Zen and the Art of Valentine Maintenance.

Mehak and I have been married 10 years, and 10 years are long enough to understand a person, or so we think. As February approaches, our DNAs start to work in different ways. She starts to drop subtle hints about the approaching event and I develop a huge resistance to subtlety. I get the shivers just thinking of the amount of pink and red that would exchange hands on one single day. The reason lies in a very simple ratio… Of boys and girls in our class at St. Jospeh’s a few decades ago. You see, ours was originally a boy’s school that happened to go co-ed…and it of course takes years before the balance is met. So in a class of 50, we had about 6-8 girls. Get the point?

The girls of course got more than their share of attention; and cards, and chocolates and flowers. The unwritten rule amongst boys was, give a ‘Be my Valentine’ type of card (and the usual accessories) to all the girls in your class and wait. If the card comes back, try next year. If it doesn’t (haven’t seen that happening), feel lucky. There were of course boys like me who couldn’t even muster the courage for this high a risk. You see; Baljit (now in the Indian Air Force) and Amit (now a professor of electrical engineering at Minnesota University) and I, were sure that the entry of a girl in any of our lives will be the end of our bonding… or so we said.

The real reason was evident in the mirror. Amit and I wore thick glasses and the worst kind of frames, had more pimples that any girl can handle, and Baljit; was 4 feet 3 (most girls were taller than him), and went to the ‘gurudwara’ everyday to pray for a few more inches. We had the worst cycles one could buy (the ones that ‘doodh wallas’ use till today), when the world had moved to BSA-SLRs. Net, net as students of probability theory, we concluded that our chances of even sitting close to one of these girls (forget valentine cards) was close to zero. So we simply quit trying and bonded with men.

When Mehak and I met in the US, it took me 2 weeks to propose marriage to her. We married soon after that. She often asks me why I was in such a rush to propose and what I saw in her. She thinks I fell in love at first sight… truth be told, I just proposed to every girl I met after school. You see we had long standing ratios to beat, and I still wear thick glasses.

Happy Valentines.

Vineet Panchhi owns and runs Audio Wagon, his lifelong passion and now a music company. He blogs at Unplanned Journeys , and can be reached at: vineet.panchhi@audiowagon.com