I used to work at Just Like That, a youth magazine owned by the Times Of India Group. While there, I wrote many, many stories on a vast variety of subjects. I recently found a few pieces I had written in the early 2000s. They’re terrible. Such tripe. I’m glad I recognize them for what they are,  but I’m also ashamed that they’re so terrible. Really, they stink. Like days-old beef.

Because I’m such a nice guy and because I can laugh at myself, I’m going to be reposting a few over the next couple of weeks. Enjoy. And be kind. At least I don’t write / think that way any more:

24 Hours In A Guy’s Mind
By Vahishta Mistry

One would think that a story about a guy’s mind would be relatively easy to write – just fill up 600 words’ worth of text with the word ‘sex’ and that’d be a pretty fair view of reality, right? Wrong. I started to do that, and then realised that I would have to change my views because (shock) guys don’t just think about sex – we’re loopy about beer too.

Seriously, girls, the fact is, there isn’t that much thought bumping around in a guy’s mind. We’re great at tactical thought – just as a soldier is excellently suited to do a series of very demanding tasks like firing a rifle, charging at the enemy and finding cover in a battle, guys tend to behave the same, largely because they look at life as a conflict. Take shopping, for example. A guy strides into a shop like Patton into France. He’s there to shop and woe betides the salesperson (or Nazi) in his way. 15.349 minutes later, the purchase is made according to plan and the next target is being scouted out.

With women too, guys are quite competent at getting what they want – it’s deciding what they want in the first place that has most of them fooled. It’s the easiest thing in the world to woo one woman – you can find out all you need to know and then attack her weaknesses one by one.
But when you’re clueless about the type of woman you’re looking for, then all the tactical genius in the world doesn’t help.

What’s the point, after all? Even if a guy were so good that he could bed every chick in town, he’d still wake up wanting more out of life. In fact, when a guy wakes up in the morning, most often, he isn’t thinking very far beyond the next 15 minutes. If he’s hungry, make that 10 minutes. If there’s a woman next to him, he’s not even thinking at all, he’s re-capping what the night was like. See what I mean about the tactical thing?

There’s no long-term thought happening, which is why men are so commitment-phobic as well – thinking that far into the future just plain scares us! This is a source of constant frustration to every woman I meet. What women very often fail to realise though, is that most of the time, guys DON’T think about things in a strategic sense. In other words, we leap before we look. We depend on external factors to give us our purpose in life – this is why women decide what they want to do with life sooner than men.

Ask a guy in the 10th grade what he wants to become and 9 times out of 10, you’ll get a canned response which tells you what his parents want him to do. Fact is, guys are easy to condition. We believe everything in advertisements, especially if there’s a bit of scientific jargon in there. We’d buy anything that would make us look cool. (This fact alone explains two things – my extremely large collection of 1:1 scale air guns and my very single status.)

We’re so easily conditioned in fact, that we’ve gotten used to getting our information in bite-sized pieces, in blurbs and catchphrases. And to make things worse, we have the attention span of a dog listening to a lecture on quantum physics while in a meat-packing plant. It isn’t so much that we’re not interested in what you’re saying, it’s that we’re not capable of paying that much attention. Cut to the chase, or we WILL tune you out! We won’t be thinking of anything more important than you have to say, we’re just thinking of something – anything – else, just for variety.