Cheers. Claps. Shouts. Laughter. Someone throws a paper cup whose graceful trajectory ends in meeting the sufficiently hard surface of a manager's scalp.

Yep, we're watching the 20Twenty finals, India vs Pakistan, on widescreen in the cafe. I check my phone after the first innings and find 7 missed calls in my register, 6 of which I knew, straightaway, would be from my dearest ma and pa.

The 7th call came from a mildly interesting source. Interesting because the source had declared itself isolated from all communication with me, mildly because, well, it wasn't terribly interesting anymore.

So, I sat there, sipping my cardamom chai, while the chai fellow spoke to me in passionate, fluent hindi, on the state of Indian bowling and the various bowlers he liked/disliked/thought had great hair. Maybe more, possibly, cause most of what he said went over my head.

And I thought, alright, after it did give me a call, what the hell, might as well call it back and say, hey wassup with call. And so I look around, and my colleague passes me her phone with a knowing smile.

'Hello,' it picks up the call with it's usual weird intonation.
'You called,' I say.
'What?.. No, I didn't.'
'Yes, you did, at 6.11..'
'No, no, I didn't..' and then, typically, it mumbles incoherently and keeps the phone down.

Interestingly, this particular specimen is supposed to be an intelligent sample of the male species, going by it's brand value: Pilani, XLRI, currently working for a well known company in a managerial position.

Isn't it sad that the heterosexual women have no other choice but to mate with such amazingly low quality counterparts of nature. No wonder mankind is going nowhere these days: the male strain must be getting stronger in our gene pool.