The Art of Having a Crush

“The Guide says that there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and missing.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Come to think of it, there is an art to everything. Pouring exactly 32.5 sips of tea into your teacup every morning. (Barring Sundays and Flashers Unite Day, when it is 37.8.) Pretending your head lice are dandruff flakes with legs. Picking your nose during your question and answer round in the Miss World contest in such a way that the judges believe that it is your goobers, not your breasts that will save the world. Etc. Etc.
And there is an art to having a crush.
Now the dictionary defines a crush as an intense but usually short-lived infatuation. But that’s a shallow definition, as if having a crush were like having a zit or a sandwich and it doesn’t to justice to a noble, ancient art, fraught with such subtle intricacies, not to mention intricate subtleties, that it deserves at least 10 volumes of the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon. Which I am in the process of penning but till then, this little jotting will have to suffice.

BC (Before the Crush)
Before setting off to have a crush there’s a very important matter that you have to first sort out. And that is to make sure that you’re not Kareena Kapoor. Or Justin Timberlake. (Tick only one.) Nor have been ever listed as one of the World’s Ten Sexiest Warthogs. In other words, the number of people currently beating a path to your door (or website) on account of how hot and whatnot you are should be one less than that for a maggot. This instantly expands by nineteen million galaxies the universe from which you can choose the object of your crush (more on that later). Which can now be anyone from Laloo’s buffalo minder to the boiled potato masher at your favourite vada-pav stall, both of whom, we’ll have you know, are as crush-worthy as your next Kareena-come-latelys.

OOC (Object of Crush)
Having got that out of the way, let us now dwell on the tricky matter of choosing the Object of Crush, henceforth referred to as OOC. Now there have been instances of people having a lifelong crush on a slotted spoon, having taken the word “object” literally. But speaking from experience, people are better. (I once have a crush on a red pencil sharpener for about two weeks and it wasn’t much fun though I have to admit the “prup-prap” sound it made every time it sharpened made my superior gemellus tingle in the most gratifying fashion.)
What about animals, did someone ask? Hm. Well, there was one case of a crush on an amoeba but we’re still as hazy on the subject as the fetish wallahs are on having sex with a shoe horn.
The next and most important thing about your choice of OOC is that he/she (since we’ve now ruled out “it”) should be unattainable. And we don’t mean your everyday, garden variety of unattainable like buying up one floor of Antilla. (Those who are asking “Antilla who?” may immediately drum themselves off this planet.) We’re talking about unattainable that makes crossing the Atlantic on a rubber bath duckie seem like licking tomato ketchup.
Unattainabilty is critical because it’s like virtual sex - you’ll never get to know the more intimate details about your OOC. Spitting while eating boiled egg. Nymphomaniac vampire half-sister who visits every full moon. Barking in sleep. Passing garlic-scented wind during….well, never mind. Mother who’s just had a sex change and likes to discuss her (his?) post-operative plumbing during lunch.
We see you blanch. You’re thinking - Richard Gere and garlic-scented….?
Really?
Who knows me darlings, who knows. But more importantly, do we really want to know.
Also, hop off the beaten path, eschew the straight and narrow and venture to where few others have dared to go. So, while George Clooney is a good choice, George Bush is better. Similarly, Beyonce is sweet but Hilary Clinton is…well, you know. (You’d be surprised how many amongst us think that ice-queen-meets-AK-47-laugh is nothing less than a Playboy centre spread coated Viagra.) So are Prince Charles, aforementioned buffalo minder, Heather Mills, Michael Jackson’s children’s wet nurse, Osama’s third wife (not to be confused with Obama who has only one wife anyway), the man who left a crate of rotting Alphonsos at your door in 1993. Famous dead people are also a good bet, as long as the dead body has been disposed off. (I mean, we don’t want any talk of necrophilia muddying these sacred waters, do we now.) Which mean King Tut is off limits, Attila the Hun is not.

And Now, The Crush
Righty-ho. Unattainable, dream-the-impossible-wet-dream OOC selected. God in Heaven, coffee on boil, libido on roil. You can now get down to the actual business of having that crush. Which basically involves thinking of the OOC every waking moment (barring while shaving underarms and performing other ablutions that we can’t mention) and generally deteriorating into the most awful kind of drip. In other words, you have to pine and ache, hanker and crave, long for and lust after. You have to gnash teeth, tear hair and eat heart out. (All yours and mercifully, it’s all low cal AND organic.) And every now and then, you have to dissolve into a deliriously gibbering, slavering puddle of ecstatic saliva at what might be a glimpse of the right-hand corner of the hangnail on the left little toe of the OOC.
And you have to do this all the while making sure that the distance of sixty-three gadzillion light years of unattainabilty between you and your OOC has not lessened by a even single millimetre.
Naturally the question that springs to mind like a startled toast out of toaster is - but what if it does? You mean what if you suddenly find that you’ve just pipped Salman Khan to the sexiest-napoleon-with-hair-weave post and Katrina – whom you lusted after for so many long and hopeless moons – is giving you the eye, not to mention the once-over, laced with a couple of smouldery-over-the-bare-shouldery come-on-overs?
Well, remember the stroke-of-midnight trick in Cinderella when the coach goes back to being a pumpkin and the coachman to the dirty, two-timing, double-crossing, whisker-twitching rat that he always was?
It’s more or less the same thing with a crush.
Which is that without so much as a by-your-leave or a hey-ninny-no, it simply will vanish into the morning smog. (Or at the next traffic signal.) And the OOC will topple off the altar, shattering into sixty-three gadzillion pieces and then morph into an ordinary mortal of flesh, blood and gumboils that you can now proceed to have as bossa nova partner, running mate or to drape on your arm to the next Star Parivaar Awards.
But never ever again to be the OOC.

Finally, AD (Or What’s The Bleeding Point about the Whole Darn Thing)
I mean, that’s a bit like asking what’s the point about balloons at birthday parties. Or umbilical cords if it’s her apron strings that’s going to keep us attached to our dear mamas. Or the p in pneumonia if we aren’t going to pronounce it. These are the unquestionable essentials of life that don’t need silly, pointless things like points. (Which are mainly for fingers and the pervie-brain that designed the pointed bra.)
But since you’re asking, actually there is a point to having a crush. It’s a lesser known but well documented fact that the secret of the longevity of the centenarians in the Upper Silesia (no relation to Yash Chopra’s Silsila) is not bathing in the urine of the Caucasian tur but a lifelong, unwavering, passionate crush on the Abominable Snowman.
And that’s simply because a crush is cross between an emotional laxative and Oil of Olay.
Lemme explain.
See, basically life’s mainly a dreary drag, a grimy grind and the daily diet of the ho-hum and the humdrum clogs up the bowels of soul to ultimately give you the worldview and complexion of an ageing constipated eel. Having a crush evacuates and expels, it also opens up the pores, irrigates the pons (not what you are thinking but close), hydrates the appendix and generally gets what till now was a grudging, grumpy trickle splooshing in great, happy gushes through your tubes.
Leaving you with softer, younger-looking….um….er….well, certainly the bowels of your soul will look like that of a sprightly 17 year-old. We can’t guarantee anything else.