Style Matters

I have started noticing how naturally stylish and graceful some people are in real life. I think it started when I was home earlier this year and my brother was driving me around in our brand new car. I just started comparing the way I drive and how he drives. He drives that manual transmission car so smooth in those Indian roads and he looks so natural as if they built the car just for him. The way I drive,well, there is nothing smooth about it to say the least. He is also very stylish in how he dresses, how he carries himself in general and oh! yeah, the girls he likes. How come I don't do anything with any style?

I think some people are born that way, like Mark Waugh of Australia, for example. He looked graceful even when (very very rarely) he dropped a easy catch standing in slips.

I have one such friend too whom I know for a long time. I have known him since I was 8 or 9 years old. We were classmates at some point and buddies in college later on. Over the years we have played lots of Cricket, Soccer, Snooker and spent lot of time in and around college campus. He is very stylish and graceful in whatever he does. He was and still is one of the most elegant Cricket players I ever seen. He is very stylish wherever I have seen or played together. From playing inside someone's house compound to playing on a decent Cricket pitch, he looks very stylish. Same applies to his bowling and he is an excellent fielder.

Its not just Cricket or Snooker or other things he plays, pretty much everything else he does, does it with a panache. Like the way he talks or does a wise-crack about someone. That also includes that one time when he chickened out of our trip to Bangalore to watch India Vs Pakistan Cricket match in Chinnaswamy Stadium. He was so elegant and graceful in convincing us that he will be there on the morning of the Match (even though he had already made up of his mind not to come) we came out of the packed stadium right before the match to call him up and ask what time he was showing up!. Even today he maintains he had the most severe fever one could have, although the reasons for the fever keep changing.

We spent a lot of time together at crossroads of our respective lives right after graduating out of Engineering college trying to figure out what we should do. Waiting for something (Job or Higher education or Running a Business, etc) to happen in our lives. So many people thought my life was going nowhere and future was looking bleak. You would think that those times were very uncertain and insecure. They were! But, I remember myself being most relaxed than any time I had ever been. That was partly due to his influence and how gracefully he was weighing his options in life. He was one of very few friends who stood by me without putting any peer-pressure on what I was wanting to do.

I was always curious and wanted to know about the girls he was linked with from time to time. Whenever I ask him who that is, he says as elegantly, "Which one, Ranga?, there are so MANY of them, I can't even get out of my house without being swarmed!!!".

I have met him in US couple of times in last couple of years. Life in US hasn't made him look one bit mechanical. Me on the other hand, as someone generously put it, growing up to be a prefect Homer Simpson.