There she stands ... with a heart so cold !!!

Right now, I'm trying hard to decide between the three different topics I want to write abt and can't make up my mind. Lesse! Hmmmmmm! Ok - mannequins win.

So it all started last week when I went shopping and had my attention drawn towards some of the mannequins on display. Boy! When did they become this pretty. I almost proposed to one of them. Silky hair; perfect feature and what more - totally believable - there she stood - urging me to buy a short skimpy top for Rs 3000. "You gold digger!" I said to myself and walked away and that's when the rest of the stuff in this post started playing in my mind.

When did people start concentrating so heavily in making mannequins. When I was young(er) (now come on! it wasn't that long ago; just rewind your minds by a decade), all mannequins looked the same. I remember this wig shop in Mumbai that had two unisex mannequins. Yes, you read it right - Unisex mannequins!! The only thing differentiating them were the wigs they sported. Occasionally the shopkeeper would draw a pencil thin moustache on one of them to make it look more manly but soon the moustache would disappear - or even worse - we would see a mustached mannequin with a girl's hairdo. I remember that several shops didn't even go through the rigor of getting a mannequin. They would just stuff clothes with newspaper and put it on the window or have one of those "blowup doll thingies".

But those days are gone. Girlfriends now not only prevent their knight in shining armours from looking at other princesseses. Mannequins are as much of a threat to them as that next Jolie look alike. The boyfriend looks at a dress on a mannequin and wonders "Whoa! What a hottie." Soon the girl friend puts on that same dress and you see that all's not well in wonderland. The same thing holds true for us men. Have you seen the abs they give to the male mannequins. I vaguely remember trying to count the number of stripes on a male mannequins stomach and giving up after ten. And it's not just the shape. Shopkeepers now have multi-ethnic mannequins. They have "happy family mannequins" (where an entire family of varying age groups are shown). They have mannequins that have robotic limbs that occasionally move. It's not long before mannequins are full blown robots that'll escort you into shops, help you shop and if need be strip down to bare essentials to send you home better clad.

There's so much writing abt the changes around us - computers, cars, music systems and what not! Somebody ought to mention these glaring changes in mannequin technology. So I thought I would.

Peace!