Placing romance and me next to each other would be the quintessential oxymoron had this been my engineering college days. I was the prototypical “finish the syllabus a month before preparatory leave, revise five times, be the person people want to borrow notes from and top the exam” type. It didn’t help that my batch in chemical engineering had 72 boys and zero… I repeat, ZERO girls. So we had to head to the electronics engineering department to umm…get a glimpse of (what I think is) a better form of Homo sapiens. All this was done under the pretext of our water coolers magically being unable to dispense cold water. Even though the electronics engineering coolers were equally lousy, somehow, the prospect of interacting with girls would somehow defy the laws of thermodynamics and make the water feel cold. I, of course, would drink water and come back and engage with my love: Strength of Materials by S. Ramamrutham.
Fast forward several years later. I’m happily married to a wonderful woman. Unfortunately, she has to bear with the quota of pent up, unleashed romance inside me that could not liberate itself from the shackles of chemical reaction engineering and process design. Not to mention that I have the sense of humour of an NCERT textbook. But to me, and her, thankfully, it’s the thought that counts. We have taken a strong liking to cooking and baking. In fact, it has brought us closer and has seen us through some tough times as a means to just forget everything and have some fun. While we aren’t the type to celebrate Valentine’s Day, every time it’s her birthday, I tend to step back and think of how she has made me realise that the online world is not just for the jobless and creepy curmudgeons. It’s a great place to inflict thousands of people with the same poor joke in one shot. That’s what I love most about Twitter and Facebook.
Coming back to romance, it was my wife’s birthday recently, and being a weekday, I baked her some profiteroles (as seen in the photo, and no, the rose wasn’t baked, you trolls). She loved the dessert but frowned upon my “Govinda movies generation” cheesy plating. But again, it is the thought that counts.
And it doesn’t have to be a special occasion. My wife is most happy with good old curd rice, and I happily oblige (not). Of course, she would be most happy if I helped her clean up after all the cooking, which I almost never do. But a healthy relationship is about accepting people for what they are, isn’t it?
