Ek ladka ek ladki.....

...is no movie just a story :)

A couple of months back we had our boss and the boss's boss come visit us from 'Phoren'. My direct boss is a beautiful, tall chinese lady and her boss is a handsome young chap. We interact with both directly and hence we were glad to meet and put a face to the many mails & calls we have. It was one happening week when they were around with meetings and presentations and outlining other 10 things to do and words like roadmap, growth path, walkthroughs, entities, project plans, WSRs, WTSes, TWSes formed most conversations. All that is fine.

The thing I wanted to blog about was the way a lot of people(read guys) sneer wicked jokes at such business visits when there is a girl and a guy involved. You know what they mean when they say 'should be a good tour for thoes 2' and smile, what creative imagination could be screening in their heads and will joke about it at the next available opportunity. Unfortunately, these kind of jokes irritate me no end. It also ends up with me giving them a little piece of my mind. Maybe I would not have been so offended if I were not in such a situation a couple of years back.

A couple of years back, I was in Korea for 3-4 weeks. I was there to train a certain group on a product and there was also an another colleague(read guy), a good friend of mine to set up their servers and stuff like that. You would be lucky if you could find a English speaking guy in Korea around you. We had a tough time telling the people at the reception of the hotel that my colleagues phone was dead. We were making a good scene at the reception with lots of action with dialogues in English & Hindi too to take the steam off the frustration we were feeling. The 2-3 Weekends I spent there, we did visit a couple of places including the Disney theme park but made sure we never lost sight of each other. We also cooked together, rather it was me cooking whatever little I knew then, and he was busy chatting with colleagues across the globe awake at that hour about what he thought I was doing and making me popular for my cooking expertise. I was taking a few online classes from them as well on what do I do with a rice cooker, which had everything written around it in Korean and the manual as well was in Korean. There was not a question about asking anyone in the hotel for help so we were chatting with colleagues who had used rice cooker to tell us what could the possible options be. In office, when I asked a female colleague for where to get something to drink, she showed me the restroom (that was helpful anyway, since I wouldn't know how to ask for that). To cut the long story short, it was difficult times. We had a few things written down for us by a gentleman in office who knew English that we would need to take a taxi and mention our hotel, water, to ask for veg food at a food joint ...a few basics. So with all that hefty details you can make out that we would dare not loose each other on a street or even in office.

I could sense the sneer looks and suspicious smiles in the office that they were wearing towards the end of my trip. Made me very uncomfortable to be judged so unreasonably. After all I am a Bharatiya nari with the culture-vulture thing. I was only glad to fly out as soon as I was done.

When we are in a group, no one has their brains working overtime but the moment you have 2 people of the opposite sex in a new place, people just love to indulge themselves with assumptions for pure cheap fun. This is not just Indian men its just about men.

Note: To train them was easy since it didn't really matter what I said, I ended up spending hours creating snapshots and wrting down in as few simple words as possible 'all' I intended to say.