Foodie at heart and stomach

I am a food-addict and I’m sick and tired of people who otherwise don’t give a damn, monitoring my dietary habits and telling me I don’t eat right. This is too much, even for me. I mean hypocrisy is one thing but being outright shameless like this is simply unacceptable. You can’t just order a hamburger platter, a double order of fries and pitcher of kingfisher and expect me to watch you devour it with a sald in front of me just because your genetics are immune to calories. Is it really such a big crime to eat and drink what you want?

Recently a professor teaching us business ethics, always an oxymoron to me, launched herself into a monologue about the benefits of eating right, sleeping right, exercising right, and leading a simple life towards the ultimate goal of Nirvana/ Moksha / Shangri-la / Elysium / (choose your spiritual end).

When someone asked her if this was for the eventual tranquility and peace of mind and for happiness of self, she had to reply in the affirmative. My question is, how in the name of lord do YOU know if this will make ME happy? Maybe it makes you happy, but are you sure living a life of spiritual intercourse, sexual or otherwise, and measly helpings of food would make me happy? If I know myself, not indulging in my food, my music, and my precious sleep would make me nothing short of miserable. You do 5 hours of sleep and 2 hours of Pranayam, I just simply do 7 hours of sleep. You eat lettuce in salad, I eat it in hamburgers. You turn on the music before having sex, I have sex and I hear music automatically. You take out time for meditation, I take out meditation to make time. And, somehow, it all works just fine for me.

Yes, it might put me in a sorry state when I’m older, and yes I might not live to be 70. But at least when I die at the age of 50, I would look back at my life and think to myself “You might not have done so well otherwise, but you did manage to become the proverbial Chef’s dream come true”. Drunken people’s proverbs, these.

Irrespective, this post is in lieu of a new blog I would be launching in May (which is when I get my hands on a brand new Canon S2IS), dedicated towards appreciation of good food and drink. The URL is www.lonelystomach.blogspot.com.

And this brand new blog is dedicated to all those near and dear ones who kept me from that elusive piece of chocolate, and that chicken tikka and that 4th filet-o-fish burger at McDonalds. I do hope you folks succeed in your endeavors of keeping me from my 5 meals a day.

:-P

Take that!

The worst thing I could've said

I might have effectively ruined a 7 year old friendship yesterday when a good friend met me online. For some reason she decided to confide in me and was telling me (apparently!) how her love life with this random fellow I've never even met was transpiring.

Long story short, the chat window looked something like this

HER- And then he told me that he was going to dump me because blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah...

...blah blah. You know Varun, I wanted to thank you for always being there for me, and for being such a good listener.

ME- Hey, I'm back!

The lamentable end of an era...

My school web-group had an email yesterday which made me cringe. A young lad just out of school wrote an email that made me wonder how things could have changed so much in the last seven years since I left St. Edwards, Simla. For those who don’t know this already, I take great pride in my convent school education and the fact that I was lucky enough to live and stay in this environment, in Simla, for 16 formative years of my life.

From the corridors which had teachers making us chorus 'i and e, except after c', to this current forgettable state of affairs, it is rather painful to see how writing etiquette and a general lack of acknowledgement of the presence of grammar has reached this deplorable state.

I for one, somehow, still swear by the ‘Wren and Martin’ grammar book, which I think has given me access to the English that many Englishmen don’t speak today (Do I sense resentment there?). Of course, having a good vocabulary meant a lot too. The most important thing I remember learning in school though, remains, how I was advised to be contemporary yet simple. A redundant style would often be received with criticism by Mrs. Sachdeva, and coupled with resistance from folks who couldn't care less about the language et al, it would often turn riotous.

At that time, we were made to learn grammar rules and then their exceptions. Yes, they were too many; but that never took away their importance. Not for me atleast. I suppose it’s the advent of this little thing we call the ‘internet’,and our blind faith in its effectiveness/efficacy, that we find ourselves 'understanding' how the world works. A conceivably refutable argument I heard recently talked about an alternate understanding of issues in separate/separated communities, that made me think whether punctuation is disposable. Grammar rules (and their exceptions) , though not sarcosanct, are 'pointers' on "what it is". And that is what I eventually stand by.

For instance, capitalization and punctuation can mean the difference between “I helped my uncle Jack, off a horse” and “I helped my uncle jack off a horse”.

And what is the reason for following up all these sentences with an innumerable number of dots. Makes you feel like summoning Pac-man from the dead. I mean they are meant to be three in number and are meant to show continuity. But every sentence? Come on...

Am I really a freak to care this vociferously about this then? I think not, though your comments are valued and appreciated.

In other news, Holi was a crazy day (read: alcohol, bhaang and a general lack of understanding of what was going on) which followed itself by an equally crazy birthday party at Insomnia at The Taj. What made the party even crazier was the presence of an inestimable number of bimbos dressed in minimalist fashion. I went upstairs to the deck for a drink during this vulgar display of money and breasts to find the entire English cricket team getting drunk and enjoying the way the bimbos hoarded them.

People in the team don’t speak to Monty Panesar. Nor do the Bimbos.