Light pushing through the darkness, traces of fog, and dim shapes of birds at the feeder: signs of things to come.

Yet my eyes are heavy with the weight of sleep, pierced with shards of talk: that alloy of anger, sadness, and pain, shaped like a liminal bubble that wrapped itself around long nights of talk and what passed for love, was perhaps love, and these half-lit mornings that followed.

I had read a while back commentary - somewhere in the less than shiny Blogsphere - about the city specific "personals" sections on Craiglist. So since this morning following a blog link, I ended up at the Craiglist Manhattan, I decided to write my own "brief" commentary on the nature of these things.

Some (very lazy) arm chair socio-athropology-ing - this consisted of a quick scan through a sampling of the first 100 posts on both the M4W list and the W4M list - enables to me to conclude that there is something to be said for evolution: (most) men seek women for sex, and (most) women seek men with an oblique, if not direct, eye on "mating". Further observation of the Manhattan "meat" market dynamics enables me to postulate that if you are an "exotic" (for example: latin or desi) woman the market demand for you is extremely high, and numerous sugar daddies with supposedly substantial "machinery" are waiting to be at your service. What about the view from the women's list? It seems to me - an very ineffectual "dater" - that most women have drunk straight from the trough of Cosmopolitan's "How to Find the Perfect Man In Five (or Fifty?) Dates?" kool-aid; one knows this is so when the adjective "handsome" shows up in more than 75% of the sample.

So what are the possible alternatives for an un-"handsome", un-"goal driven", un-"ambitious", un-"funny", Manhattan (or its close environs) bound, desi man like me, given that I am potentially an outlier in these demand and supply curves? I can try the "I want be u frnd" Orkut route but my inner grammar Nazi would rebel. I can try "hanging" at Myspace but my vocal chords aren't suitably trained to squeal "omigod" at bat-like frequencies. Or I can be more decisive and drastic, and make the switch from being a "consumer" to a "supplier" by undertaking a sex change operation: come daddy, come get yooshelf some exotic "sushi". But I think I can always do nothing, and be my usual bookish self, and persist in dreaming of writing some 21st century versions of Uncle Walt's eagles and "pent up aching rivers".

"Yeh kya ho raha hain beta Dhuryodhan?"