Just like the West, is Mumbai ready for the relationship terminator?
Daniel Day Lewis did it with a fax. As did Phil Collins. Matt Damon did it on a chat show. Dump their better halves, that is. It might seem as if evolution decided to skip etiquette altogether.
If we’re in a particularly vindictive mood we can make Bernd Dressler the scapegoat. As the owner of The Separation Agency in Berlin, he hires himself out as a relationship terminator. For a fee he delivers a message terminating the concerned person’s relationship. “Hi, I’m representing your girlfriend/boyfriend. I’m here to tell you that you’ve been dumped.”
No ifs, buts or second chances and most of his clients are women! And before you toss this information aside with some balderdash about Indian values, give clinical psychologist Seema Hingorrany a listen.
“I’ve counselled girls who ask me to tell their boyfriends it’s over,” she says. “It’s so absurd because despite Bernd’s agency being such an absurd concept, it exists in a weird way here,” she laughs. Hardly an honourable way to end a relationship, it spells disaster mentally too. “How is anyone going to get any closure from a relationship if they’re being dumped by someone other than their partner? How will they move on with their lives?” she adds.
“How spineless!” exclaims actor Maria Goretti. “It shows a lack of basic etiquette,” she says of the Separation Agency being adapted here. Fashion critic Bandana Tewari agrees. “It’s a sick emotional degradation. Despite all the cultural osmosis that India goes through, I doubt this will come through.”
True the agency cuts through emotional baggage and people who get comfortable in a relationship and want out now have a means to do it. “It might work in relationships where you realise you’ll miss the couch in their house, not the person,” says veejay Cyrus Sahukar. “You get comfortable and complacent.”
“But we Indians are so emotional. We could do with a mediator, but I don’t know how far Bernd would be successful here,” concludes Hingorrany.
s_rituparna@dnaindia.net
