Handsome in Pink

Saturday. The wife is 400 miles away attending her MBA classes at University of California Berkeley. I am at the Torrey Pines Beach in San Diego, California. The two well shaped women in attire befitting the Californian Pacific Coast, walk past me, muttering under their breaths: "Sexy!" They allude not to me, let alone my bare chest, devoid of pectoids befitting the then Governor of Cah-lee-four-nee-ah, Arnold Schwarzenegger, but to the scene in front of them of this dishevelled brown guy with an eight month old daughter in a swim suit and strapped in a snugly while dangling from daddy's neck.

I feel sorry for the two women. They have been devoid of a far hotter scene of this very me getting out of my lipstick red Mitsubishi 3000 GT sports car, then struggling to unstrap the restless daughter out of the child seat, balancing myself into reversing out of the back seat area of the car (there is barely a back seat) with my hands around the baby while the diaper bag falls off on to the dirty ground. 

Fast forward to last week in Dhaka. My car is stuck in traffic in an alley where I see a rickshaw-puller being approached by an out-of-shape young man with unkempt, oily hair, half his T-shirt sticking out of his jeans requiring a much deserved wash, a pink coloured Elsa backpack hanging from his left shoulder as he holds a 4-year-old girl lovingly clinging on to him with her head peacefully resting on his shoulder from being tired after a long day in school.

Unbeknownst to a lot of us men, both these scenes from San Diego and Dhaka are major turn-ons to the female counterpart, relegating into insignificance the scene of a tuxedo clad, gelled up beef cake with a chiselled jaw line. Of course the San Diego and Dhaka guys would give an arm and a leg and their deshaped bodies for the latter. But believe it or not, many fitting the latter category of a hunk would give it all up for the former. Take it from a guy who not too long ago was a high flying, career building bachelor driving that same red Mitsubishi sports car as a babe magnet, which turned out to be nothing more than a cop magnet, raking in four speeding tickets over a span of just seven months while bringing him this close to being sentenced to community service for repeated traffic violations. 

Let's face it, men want to be admired. Period. It's just that we are slowly getting to learn of other undiscovered (or should I say ignored) ways to be good looking, such as not pacing in front of the labour room but rather holding the wife as she screams in pain during delivery, getting into the kitchen, feeding the kids, putting them to bed, being called up by the mother-in-law to make sure that the kids eat the brownies that she had specially made for them, swallowing the complaints from the kids' teachers at parent-teacher meetings and plain having two screaming kids clinging on to his dishevelled self. These make us hot, these make us cool, these make us sexy and these make us foxy. 

These also make us selfish into wanting to look attractive in these ways, resulting in us to happily make some room for all that we occupy — the corner office, the playing field, the flight deck, the gym, the public office, the court room…

There is no task that a woman can't do that a man can. In fact, there are at least two tasks that the woman can do that the man can't — the man can rear, but not bear a child and can feed, but not breast feed a child. In the game of tennis between the sexes, the female leads the male by 30-0. 

'Be Bold for Change', the theme for International Women's Day 2017, really applies to men because women have already been bold but have seen little change. It is great to have a 20 percent female quota in a certain profession or have 30 additional seats in the parliament. But that is still forced and enforced charity for those who don't need it. It is a thousand times braver, bolder, if not sexier, to voluntarily and happily make room amounting to 20 percent of the jobs or 30 from the contested 300 seats. And more men will, once they taste the blood of the seemingly mundane alternatives to their 'traditional roles' as being far sexier. For once, selfishness and ego can be put to good use. 

And when that happens, International Women's Day will become as obscure as International Men's Day.

The writer is an engineer at Ford & Qualcomm USA and CEO of IBM & Nokia Siemens Networks Bangladesh turned comedian (by choice), the host of ATN Bangla's The Naveed Mahbub Show and ABC Radio's Good Morning Bangladesh, the founder of Naveed's Comedy Club. 

E-mail: naveed@naveedmahbub.com