The weirder sex.

I don't know what's all the fuss about the un-understandable sex is all about.

For all I know - they've had us figured out for years.

For example.

Everyone knows women love to shop, love to look pretty, love to go all pouty even when they're just kidding, love to get nasty every so often just to gauge whether people are paying enough attention, love to get involved in petty politics so that they've got something to do and basically find all the entertainment of their lives within the periphery of ten people.

But I cannot understand men.

I've always been chaperoned by my dad all my life. His way of loving me involves crazy obsessions that some calamity is going to befall me even if he leaves me for the slightest fraction of a second and therefore I must be accompanied by an adult at all times - and not just any adult. Only Dad himself. In no other entity he trusts. I just wonder how he's dealing with the idea that Miaan Jee is indeed going to come take me away.

Anyway - as I got off the car today to go pick some clothes from the tailor I told Ali to wait for five minutes because all I had to do was pick up the parcel and come back. When I got off the car, it was a minute long walk to the shopping centre, and I had to tolerate the gazes of at least 10-20 men who were milling about. My questions began to increase. What are these people looking at? I am not exactly Madonna here, my head is always covered, my gaze is always either on the ground or directly across some inanimate object of reach, I'm usually walked at a fast, convicted pace with a slight frown on my face - especially when in public. Overall verdict? NOT worth staring and wasting precious moments of the day at.

And here they were ... pouring out of nooks and crannies ... walking at their pace, but not without glancing and gazing and staring.

The real point of frustration came when I returned from the tailor (who by the way was way too distracted to pay any attention to his clients and took his sweet time to give me the dress he was supposed to give two weeks ago - yes, the irony is charming) I saw Ali nowhere in sight. I called him up asking his whereabouts to which he said that the traffic police had told him to move the car so he had to take a long route and come back.

So I waited.

Right in front of Nirala Sweets, on an island next to Bareeze and Minnie Minors, I waited with my packet of clothes and anklets in hand. Right. Men. Walking by. Staring. Left. Men. Coming out of the bank with papers in their hands. First they look. Then they move. So I began walking purposefully so that no one would think that I'm waiting for a rickshaw or taxi ... and be offered a lift!! ... (yes, Dad's paranoia has had its effects on me) ... I rummage the road with my eyes waiting for Ali to come round the corner, but he also decides to make me wait needlessly and I walk a bit more. Tiny pathan kids. Not more than 10. They join the fraternity, the little tykes. And stare with their blue eyes which must have the most intricate mechanism of x-rays fitted inside them to ever exist in nature.

In those five minutes of waiting (which really did seem like the cliched eternity) I could not for the life of me understand the POINT of looking at a girl, even if it is for 1/100th of a second, and like it. I could not understand their tolerance and stomach to look at a girl if she's fat, ugly, old, young, pretty, ordinary, covered, uncovered ... I don't understand it. It's just a bypassing stimuli. How hard can it be to avert your gaze and not make her feel like she's on display?

I do know what Freud spent all his life doing and at the end of the asking "What do women want?" ... but would it not have been scores better ... had, while studying libido on the side, he could have also wondered, "I know what men want - but is there any way they can be civilized about it?"