Cheating is easy nowadays, but catching on is equally tech-savvy!

Pants on fire no more. Lipstick on the cyber collar is washable. Cheating, like other art forms, has kept up with technological advances. Informal workplaces, availability of public places to hang out in, the item-girlisation of women and the promise of eternal network by every mobile phone… Sleeping around just got easier!

Much has been said about the bored housewife who suddenly hits her G-spot. She has entertained us in art films and our daily porn. But with career-oriented women circumventing marriages in these post-Maybelline times, the huffer-puffer go-getter has raced past the horny housewife. What was seductive gear yesterday is now standard office-wear and suggestive forwards are SMS staple.

If women are flaunting their freedom, men are blindsided by their social and sartorial openness — a bra strap here, a suggestion of thong there and pubbing everywhere. Really, who is complaining? Not the men, who are busy just trying to get some work done. Not the women, for fear of conveying sour grapes.

The urgency, the secrecy; it’s easy to see why women go for older men poised above them on the corporate ladder. Nothing like hanky-panky with a higher-up for a quick buzz. And Alice in sexual wonderland is just what a jaded workaholic man who spent his youth working himself cross-eyed or licking management ass needs. Behind him is the wife who nagged him to where he is now but up ahead is this sweet young thing whose clock starts now.

Single with an untried waistline or a young mom fatigued from back-to-back babies, the other woman can give the game away any moment. What is the use of hobnobbing with bosses if one can’t brag? One iconic line — ‘she is not bad-looking’ — about the wife’s FB pic, and everyone goes ‘aaah!’

The wife catches only the tail end of a smoldering look at an office party or an inexplicable text on an odd afternoon. Difficult to pin anything on the guy — who will plead innocence till the day of his demise — and not all wives are equipped with golf clubs.

Sometimes the wife has only a smiley to go by. The husband of course will pretend she is plain crazy. ‘Just a co-worker,’ he will say, man to moron. And the gut feeling of countless women will go unrecorded.

Cut to the chase in the last scene. If cheating is easy, catching on is equally tech-savvy. To see their better half in flagrante delicto, cuckolds employ snoops, upgrade e-surveillance and flood DNA labs with saliva swabs and the question every child wants to hear: am I his father?

The sugar daddy syndrome also has a flip side. Valuable fertile time is wasted on unavailable men who find such women gropable on a rainy day, but dumpable all-year round. A recent Indian novel terms such women ‘lampposts’ (to doggy men) and a management bestseller says Indian bosses go for an office fling to prove their virility.

Sweetie, no man wants to rock the boat. Just the rented bed.