Romance : Chandigarh style

Somehow my hometown has taken it upon itself to be the most "Valentined" city in India. Maybe it is because of its monicker : The City Beautiful. V Day is serious business here. According to an alert investigative journalist from the local newspaper, around 10 tonnes of chocolate was sold in the city on Feb 13th. Quite an acheivment for a city with a population of less than a million.

Around 1500 cops were deployed today on the infamous "gheri route". This is a road passing through sectors 9,10 and 11, where a lot of youngesters congregate. Actually, they mostly go round (gheri means "going round" in Punjabi) on their vehicles, looking at each other. This is what passes for a romantic encounter in India. Chandigarh is the favored educational destination for the younglings of the rich farming community in Punjab, so you encounter a lot of "raw" but well off kids. And they have somehow taken it to heart that proposing to a girl on V Day is a slam dunk. Their version of the wooing game is played like this :
1. Ride in a pimped up jeep with the top off with loud music blasting (any similarity to the gangstas is purely coincidental)
2. Honk at random women passing by
3. If there is no favorable response (which is the usual case), get more aggressive and pass lewd comments
4. If still no favorable response (what is the probability of that after step3), go to step 1
5. If there is a couple, direct aggression towards the boy

Let me relate an incident. When i was in college, a friend of mine in Chandigarh started dating this hot girl. A few days later, he is accosted by five huge sardars. It seems that one of them has earmarked the girl as "his", and my friend is "encroaching". Never mind the fact that this sardar has never spoken a word to the girl (and probably never will). Even if he does, what the girl thinks about it is still irrelevant. This is a typical Chandigarh romantic story.

So, coming back to the cops, they "are again determined that they will let love bloom only under their watchful eyes", and "are all set to have cameras rolling to record any untoward incident and have it as a piece of evidence" (direct quotes from the top cop). And the "gheri route" was declared a no-vehicle zone. See what i mean about the city taking V Day very seriously !!

But when i went out to get some food for take-out, I did notice groups of kids in eating joints, taking their first stumbling steps towards a relationship with the opposite sex, feeling out boundaries, marking territory. That was a trip down nostalgia lane. ( and woe betide the first bugger to comment "so how has that changed for you today ?" )