Time proves Freud Right

Time proves Freud Right

According to Douglas Adams an indispensable tool for travel through the galaxy is the Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy and a towel. The towel is Adam’s idiosyncratic choice (though he does provide some hilarious reasons for the choice). For any other trip you would want a watch, better if it is a digital one. I had the misfortune of losing my Titan watch during an amusement park ride during a recent trip. Getting one soon was of paramount importance, since I am one of those people who feel naked if they are not wearing a watch. Obviously, I wanted a digital watch because it has more possibilities than a simple analog one.

Blame evolution or cultural upbringing. Guys love gadgets. More correctly guys love to fiddle around, tinker with and mess around with equipment, take things apart and then try to put them back again. Anything with lots of buttons and lights does not scare the little boy. He will just go ahead and hit the buttons. Reason - ‘To see what happens’. When he gets old enough to wield a screwdriver he will be unscrewing stuff and extracting the innards of electronic equipment. Quite often this results in breaking things when they were working perfectly FINE. This invites the ire of the opposite sex, which do not have such destructive tendencies and cannot understand why guys should do this, and ALL the TIME. A girl will use things more carefully and ALMOST never mess around with things if they are working FINE.

Quite understandably a fancy digital watch with the INDIGLO light, umpteen buttons and complex functions catches a guy’s fancy instantly. I have seen women wear digital watches, but I have NEVER seen a woman wear a watch that measured heartbeats, told you the altitude above sea level or with a calculator. Then there is a question of size. There seems to be unwritten rule that any dial less than 1.5’ in diameter is a girly watch which any self respecting guy would not even touch let alone wear. What use is a watch if you can’t see the damn time without being within inches of it? Of course smaller watches have fewer displays and hence fewer functions, definitely not a guy-appealing quality.
Curtailing these possibly Freudian impulses I chose the largish TIMEX Ironman instead of the massive CASIO G-Shock (the size of a small laptop). Sumedha thought that this was the most grotesque and ugly gift she ever bought me. According to me it was the most useful gift, a gift that would be by my side ALL the TIME. Guys appreciate a good digital watch more than some silly pink shirt (Thank God she understands that!). There is a really slim chance that I will be going snorkeling 100m deep or that the 100 lap memory will never be used to its capacity. But what if …?

Douglas Adams may not be completely right, but his choice of a towel is less controversial and sexist one.