End of the World......Never Happened

So 21^st December came and went and somehow the end of the Mayan calendar was as uneventful as Valentine’s Day in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Well, in order to understand it better, my charming sis-in-law-cum-my-chief-research-officer Kanya Bahwa conducted some research on this whole Mayan calendar thing and it turns out that the reason for the Mayan calendar to have only 5,125 years was not that they were predicting the end of the world after that…it was simply the fact that they did not know counting beyond 5,125. Talk about some “intellectually disabled” people!! Yes Sir, it is true that living in Canada, I cannot call morons as morons anymore. I was recently trained on Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) and I was enlightened by the fact that in addition to physical disabilities, there are many other types of disabilities people may have that I need to be sensitive to…and one of them interestingly was “intellectual disability”. Hmmm…coming to think of it, if we are going to be so politically correct and superficial in our approach where we cannot call an idiot by his/her first name (Idiot), it probably would have been better if the world actually had ended last Friday.

Coming back to Kanya’s findings, I have to believe her because I know that she is a really good research scientist. I know what you are thinking (of course, if you are not Kanya) – Isn’t this the same lovely girl who I mentioned in the past as a notorious, I mean, famous fashion writer and my own fashion adviser?? That part is still true, but remember, she does have a degree in Biotechnology so that ought to make her (at least on paper) a “scientist”. And obviously, there are tons of brilliant scientists who have a very strong sense of fashion (can’t think of a single one right now but I am sure there are) so why can’t she be a fashion scientist. Hmmm….that fashion scientist stuff does not make much sense when I re-read what I just wrote above but since I am under the gun to complete and post this article before Christmas and it is already 1:25 AM on 25^th of December, let us simply move on…

Another argument to prove my hypothesis about Kanya is that it is only due to her “research” skills that she is now a renowned expert on early childhood development even though she herself is a few basic steps away from having her own kids, such as, meeting an interesting guy, dating him for a while, getting proposed, saying yes, getting engaged and then getting married in a big-fat-Mansarovar-Garden-Delhi-style-Punjabi-wedding, going to Abbottabad, Pakistan (heard that Osama Bin Laden’s compound has been turned into a lovers’ paradise…after all, he did have some 17 wives so I am sure the place is reeking of love) for their honeymoon, audaciously fielding for a few years some age-old questions by 231 Indian aunts/neighbors/maids/random ladies on the street, “When is your baby coming?”, “Why are you taking so long?”, “Is there a problem with one of you because I know a Hakim who can “fix” any issues?”, “Where did you buy that color of mascara from?”, “Do you know that if you do not have your first baby within one year of marriage per Indian standards, there will be a “hurdle” later on?” etc. etc. and THEN finally succumbing to this unbearable social pressure, and having her own kids. But, as I said, thanks to her research for some internship, she is now well-known around the world for her expertise on Pre-K education.

In any case, one way it is good that the world did not end on the 21^st because, for Pete’s sake, it was a Friday. It goes without saying that Friday is my favorite day of the week and I am sure, it is for most of the people around the world, except may be, in Saudi Arabia, where Friday sucks because the work week starts on a Saturday (no wonder during my numerous trips to the Middle East I could never find any T. G. I. Friday’s anywhere because if they build one, they will need to call it TGIWednesday’s in Saudi Arabia and then TGIThrusday’s in Qatar, Egypt etc. where the weekend is Friday/Saturday…and pretty soon it just becomes quite confusing so no wonder that the Carlson Companies never ventured into the Middle East). Coming back to Friday, last week was a long and tough week at work where some of the decisions I had to make will haunt me for some time (thank God I have seen ‘The Godfather’ 321 times….so I kept reminding myself, “it is business, not personal”). And after such a tough week, when you are looking forward to not only the weekend but 11 days of winter holidays…BHAM!!! the world ends right on Friday itself…that would have been a travesty of justice.

And talking about winter holidays, my 7-year-old son, Kush, is always charged up by Christmas, Santa, and a bunch of presents this big, fat dude brings every year.  This year, he has tried a new trick to get his present from Santa. He actually had something which someone gave him as a present but he did not like it so he has written a letter to Santa saying that Santa can take this present (which he put next to the letter) and in return get him what he wants. If that bribe was not enough, he also has left some beer and pizza for Santa…. no wait, that I think, was for me. Santa will get his usual cookies and milk. And thanks to my older son Nyle convincing Kush, Reindeers this year will get a treat of “Cheez It” rather than their usual boring carrots.

And I just remembered that this year, Kush also received a letter from Santa (courtesy his school), which, IMHO, was pretty dumb. The return address on the letter was listed as “Santa Claus, North Pole, HOH OHO, Canada”. When did the North Pole become a part of Canada? Do we need a UN referendum here? Then after a bunch of BS in the letter about elves being busy and all, the last paragraph read, “Don’t forget to get to bed early, and we will try not to wake you up when we land. Last year, we had to fly around the block 2 times because you were still awake when we got to your house!” Obviously, it took 2 seconds for Kush to call Santa’s bluff. He immediately blurted out after reading the letter, “Wait a minute! What does he mean by last year me being awake in the house? We were not even home because we were in a hotel in Chicago on Christmas Eve. What is Santa smoking these days?” No, he did not say the smoking part but I am sure he would have, had he known the beautiful concept of pot (as I wrote in my last blog, this is a PG-14 blog so parents are encouraged to provide some guidance to their offspring about the appropriateness of this blog for their reading pleasure).

Now, here you have a 7-year-old boy, who is at the crossroads of life where he has been somewhat questioning the existence of Santa for a couple of months anyway because one kid in his class apparently told him that he knew from his older sister that Santa did not exist but he was still pretending that he believed in Santa in order to receive his present on Christmas. And then some genius writes this letter pretending to be Santa where he/she makes these glaring mistakes to arouse suspicion from Kush all over again. And the real tragedy (second only to the world ending….if that had actually happened) is that I cannot call this person a moron….I guess he/she is “intellectually disabled”.

Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones (which obviously includes me)!!

And my final thought: It is ALWAYS better to cut your losses and move on rather than to chase almost dead relationships….life is too short.

Spams "R" Us

Well, we are only a few days away from the end of the world so I want to make sure that I squeeze in one more blog before that happens….not really sure about the iPad or broadband situation in hell (I tried to google for a “hot”line with information on amenities in hell but no luck) so why take a chance.  If we all (especially me) survive the anticipated cataclysmic events on December 21, 2012, when the 5,125 year-long Mayan calendar ends, I will be back with a Christmas special. If the world actually ends on that fateful day, the bright side is that we will not have to worry about the impending financial cliff in the US (I am sure President Obama and the House Speaker Boehner are counting on the world to end….nothing else can explain a complete lack of progress so far). And obviously, I have been very thoughtful in picking the topic for this possibly last blog of my life – SPAMS.

As starters, I would like to share some good news and some bad news. Let me start with the good news. Thank God, I did not turn in my resignation based on this e-mail from Nigeria a few weeks ago and I am still gainfully employed. The bad news is that this whole Nigeria thing turned out to be some kind of scam. If you recall from my blog of Nov 19, I was expecting an obscene amount of money to be transferred from this attractive African widow’s account to my Bank of America account (still do not know if she is attractive or not and I guess we will never find out but I am still sticking to my story…. Angelina Jolie is also a mom of several African kids, so why couldn’t this woman be attractive?).

Well, it now appears that she was not very truthful about her whole situation (her husband dying and leaving all this money for her etc. etc.). And at this stage, it is quite possible that she may not even have a husband because she herself may actually be a man, who under the name of Mrs. Choubatou has been fleecing gullible souls like me. Coming to think of it, as a man, he may still have a “husband” but let us not get there because it is quite outside the scope of this blog…….as my lovely sis-in-law-cum-my-inspiration-for-this-blog-cum-my-fashion-adviser Kanya Bahwa (so now if my socks do not match with my pants, or worse, not even with each other, do not blame me but blame Kanya because she convinced me that this was the latest fashion trend in Kandahar, which she claims is the fashion capital of Afghanistan….Kabul being the suicide-bombing capital) told me yesterday that, according to her market research, there are now several kids who are hooked to this blog so I need to be careful about what I write…will not be appropriate if these kids learn some of this super-important “stuff” from my PG-14 blog much before their parents have had a chance to conduct the ‘birds and bees’ talk with them.

But wait…should I even trust what Kanya says these days because she also told me in the same conversation that she had recently been inducted into the Guinness book of World Records for carrying the largest number of corporate titles (per my blog of Nov 19, she had 10 titles). Here is the soul-less narcissism at its peak…. on the other hand, it is also possible that she may have taken a large accidental overdose of prescription medication or may have smoked something by mistake so let us cut her some slack and move on. In any case, let Santa decide if she has been nice or naughty this year.

Coming back to e-mail scams, according to one estimate, there are 94 billion UBEs sent out around the world every single day (Source: American Journal of Agriculture and Scientology, circa 1943). In case you are wondering, UBE stands for Unsolicited Bulk E-mail, also known as, Spam or simply “junk” mail. This has become a huge problem around the world but the good news is that finally a rigorous study conducted at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has offered some hope to tackle with this growing menace.  Researchers at Kellogg have concluded that this large 94 billion number can easily be cut into half if we all take some simple measures, such as, divide it by 2 (Well, I am from Chicago Booth….. what can I say?). In the press conference, when reporters started asking some tough questions about this study, researchers broke into 2 groups and danced to the tunes of Gangnam Style for 2 hours….though there were no sexy ladies to accompany them (they all go to Booth). That reminds me…..when my 7-year-old son Kush heard the song for the first time a few weeks ago, he asked me what the word “sexy lady” meant….I still have not figured out a way to explain. I guess he is too young for a ‘bird and bee’ talk. Any other ideas?

And as with anything else, there are definitely some advantages of this cyber space manipulation as well. For example, I believe that when it comes to cheating on their wives, this whole General Petraeus saga will act as a deterrent for men around the world. If the head of the CIA, the most clandestine organization in the history of mankind (or should I say the history of “person”kind before my ladies friends start calling me a sexist) could not keep his e-mails secret, what chance does a regular Joe have? And then there is no better source than the cyber space if one wants to entertain offers to make s - - tloads of money by working from home (I do not need that), or a hot date tonight (I definitely do not need that), or obtain an uninterrupted supply of Viagra (no comment). Of course, there are also some bombs out there, such as offers to enhance the size of one’s manhood (I am still waiting for my refund).

Nonetheless, as I said before, I am glad that I did not quit my day job in anticipation of this inheritance. But then a great philosopher of 21^st century (last name Arora) once said, “You need the inner peace, not a glamorous job to be happy.”  By following a simple advice I read somewhere, I have finally found my inner peace. The advice was: "The way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you've started." So, this afternoon, I looked around to see all the things I had started but not finished.  And finally, I have finished off a bottle of vodka, a bottle of Johnnie Walker, my Prozac, a bottle of red wine, a large box of chocolates, and 2 liters of Stella Artois beer......you have no idea how good I feel now…..completely at peace with myself!

Happy Holidays!!

PS: I personally do not believe that the world will end in 2012 because dyslexic people would survive for another 90 years. Think about it.

And my final thought: Indifference and neglect cause more damage to a relationship than outright dislike.

Thanksgiving Adventures

In order to maintain a 9-year old tradition, we flew to New Jersey last week to spend the Thanksgiving weekend with our friends S&P, R&H, and A&D but before I get into those gory details, there is one correction from the last blog – I had listed my lovely sis-in-law-cum-my-partner-in-crime-for-this-blog Kanya Bahwa’s e-mail ID as iamsopretty@pink-cerelac.in. Many of you reported that it did not work when you tried to lodge a complaint against my blog. That was an honest mistake on my part. Turned out that Kanya had, in the mean time, changed her blog’s name from Pink-Cerelac to Malai-Chop (or was it Style-Shop?… I am not sure now and it does not matter anyway). So if you are still trying to reach out to her, you can do so by sending an e-mail to whydoyouthinkicare@malai-chop.in.

So coming back to our Thanksgiving weekend… it was great to see our friends in NJ who are still going through some post-traumatic stress. No, it is NOT due to hurricane Sandy. It is the natural reaction after you are done with the Black Friday shopping, which, this year actually started on Thursday evening at 9 PM. In the past, there used to be at least one day between saying thanks and then crushing your fellow shoppers during the stampede to race to the highly discounted merchandise at Best Buy when it opened its doors at 5 AM. But now, both of these activities take place the same day. The funny thing is that we still call it “Thanksgiving”…..God Bless America!!

And talking about Hurricane Sandy – I closely follow the names given to hurricanes and after years of observations, I can conclude that there is a racial discrimination in hurricane names. You hear about Hurricane Katrina (no, not Katrina Kaif but the one which devastated New Orleans in 2005…though Kaif herself is no less than a hurricane either and has probably devastated many lives as well) or Hurricane Irene, or Hurricane Sandy. This is because these are the Americans who give only Anglo-Saxon names to the hurricanes. After moving to Canada, I realize how diverse this country is. So I am sure that if Canadians were assigning names to hurricanes, the typical weather news would be - “Hurricane Gurudyal Singh Dhillon is going to hit the northern Ontario this evening” or “Hurricane Skanda Subramanian Balasubramanian has been downgraded to a tropical storm” or “Hurricane Chinchoo Hwang Zhang can bring winds up to 125 kilometers/hour (for my American friends this translates into 78.125 miles/hour) to Montreal, Quebec”.. I am sure that the last piece of news will be telecast in French in Quebec but even after 17 individual lessons with my French tutor (who finally fled the town to get away from me), I won’t even try to translate it because I know by the time I am done with the translation, it will come out something like Chinchoo Hwang Zhang was spotted to break the wind at 125 kilometers/hour. I digress. 

Coming back to Thanksgiving (has started to feel like a Hindi movie with so many flashbacks), we did have our traditional Thanksgiving meal Thursday evening, which involved a variety of Indian dishes (come on, Desis in the US have their own “traditional” Thanksgiving food) plus a beautiful vegetarian turkey my friend “P” made with tremendous creativity (picture below is worth a thousand words). And please note that no animals were hurt in the preparation of our Thanksgiving meal.

Then, in order to continue the 9-year old tradition, my friend “S”, my wife Anshu, and I got to the outlet mall at around 10 PM for some Black Friday (rather Thursday) shopping. As much as we had to drive around to find the parking, we still made sure that we parked in the mall’s parking lot because last year we parked at the apartment complex across the mall and when we returned to our car at 3 AM, it gave us a big surprise by not being there…it had been towed. The experience of getting it back caused some mental scars which we did not want to repeat this year.

Every store had a huge crowd in the front because they were letting only a certain number of shoppers to get in at any given time. We joined the line for The North Face outlet store. This was a long, convoluted line with people waiting patiently in the freezing temperatures.  It was moving very slow and after moving 3 feet in 15 minutes, I was becoming impatient.  So I said to the guy next to me, “This store better have tons of good deals”.  He laughed and said, “Come on, you cannot expect “deals” at Starbucks. In fact, I think they should open more Starbucks in this mall.”  “What?” I screamed.  Turned out that we were not standing in the store line but in the Starbucks line. 

And since we were already in the line and “S” and Anshu are huge coffee fans, we decided to wait in the line and get some coffee anyway. I am not a coffee drinker at all but given the sub-zero temperatures, I decided to get a Caramel Macchiato. When I told the barista my order, she asked, “what size?”  I looked at the board. It showed: Tall (12 oz): $4.65, Grande (16 oz): $5.15, Venti (20 oz): $5.90. I said, “I am not a big coffee drinker. So can I get a difference between a Grande and a Tall? It will be 4 oz and I will pay you $0.50 (for arithmetically-challenged readers, it is the difference between $5.15 and $4.65)?” Needless to say, I had to stay without a coffee the whole night. So much for the arbitrage and an efficient market theory I was taught at the business school.

The next day was dedicated for our friends A&D, who drove a long distance to come and meet us at S&P’s home. A&D were blessed with their first child last year and are still getting used to trials and tribulations of raising a drooling but cute bundle of joy so making fun of them will be insensitive, inappropriate (and I am sure unconstitutional as well).

We also spent a memorable couple of days with our friends R&H, who have 2 lovely daughters (12 and 8). In the evening, we had to go to the mall to pick up something at the Apple store but there was a long wait so I was assigned the job of keeping their 2 daughters, a 12-year old friend of the elder daughter and my 7-year-old son Kush busy in the mall while the rest of the clan waited at the Apple store. This is when these two 12-year old girls came up with a brilliant idea to do some store-hopping (equivalent to bar-hopping but at a much higher speed and with much less fun for me). Now, in my ideal world, I try to stay away from the mall as much as possible but I still accompany Anshu during some “sane” shopping trips...nothing like what I experienced that fateful evening. We went from one clothing store to another, where these 2 girls “oohed” and “awwwed” at every single girl clothing item.

I saw many shoppers smiling at my misery and it was still ok until the trip culminated at the ultimate teenage girl’s store – Claire’s.  That was the last straw. I had never set foot in a Claire’s store before that day but I was extremely thankful for the surplus of Y-chromosomes in my family (grew up with 2 brothers and now have 2 sons). No wonder God kept me away from the pleasure of having a daughter because I think I would have been a clueless dad of a daughter.  As with every traumatic experience, my pain from the store-hopping will heal away with time (a weekly therapy session with my shrink will help too) but I am sure some mental scars will stay for a long time.

On a serious note, thanks S&P, R&H, and A&D for your gracious hospitality and a fun-filled super long weekend. We had a blast!!

And a final thought: Armor and humor both deflect pain but, obviously, it will idiotic to wear full body armor in these peaceful times.