Many a times we feel like stopping this world and jump into some other planet. Valentines day is one such dreadful day because your wife/girl friend is waiting for some surprise but as usual you don't even remember about this day. BTW, do we really need a set date to celebrate Love? My boss (that is what I call my wife) believes that, by doing special things on special occasions the day will remain etched in our memory forever and will make our life worth living. Also these set dates give us a reason to pause and celebrate an occasion in a otherwise monotonous life. Whatever be her philosophy and whether I like it or not, I have no choice but to follow it. So in my case, ever since the courtship days I have managed to spend most of the valentine days with my girl. Over the years, we have had dinner by Thames river, lunches in some good restaurants/pubs near the gateway of India, roamed around in Atlantic city, camped in coorg, used sulekha.com to send gifts when I was out of India without her, and during my initial work years I religiously travelled to Mumbai from Mangalore around v-day to be with my boss. Of all the days, the memories from my first V-day still remains quite fresh ..
Expressing love never came naturally to me, probably due to my family's culture but my boss is opposite of that. For our first valentines day, the request from my boss was "Surprise me" and given my background I had no clue what it meant. But one thing I knew is, i would definitely need some additional cash. So for over 2 to 3 weeks I started saving my pocket money (rather saving my father's hard earned money), cut down on Kunjvihar VadaPav, government buses took precedence over Auto rickshaw, sacrificed old monk and cannon 10K, stopped visiting pool/snooker parlors, and religiously took my lunch box to college. Financially I was all set. The only good shop in my locality was Archies, I picked up a teddy bear and few other mushy stuff from there, and was on the way to railway station. On the way, there were quite a few vendors selling heart shaped red balloons and roses. I picked up both and jumped into the first class coach of a Mumbai CST bound local train. Within few minutes in the train, I realized I looked like pakka idiot, imagine me with red roses + teddy bear in one hand and heart shaped balloon in the other and that too in a crowded train. I came back to my senses and let the balloons fly off and dumped the teddy bear + red roses into my shoulder bag. Anyway, reached the destination, met her, we exchanged whatever we got for each other, spent almost the whole time in a pub cum restaurant, and roamed around for sometime before we went back to our respective homes. The day was not as boring as my writing, I didn't do anything special to surprise my boss but it was still fun and a lovely day
Now a days my boss does not say "Surprise Me", if i ask her "what do you want Honey", the answer is usually "Nothing". Thanks to all the forwarded emails about women, by now I know that "Nothing" means something and it is not just the "normal" something, it means I need to be on my toes and ensure i do something different. Finally, it still means "Surprise Me" ...:-)
