Guns and Romance

So after reading my last blog, my lovely sis-in-law-cum-my-content-advisor, Kanya Bahwa commented that my blogs lacked romance. Even though it was a harsh criticism to swallow because I know I was born with a romantic bone (when people can have a funny bone, why can’t I have a romantic bone?) but if Kanya asks for more romance in my blog, Kanya gets more romance….after all, she inspired me to start this blog anyway. Now I realize that, for me, being romantic is one thing but writing about romance, especially in a humor blog, is pretty challenging….let me try it anyway.

Another challenge facing me right now is that I recently noticed that my delightful sis-in-law, Kanya Bahwa’s brother, Bunny, has also become a “follower” of my blog. Yeah yeah... I know what you are thinking…isn’t my sis-in-law’s brother my brother-in-law? True, he is… but I believe in complicated, complex, and convoluted relationships, and hence, calling him my sis-in-law’s brother is definitely more fun. So now I have to be very careful about what I write regarding Kanya because who knows…. in one of his happy, drunk, confused, befuddled, confounded, disoriented states Bunny decides to read my blog as well.

In any case, with Yash Chopra back to the pavilion, the world definitely needs a new romantic storyteller who can capture the imagination of millions the way Yash Chopra did.  And for my American/Canadian friends, who do not know Yash Chopra, he was a famous Bollywood director who recently passed away due to Dengue fever…and those of you who do not know what a pavilion is, start following cricket matches, and those of you who do not know what Dengue fever is, please ask Uncle Google…and those of you who do not know what Bollywood is, …well, no hope for you guys!! You can convert to Hinduism and may be in the next incarnation you will be born in Rishikesh, India, where in addition to enjoying Bollywood flicks you can also enroll in the spiritualism classes on the weekends.

Let us get to the romantic blog now. I know what you are thinking – Why do I have guns in the title of this blog? Is this going to be a story about romance at a gun-point? Hmmmm…interesting idea but that will borderline sexual assault, not romance. Since President Obama proposed the most sweeping gun-law changes this week, I am trying to honor him by somehow fitting guns with romance in the title of my post. And I am sure it will definitely get those people’s attention who were on the fence in terms of whether to read my post or not…but guns in the title may entice them to keep reading (especially the loyal NRA members).

Just like any other celebrated author (at least my friend Deepa thinks that I am one), I thought that I should “research” the topic of my article, especially when romance is something I have never written about before. So I started my research last week at the Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida where I was attending a business meeting. Near the roller-coaster rides at Universal, I approached several random chicks to get their perspectives on romance. What transpired after some of these conversations cannot be published here…otherwise this romantic comedy article will quickly become a romantic thriller with wild chases down the Spiderman ride and my own version of a Free Fall ride. And then on the plane ride back to Toronto, there was this beautiful, young chick sitting next to me so I decided to try my luck once more thinking she is a captive audience and cannot run away from me at 37000 feet up in the air. After debating in my mind for 30 minutes, I finally gathered enough courage to ask for her perspective on romance. As I turned towards her, I found her deeply engrossed in a magazine reading an article titled, “What is Up with Your periods”. Damn these girly magazines (obviously she was not reading “The Economist”) and their articles. Needless to say, I turned back and spent the remaining 2 hours staring outside the window into the open, cloudless, empty sky.

Since this “live” market research attempt did not yield desired results, I decided to change my strategy and check out some books in order to get some ideas on romance. In the bookstore, passing through a section, I noticed a book titled, “Fifty Shades of Grey”. Looking at the title, I remembered that in one of our chats, Kanya had mentioned that she heard about this book but I did not remember what the context was. Since my hair has been turning grey at a lightning speed and Kanya makes fun of my age in almost every conversation (she being 22 and all), I thought she must have mentioned this book for me to read to manage the color of my hair. So I picked up a copy and browsed through it. Oh My Dear Sweet God!! The book had nothing to do with the color of the hair (and if it did, it must be somewhere in the gory details but this definitely was not the central theme by any stretch of imagination). It appeared to be a book on romance but nothing like anything I have ever come across. No wonder housewives are getting more desperate in the hit ABC show, “Desperate Housewives” when they read these kinds of books.  So Kanya, if you were expecting that kind of romantic material in my blog, you will need to look elsewhere. I remember reading in the American Journal of Medicine that there are many websites that specifically deal with that genre of romance, sometimes with educational videos as well but I do not know any specific ones…sorry!

And as a last-minute, desperate attempt to garner some knowledge about romance, I also watched Yash Chopra’s last chick-flick, “Jab Tak Hai Jaan”. And what a waste of time that was!! Enough said!!

Now, in a romantic story, we need a hero and a heroine. My first dilemma is – who do I pick as my story’s hero. One option is to pick myself as a hero and talk about my 17 years of romance with Anshu (officially it started only17 years ago because that is when we got married…I cannot talk about the romance before that due to 2 reasons – One, even though it is highly unlikely but there is still a tiny possibility that Anshu’s immediate family members end up reading this blog and if that happens, she might get in trouble and secondly, this is a PG-13 blog often read by my own 13-year-old son, Nyle who may cringe reading about the pre-marital romance of his parents so let us not get there). However, even though all these Khans in Bollywood in their mid-40s shamelessly show up as Heros in romantic movies, I think I should not push this idea…else the readership of my blog may go down by 50% (from current 6 readers to 3).

My other choice for the hero of my romantic story is Nyle. He is almost a grown-up now……yesterday, for the first time in his life, I let him sit in the passenger seat of my car rather than the back seat, and also for the first time, I let him use a trimmer on this shadow above his lips, which eventually will become a moustache. I cannot wait to have those father-son juicy story sessions every evening where he tells me all about the girls he chased during the day and how many (Indian) girls reciprocated the gesture with a Rakhi (that happened to me more often than not when I was his age…especially because I do not have a sister so girls thought that I had a ‘sister” issue).

My friend Skanda is also an excellent choice for the main lead of my story. If you recall, in one of his comments on my last blog, he described himself as a muscular, chest-ribbed, fully toned macho man. However, it turns out that his actual romantic story is, in fact, a love triangle, which is a little outside my capabilities at this stage…let me first handle a straight boy-girl story before I get into complex love triangles or foursomes.

So, at this stage, given the lack of information on romance and quite a bit of confusion about the hero of my story, I think I will need to postpone the romantic comedy post to some other time (may be on the Valentine’s Day). Sorry to shatter your hopes, Deepa… I know you were eagerly waiting for this romantic blog. And I am sure that Yash Chopra’s soul will now NEVER rest in peace given the way I have botched up my first attempt at romance. But hey, that is life!!! (Though not for Yash Chopra)

And, as always, my final thought:

When a relationship becomes like a broken glass…..it is better to leave it broken rather than to hurt yourself more by trying to put it back together – Justin Bieber.

Happy New Year

So 2013 is here and even though the US did not fall off the “fiscal cliff”, it is still a pretty crappy start of the year with our taxes going up, snow in Toronto drifting on roadways causing treacherous driving conditions, and undue publicity being given to Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy and Hugh Hefner’s marriage to Crystal Harris (and if she gets pregnant, Hugh, unfortunately, will not be the oldest dad in the world…that honor goes to Ramajit Raghav of my native state Haryana in India who recently became a dad at the tender age of 96). It is funny that the US Congress had 518 days to come up with a solution to the fiscal cliff and they still needed additional 21 hours after the deadline to avoid falling off the cliff…..talk about the height of procrastination. Nonetheless, the bottom line is that they still got it done…. and that is why I have decided that my New Year resolution this year will be to procrastinate as much as I can.

And to start with, I procrastinated making my New Year resolution as well. Rather than doing it on the 1^st of January or even before as some crazy people do it, I have waited a week to decide. Then I had promised my lovely sis-in-law-cum-my-future-book-editor, Kanya Bahwa that I will post my new blog on the New Year day but I procrastinated until today. From now on, whenever my soul mate, Anshu, requests me to take care of some household stuff, my strategy will be to postpone it until one of the following two things happens – she forgets that she asked me to do something (my best bet) or enough time goes by and the need to do the task actually goes away (for example, if I leave the empty garbage can outside for a long time, the city truck will eventually haul it away and I won’t have to move it back to the garage…then she can go and buy a new one….problem solved).

Another example – Anshu requested 2 weeks ago when she “winterized” our home (disconnected water hoses, moved the lawn furniture to the shed, brought the beer tanker and the cotton candy machine from the deck to the basement etc.) that I should make sure that our snow blower is ready for the upcoming snow season. I obviously procrastinated and did not do anything about it and when Toronto was hit by a major snow storm, rather than screwing around with the snow blower and cleaning our driveway, I used the immense power of our two SUVs to crush the 8 inch thick layer of snow to get in and out of the garage.

This strategy worked very well for me but I know that my dear friend, Skanda (who also goes by Sikandar for those dimwits who keep calling him Sikandar even though he keeps correcting them that it is Skanda, not Sikandar) did not like it when he tried to park his car in our driveway. Apparently, the car span (I did some research on the past tense of the word “spin” and turned out that both “span” and “spun” are accepted by linguists so I have decided to go with “span” though you are free to replace it with “spun” when you re-read the paragraph from the beginning because I have distracted you so much that you do not even remember what you were reading….and my advice is that when you re-read, it will be better if you skip the portion between parentheses otherwise you will need to start all over again) some 180 degrees when he floored his gas pedal in order to go over the 12 inch high wall of snow/salt mix between our driveway and our street caused by the city plowing trucks. So rather than wishing me a happy new year, the first thing he said when he saw me was, “Dude, you need to clean your driveway.”

However, I still do not understand what the issue is. From my standpoint, we provided an amusement-park-type-exciting ride to Skanda and his family and we did not even charge him for this fun and he is still complaining about the ice skating rink, I mean, our driveway. Secondly, if the car did spin 180 degrees, it was good because he was able to park the car facing the street rather than facing the garage and I know as a fact that 73% of the parking lot type accidents happen when people are going out of a parking spot in reverse (Source: Pakistani Journal of Jihad and Parking Lots, Issue 34; page 112 from the back….because it is in Urdu). This way he did not need to get out in reverse and rather than thanking me for saving him from a potential accident, he was complaining about his so called ‘ordeal”. I guess, it does not matter whatever you do for some people…. they are never satisfied.

What Skanda failed to remember was that we were actually enjoying our winter holidays in beautiful Chicago when Toronto got hit with the snow storm…. and cleaning the snow 3 days after it falls is as difficult as cleaning a baby’s butt 6 hours after the baby has pooped in the diaper. Now, I do hope that Skanda does not get too offended by what I wrote here to demand a refund of $37.50 he already gave me for a copy of my future book, which may or may not get published because I may or may not write it. Obviously, I have already drunk $37.50 long time ago…no, no I did not drink dollars; I drank alcohol bought by his dollars. If Skanda does demand his money back, I will sell a future copy of my book to my friend Deepa to pay off Skanda. She apparently has been enjoying whatever crap I have peddled in the name of humor in this blog so I am sure she will happily part away with money for a noble cause.  

And talking about Chicago, when we were landing, the pilot announced that the outside temperature with the wind chill was -15 deg C. Stepping out of the airport we were thinking “Is there any place on earth that can be colder than here?” And pretty soon we got our answer – yes, it was the rental car. Even though Anshu turned on seat warmers as soon as I started the car, we still did not feel our rear ends the rest of the day. That is why I love this bumper sticker on many cars in Canada, “Screw the Global Warming, we are cold now!!”

Now a million-dollar question is – what is common among a New Year resolution, cleaning drive ways, Skanda, extremely cold weather, and parking lot statistics? The answer is – Nothing. And that is why this is a column about nothing!!!

And, as always, my final thoughts for this first blog of the New Year:

Let me clarify that this time, these are NOT “my” thoughts even though I live by most of them on a daily basis. I read this paragraph a long time ago somewhere and liked it so I am publishing it here. Hopefully, this is not plagiarism. There is nothing funny here and even though most of it may sound cliché, it has some profound thought-provoking ideas so please read carefully:

As you grow up, you learn that even that one person, who wasn't supposed to ever let you down, probably will. You'll have your heart broken and you'll break others' hearts. You'll fight with your best friend or maybe even fall in love with him/her, and you'll cry because time is flying by. So take many pictures, laugh too much, forgive freely, and love like you've never been hurt. Life comes with no guarantees, no time outs, and no second chances. You just have to live life to the fullest – so pick up the phone today and tell someone special what he/she means to you, completely ignore those who are often too “busy” to really be in your life and hence use you as an option, speak out, dance in the pouring rain, hold someone's hand, comfort a friend, stay up late and fall asleep watching the sun come up, be a flirt, and smile until your face hurts. Don't be afraid to take chances or fall in love and most of all; live in the moment because every second you spend angry or upset is a second of happiness you can never get back.....

In the end, it's not going to matter how many breaths you took, but how many people’s breaths you took away.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!