How to get your flirt on: Get a sex guru like Ashmit Patel!

Why would anyone go to MMS King Ashmit Patel for dating advice? It’s tantamount to going to Shiney Ahuja or Shakti Kapoor for tips on wooing women. But then again, desperate times call for desperate measures. And it seems those Indian men who don’t really have a way with the ladies, have decided to seek help in learning how to get jiggy with the girls. Which deserves some applause. It’s at least big of them to realise that there is a problem and seek help. It’s another matter they are seeking help from the decidedly sleazy Ashmit Patel with his Super Stud — School of Flirt on UTV Bindaas. Ashmit’s tips on how to be a Super-stud are only for the lucky few aka the 19 socially inept boys hand-picked by UTV to benefit from his expertise. Less fortunate souls have to make do with the last ray of hope open to them — the slew of dating schools which have popped up in the last year or so. So what exactly are these schools offering to solve and help? Men longing for love but not knowing how to go about getting it, are taught everything from how to play hard to get to how to change their appearance to even posture and voice modulation. These are like finishing schools for the lovelorn and sexually awkward Indian man. Instead of going to Switzerland, they just get to go to Chandigarh to learn how to seduce and hopefully be seduced as a result. [caption id=“attachment_104853” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Ashmit Patel with Veena Malik who makes an appearance on the show. AFP”]  [/caption] According to a Times Crest article, most of these dating and self-proclaimed ‘seduction’ schools are über-professional. So, much like our chemistry classes during the ICSE, you have theory classes as well as practical classes. The men are given the opportunity to indulge in some field-work where they’re taken to bars and pubs to try out their newfound dating prowess on unsuspecting women. So the next time some poor sod walks up to you at a bar and tries to strike up a conversation by saying, “Hello sweety, want to make frandship with me?” be warned. He might just be giving his practical exam for his dating academy course. These aspiring Alpha males also get to learn bedroom techniques to take them from being pussycats in the bedroom to insatiable tigers.  They’re taught everything from how to kiss — by kissing their hand, no less — to concentrating on ‘after play’ and taking the woman from ‘hot to hotter to hottest’. Now what these classes teach is a clear indicator of what most Indian men think women want. According to the love/sex  gurus, a ‘real’ man must give a woman the impression that he wants her in his life, but doesn’t need her. How wise. Which is why they teach a unique thing called the ‘push-pull method’. No, this is not another name for the rhythm method. This is when you take a girl’s number, call her and say that you’ll call back, but you don’t. Or when you fix up a time to meet your date, but are 20 minutes late — even if you’ve been sitting in your car staking out the date spot for the last one hour. According to Shiva, the love expert at Real Man Academy,  by saying that he was at the gym, a guy can make the object of his dubious seduction believe that he was busy and that he has a ‘high fitness level’. “To the million-year-old wiring in her head, this means he is strong and would be able to protect her. This increases his value.” He also goes on to say that “girls with high self-esteem tend to enjoy this kind of teasing more than girls with low self-esteem.” Basically the classes teach men to behave like jerks, because according to the instructors that’s what women want. They even have a class on evolution to display how from the Mesozoic Age, women have shown an affinity for aggressive jerks. There might be something there. Or at least it definitely explains why men like Shakti Kapoor, Ashmit Patel, Darshan and Kamal Haasan are never hard-up for dates. Going by the rollicking success of these classes, you can’t blame UTV for trying to cash in on a good thing with their Super Stud - School of Flirt. Giving Ashmit Patel company in this worthy endeavour is ex-Miss India, Neha Suri in an unsurprising career move after she’d finished saving the under-privileged and using her breasts for world peace. The few episodes which I had the misfortune of watching had the boys being given theory classes by Ashmit and Neha on a variety of skills ranging from how to dress Neha to how to tease a girl — Ashmit says you should take your mobile phone and make an MMS video of her and put it on Youtube. Okay, no, but it would have been better than his suggestion that you should flirt with a girl’s friend to pique her interest. Strange are the ways of the sex fiend. The practical classes ranged from the boys looking at a wardrobe of clothes and choosing outfits for Neha, and being judged on their aesthetic skills and flirtation prowess based on whether they chose a mini-skirt or a tank top for her. It’s all very confusing. Then each boy had to enter a swimming pool full of Eastern European women who obviously needed to make a quick buck before heading to Leopold’s, and convince them to go on a holiday with him. Or play bartender in a pub and convince some unsuspecting woman who just wants a drink, to dance with him. Judging these inane ‘on-field’ adventures and practical classes are a bunch of TV and film vamps ranging from Veena Malik to Jacqueline Fernandes who assist Ashmit in imparting his wisdom. What’s interesting though is that all the boys seem to hang on every word of Ashmit’s as if he is indeed the love guru. I hear that the next show concept being bandied around in television channel corridors is ‘Maid to order’, hosted by Shiney Ahuja with Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the international expert. So next time you see some chap making an ass of himself in a public place or an utter nuisance of himself with women, don’t blame his parents for not teaching him how to behave with women. Blame new evolved India, Ashmit Patel, Superstud and the love gurus of Real Man Academies. Rajyasree Sen is a bona fide foodie, TV connoisseur and unsolicited opinion-giver. You can read about her adventures with food and life in Delhi on her blog www.brownsahiba.blogspot.com or follow her at @rajyasree