’s love for her while he was beating up 19M. She fell in love because of another concept called love at first sight or in this case love at first fight.
Two years later, both married separately to people of their parents’ choice. Beat that, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil.
Many years ago, when I was a GenZ kid, I was obsessed with a series called Castle. I would follow the female lead, Stana Katic, on Facebook and every other fan page of hers. My feed would be full of her pictures, and my ‘delulu’ grew to a point where I thought I had to go to Los Angeles because she was waiting at the airport.
Anyways, next month Game of Thrones released, and I moved on from my first parasocial relationship.
The peak of parasocial activity was seen when Taylor Swift got engaged. Extreme introverts who hardly ever share anything on the gram recovered their passwords, downloaded pictures of the engagement, and even tagged the couple like Taylor Swift would be very upset if they missed it.
Also, it’s not a bad thing to imagine a person who exists in a different pin code being around you.
The stoic philosopher Seneca says: pick a person living or dead whose opinion you respect and imagine they are in the room with you. Use that as a filter before doing stupid things.
I should do this more, but I sometimes imagine Javed Akhtar reading my work, going ‘mashallah, you’re better than Farhan’.
Often I wonder if this joke would make Javed sahab laugh. Will he approve this? I don’t know if he will ever read my work, but thinking he will makes my writing more rational, less sexist, and a bit more progressive.
As a kid, my parents also introduced a parasocial friend and told me, ‘God is watching you always, so never sin’. At first I was scared. I mean, why is God watching me watch naked people.
But then later I realised he was also watching Osama Bin Laden, so I felt less guilty.
Also, don’t judge my parents. Most Indian uncles have a parasocial relationship with Modi ji.
Anyway, in the future this will get better. With AI, we will probably have an Alexa model of your Taylor Swift starting the day with Bad Blood and also reminding you not to eat sugar.
Sandesh
@msgfromsandesh
(This comedian is here to tell funny stories about Hyderabad)
(The writer’s views are his own)