But Pappu can't cry saala..!!

Tears are the raw-est form of emotion. You can pretend to laught at puke-inducing jokes just out of courtesy.. you can pretend to be angry at someone.. you can fake many such emotions. But tears are the surest manifestation of an emotion that is genuine. Or *so* I used to suppose.

Unfortunately, I havent learnt this art yet. My mom once told me how I just *refused* to cry when I was born. Everyone thought I was born dumb, literally. Doctors and the-then-hot nurses had to pinch my oh-so-hot butt multiple times to even make me feel the pain. After repeated attempts to outrage my modesty, I gave in. Maybe even as a 1 day old, I was laziness personified.

And till this day, I havent been able to understand how binary it is for some people (esp women) to switch from crying Lalita-Pawarly to smiling colgately. They can bring a category 2 hurricane, if not 3, by their random cry. Now why am I on about this? I was glancing through another big-boss episode (after getting back from work at midnight.. the things we need to do to keep the oil prices in check. Bow down!) and almost every other girl was crying buckets. On prime time. One of them was like "please let me do household work. i cannot live without working. booo hooo". WTF? A friend of mine in undergrad used to cry everytime he watched SRK's Devdas. Everytime. Immense amazement oozed.

A lady friend once told me that girls use this tool to melt the men in their lives (father/bf/brother/etc). Is that true? An unsolicited advice: I dont know about father-brother, but a bf sure will be turned off by such flooding-induced-sympathy-seekers.

Talking about drama, I really am in awe of actors who can make the crying scenes look very genuine. Big B is one of them. Hrithik Roshan, initially, used to look like a constipated crier. Post-Lakshya, he has been amazing. Aamir, great at it. Remember his DCH phone scene with his father? Classic. SRK, more often than not, is a hamming crier. Remember kal ho na ho? Asthmatic outpour. At times, I have felt that if I were to be an actor, I could do justice to all kinds of roles, *except* for the ones that would require me to cry chest-thumpingly. It just doesnt come to me naturally. (And I cannot call the nurses all the time to apply their unique methodology to make me cry). On second thoughts though, I dont think crying is a *must* to depict emotional-painful scenes. Remember SRK's reaction in that scene in Swades when he sees a 10 yr old kid selling water to earn 25 paise? Not a single tear shed. But that scene moves me even today beyond words. THAT, to me, is raw-er and deeper than these tears. Nurses need to know that before flirtingly pinching a 1-day-old kid's butt.