1. Money spent on food varies widely across the world.  A family in Chad spends less than $2 while a German family spends 250 times that amount, for food that looks average (ie non-exotic, therefore affordable prices) for their respective countries.
2. The cheaper the food, the healthier it seems to be!  People who spend a high amount of money (in the US, Europe and Japan) eat a lot of ready-made, processed foods.  As expected, American families are ahead (!) of the Europeans and the Japanese on that front.  The Europeans and the Japanese can be seen to eat at least some portions of fresh veggies and fruit (and fish, dozens of them for the Japanese!).  On the other hand, the families from poor countries rely more on fruit, veggies, grains, cereals and locally available meats (polar bears anyone?!).  The Bhutanese family picture shows a single packaged food(!) product: looks like tea!
3. The stereotypical families lived up to their national reputations.  So the Italians are unmistakably gorging on a tableful of bread.  The Germans had a big section stocked with beer.  The american family from NC had teenagers holding a humongous pizza each, the size of a flying saucer!
4. The nutritional values of these foods are not known but none of the families appeared malnourished, even in low-food-cost countries such as Chad ($2), Bhutan ($5) or India ($36).  In fact, the Indians (Patkars from Ujjain) looked very happy eating the mother’s Pohe!
5. What was also striking was the joyous and beautiful smiles on the families’ faces.  And I don’t know if it was just my imagination but the poor-country-big-family pictures seemed to have more genuine smiles than the rich-country-nuclear-families whose smiles looked photo-oppish.  It may just be the measured smiles of the polished cultures, who knows?
6. Japanese are gluttons.  Even the guy in the TV is salivating looking at the fish on the family table

Just look over the pictures and see what else you can glean from them.

I don’t normally review movies, simply because I cannot watch them with that aim.  Movie reviewing is serious and also seriously difficult business.  If a movie moved me, I was too engrossed in it to be able to make intellectual comments on an essentially visceral experience (sort of like trying to analyze the mesmerizing beauty of a woman by analyzing how her viscera contributed to it ) and if I hated the movie, why waste more time by writing about it, unless I am in a seriously bitchy mood to really screw someone’s happiness?  So I prefer to remain an avid reader of film reviews rather than a writer, which is a different breed of movie-goers!  This attempt will surely not tell you all about the following movies but I hope to convey to you why they moved me!

Just to dispel the myth that only serious movies can move you, let’s start with a comedy as the first one:

History of the World, Part I:

There was not a bone in my body that moved, shook, rattled, displaced, dislodged, and romped to the utter collegial intelligent silliness of this farce!  This is one movie whose sequel I just longed for (but never arrived!).  It is classic Mel Brooks. If you enjoyed his sidesplitting movies (as an actor and/or director) such as  Silent Movie, Blazing Saddles, or Robin Hood: Men in Tights, you will just burst out of all the seams (dorsal, ventral, anterior, posterior et al) watching History of the World.

The fun begins with the very first scene where a bunch of fierce alpha males of early apes graduate from chest thumping to self hum.. I mean self… aah… how should I say it… stimulation… yeah, that’s the word!  And from then on, it’s a tumultuous riot breaking out in front of your eyes.  The movie moves very briskly thru short skits, some as short as just a few seconds.  For example, an early man bonks an early female and drags her to his cave: the first heterosexual marriage.  Needless to say, this few-seconds-long skit is followed by another short skit depicting the first homosexual marriage.  And so on it takes you on a whirlwind time travel thru the roman empire, the birth and death of Jesus (including the REAL story behind the Last Supper), the Spanish Inquisition (including a fantastically choreographed musical with the words: Inquisiiiiition – what a show!) and finally ending at the French Revolution.  All forms of humor, be it silly slapstick, wordplays, anachronistic mix of people/props/situations, elegant choreography, oxymoronic juxtapositions are used to rearrange the entire skeletal structure in your body.  So a black slave (Gregory Hines) walking into a roman era bazaar with ‘funky town’ blaring on a transistor radio doesn’t remain a schoolhouse skit production humor.  The movie is a super-fast laugh parade of such skits weaved together in a common thread.  It can get as burlesquely irreverent at times as Benny Hill and it does that with superlative results, but for most parts it stays at a family entertainment level, that of a somewhat twisted family that is  Along with Mel and Gregory, Dom Deluise doesn’t just tickle your bones but makes you feel that your marrow is going to ooze out of them.  His portrayal of Caesar is one of the funniest I have ever seen.

This non-stop romp of a comedy doesn’t just move your bones with laughter.  It transcends you from the caveman period to the French Revolution in less than 2 hours.  It doesn’t move you with tremendous audio-visual and intellectual sensory overload, it makes you forget you have any sense at all!  It’s good to be moved totally senseless once in a while, that’s like getting an ultimate high without drugs, and for me, that is the biggest success of this movie!

The Legend of 1900:

If I continue to occasionally channel surf late at night, somewhat aimlessly but still wistfully hoping for a repeat of a serendipitous discovery, all credit goes to this gem of an obscure movie.  I don’t even remember when I saw this.  It was definitely between 2003-2005 and a late night at home in the US.  I was halfway done with some homework for my MBA, one of those last minute all nighters and for a break, I switched on the TV and caught the first few minutes of this movie.  I am glad I kept watching, homework be damned, and when it was finally over, I couldn’t fall asleep (but couldn’t study either!).

For me, the story-line of a movie is very important.  In the venture capital parlance, it’s the ‘Elevator Pitch’ of the movie.  This one sentence description of a movie must arrest you enough to feel guilty if you don’t watch the movie!  So how’s this for the Legend of 1900: the story of an infant abandoned on a cruise ship, adopted by the crew, never sets foot on the land, becomes the best pianist entertainer in the world, and of fleeting love that finally drags him to the land… almost!  And drawn in by this weird prospect of a storyline, you get treated not just with fine film-making but some of the most other-worldly piano scores you have ever heard in your life.  If you liked the Pianist or Piano or some such fine movies and thought they epitomized the finest in on-screen piano, think again!

The story starts in a flashback sort of a way, when an ex-musician fallen in bad times visits a pawn shop to sell his trumpet.  The tune he plays moves something in the shopkeeper and the musician narrates the story of Danny Boodman T.D. 1900 (supremely played by Tim Roth), a child abandoned by his immigrant parents on board a luxury cruise liner.  Danny is raised by the guy who shovels coal in the gargantuan underbelly of the ship’s engine room where Danny spends most of his time.  He becomes a self-taught pianist, modern-day composer, as well as a jazz virtuoso and one of the best in the world in each of those categories.  Yet, this orphan never loses his child-like innocence, sheltered by his small world of the cruise liner, learning about the outside world thru filtered stories told by passengers who befriended him.  Interspersed in this story are some of his amazing skills at the piano.  The highlight of the movie is the duel between Danny and Jelly Roll Morton, a real life jazz virtuoso and self-taught pianist who claimed to have invented jazz.  Jelly challenges Danny to a piano duel and insults Danny until he accepts.  What transpires next is one of the most unanticipated scenes I have ever seen on screen.  And the piano?!  I guarantee you’ve rarely heard such fantastic (and fast) piano ever in your life.

The piano of 1900 moves you (thanks to Ennio Morriccone and Jelly himself) to the core, starting with your tympanic membrane, reaching out to the auditory brain circuits and propagating thru your body, making you understand you’re listening to some of the best in the world.  But that’s just the icing.  The basic premise of the movie, the self-taught prodigiousness of an orphan who defines his entire world, life, and love in the cocoon of a cruise ship, continues to tug at my heart even to this day.  The innocence that envelopes Danny throughout his life makes you wish you continued to hang on to your long lost innocence.  Long after the movie has ended (in my case, almost 7-8 years), he continues to tug at your heart with a pang: I wish I could have done something to save him from his cocoon-doom.  There are epic movies that move you to the core and want you to do something great for the entire mankind.  The Legend of 1900 moves you with just one person’s unique story and in no small parts due to the fantastic piano score!

The Untouchables:

Crime dramas make me uncomfortable.  Not because of the violence and gore but because they often engender sympathy for the wrong folk.  Why should your heart bleed for Don Corleone in The Godfather?  Why would a hot-tempered and extremely violent Joe Pesci’s death make you puke in The Casino?  It bothers me when that happens and I still cannot help it.  The difference with The Untouchables is that the real good guys move you.  And the bonus is that it was a true story!

Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is a federal agent who goes after the entire criminal empire of Al Capone (Robert De Niro).  Ness is straight laced, law abiding official who tries to trap Capone thru above-board and legal means and gets frustrated as the entire security and legal apparatus is bought off by Capone!  A disillusioned Ness selects a young dedicated assistant to help him, Detective George Stone (Andy Garcia) but to no avail.  Eliot’s gradual transformation from following and upholding the law to taking it into his own hands starts with a sermon from a jaded cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery) who has bottled up all his righteousness in an entirely corrupt system and is just biding his time.  The team is complete with the inclusion of Agent Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith, a versatile actor and director in his own right), a bespectacled agent who looks more like a benign accountant than an agent.  They hound Capone with a singular mission to book him, following unconventional means, taking law into their hands, meeting violence with violence and sacrificing half of the team in very violent encounters.

This is one of those films where everything works together perfectly, the acting, direction, cinematography, locations, music, all of it.  Much lower on the gore quotient than some other Brian De Palma films, it nevertheless has a fair share of gory violence and action.  None of that, however, reeks of sadism on part of the director as it sometimes does.  The final action sequence in a subway station where Costner and Garcia nab one of the criminals is one of the best stylized slow-motion action sequences I have ever seen on the screen.  The suspense, the slow motion, Garcia’s run, Costner’s dilemma between saving a baby and nabbing the criminal, the implied voices, the inanimate sounds of everything else all come together to etch the entire sequence on your mind like no other.  The timing is improbable but well within the realm of possibility.  Almost the entire cast is absolutely stellar, Costner being the weakest link, not being able to change expressions much as he starts losing his moral and legal plank.  De Niro absolutely boggles your mind letting you peek into the perverse mind of Al Capone, crying while watching an emotive opera and simultaneously chuckling a sinister smile when he gets the news of the death of one of the agents.  Sean Connery is the same Sean Connery as always: gritty, no-nonsense cop.  Garcia fits the quietly energetic and unemotional rookie cop perfectly well.  The goose-bumping sinister quotient is mightily enhanced by Bill Drago playing Frank Nitti, a ruthless killing machine working for Capone.

A criminal son dies a violent death, the criminal (god)father weeps and we feel his pain.  Or the weakened godfather dies of a heart attack, playing with his grandson and makes us somehow like him.  By showing the rare human vulnerability of a hardened criminal, movies like The Godfather make us fall into an uneasy love for criminals.  The transformation of Eliot Ness from a law-upholding official to a killer is complete when he brutally finishes an unarmed Bill Drago in an enraged revenge killing.  And we identify with his rage bordering criminality.  When we like him (even under somewhat expressionless face of Costner), we feel happy we are moved by the right person, precisely because a decent man finally said ‘enough is enough’ and perpetrated a criminal act against evil!  Who amongst us has not ever dreamed of taking things in our own hands and finish off all evil in the world in a violent way?

Unlike watching Shahrukh Khan (whom I have watched once and swore off forever) I actually LIKE going to lavish resorts… once a while.  After getting your soul battered in the daily struggle called life, it feels good to lose it once a while.  But then you go back to your life and find nothing’s changed.  Sometimes, however,  you serendipitously experience something you thought was long lost… and out comes along with it, your soul.  Not the battered one, but the pure, innocent soul that you were born with, that never bruised even in childish altercations, or that which became all lumpy thinking of your first crush.  Or the one that still remembers your parents’ tough love with an unexplainable miss of a few heartbeats.

Atithi Parinay is not easy to find.  Left to myself, plodding the wild west of online stuff, I couldn’t have found it myself.  But the amazing folks at Black Swann do precisely that.  I have no idea where they find these gems.  It’s so deeply hidden inside coastal Konkan that you feel only locals would know about it.  But that’s exactly the kind of stuff Black Swann finds: helps you travel to faraway places and experience them thru the eyes of the locals.

We arrived at Atithi Parinay on 20th August, after about 7 hours of driving and full of fabulous seafood consumed at a very reasonably priced Ratnagiri joint called Amantran.  The road to Ratnagiri thru Amba Ghat was another soul-moving experience.  No matter how many pretty, rolling, and undulating hillsides I have seen all over the world, the hills of Sahyadris etched in my mind are still breath-taking.  Especially after the monsoon, they can easily give any other similar other-worldly vista a worldly run for the money!  Wading thru one-car wide market lanes of Ratnagiri, we finally reached Kotawade, an utterly nondescript hamlet of a village, deep inside Konkan, 3-4 km off the Ratnagiri-Ganapatipule road.

Atithi Parinay does not bewilder you with its setting.  It does not moisten your eyes with sweeping vistas.  It does not take your breath away with its sheer beauty.  It doesn’t even evoke a sense of pregnant anxiousness thru meandering pathways.  You reach its non-gate and you feel as if you’re entering the private driveway of a retiree’s concretized life-savings.  And that’s exactly what it is.  It’s a home-stay with an unerasable underlining of the ‘home’ part.  Unlike other properties with heavenly settings, Atithi Parinay cannot win you at first sight.  Instead, it slowly takes you over like a temptress relying on her intrinsic motives, moves and moods more than the moxie of her beauty.  Over the gravelly crackle of your tires (your car’s tires, that is), you reach the little parking area charmingly paved with dried coconut fronds.  And you see the owner-hostess standing at the porch, a lovely lady, immaculately dressed in a delightfully crisp Fabindia saree, a broad smile on her face, and an honest welcome in her somewhat deep-set eyes behind the thick spectacles.  At a resort, you’d be welcomed by a salaried hostess in starched linen with a pad in her hand with a long list of the day’s “arrivals”.  And then clumsily balancing the pad, shifting the pencil from her right hand to her left, she’d shake hands with you with the trained smile of the hospitality industry, coupled with an almost robotic ‘Welcome Mr. Paranjape’ and then with a reverse shuffle of the pen from the left to the right, she’d tick your name off the list: ‘done’!  For her, you’d be a business statistic that need to be checked-in as part of the day’s job.  Not so at Atithi Parinay.  No forms, no lists, no awkward pencil shuffles, no mechanical movements of the lips, no business, no bull.  Instead: a simple namaste and behind that, an unspoken curiosity and a yearning to welcome someone new from a distant civilization (that’s how far off Atithi Parinay is from the daily drudgery of the big cities with their own urban civilizations!) to fill the sometimes lonely voids in the rustic village life.  At a resort, you’re a customer who wants to be really treated as a guest (as the resorts promise all over their literature).  Here, you’re a guest who has to decide whether you want to be just a customer, a guest, or even the host!  With that welcome, Atithi Parinay starts taking over all your senses, the way a great wine does (too bad, alcohol is strictly not allowed at Atithi Parinay.  If it was, the results could be simply super-toxicating!)

Refreshed with a homely cup of tea (with a lot of insistence to ‘have more’!), we finally proceeded to our quaint cottage with two adjoining rooms.  The rooms are very well furnished: spartan but with spotless white bed linen and cow-dung floors!  The semi-open-air bathroom is well laid and well lit with all the modern amenities such as instant hot water, spotless showers, floors, designer sink etc etc.  Changed, we went back to the main house which also accommodates two rooms for guests which are bigger than the cottage rooms and have tiled floors and a huge terrace in front.  We started roaming the natural outgrowth of trees, shrubs and crops on the little property (a total of 2-3 acres only!)  The hostess accompanied us, telling us about the life in the village, various plants, their peculiarities, rarities etc.  Interspersed in that narrative were affectionate half-complaints about her daughters’ insistence on eco-friendliness, reverence towards her late husband who dreamt it all up and even a few questions about us: well balanced between a genuinely curious probing and respecting our privacy.

It had started raining heavily.  So we skipped our earlier plan of going to Ratnagiri (about 14 km away) to eat seafood (Atithi Parinay is a veggie-only property) and opted for the homely veggie dinner on the property.  The dinner comes from a nearby family, relatives of the owner.  It was absolutely delicious, wholesome, hearty and true to the ‘home’ part of the home-stay, the hostess and the cooks insisted we eat more.  She even scolded our fussy-eater daughter, exactly how her grandmother would.  Atithi Parinay had started slowly creeping into our consciousness with simple things such as these and by the time we retired to our cottage, we had forgotten we were guests and started feeling as if we were family!  A testament to this is the fact that for the first time in my living, post-marriage memory, Urmila did NOT test the cleanliness of the bed with her microscopic vision!  We just assumed it’d be clean!  After all, you don’t suspect cleanliness of your own bed linens, do you?!?!

The morning of the 21st August brought on my 47th birthday.  Special birthday kisses from my two girls and a well-composed poem by Sunskriti brought happily gushing tears to my eyes.  Sunskriti was somewhat confused: did I write something wrong?  A long hug was needed to reassure her that she hadn’t.  Back at the house for multiple cups of well-brewed tea and sumptuous breakfast of Pohe and we were ready to take a dip into the charming little seasonal river flowing next to the property.  Gingerly at first, I entered the refreshingly lukewarm water and then everyone poured in.  For Sunskriti and Shravani (niece), it was their first experience swimming in a little river, along with little fish all around us.  And for me, it was my second experience, almost 38 years after the first, which I had when I was their age.  That river started onion-peeling layers of adulthood from my soul.  Shubhada (sister-in-law) brought fishing lines from the hostess and we had a blast trying to lure the finger-long fishes with balls of wheat-floor mixed with turmeric.  Whoever said you needed expensive bait to fish?

Before we got out, we had spent 3-4 hours in the river.  Then off we went to Ganapatipule for lunch.  This was the first time I went to such a divine place of worship with the sole aim to eat seafood and drink beer.  After copious amounts of ingesting both, we were sufficiently buzzed and stupefied to not mind the filth around the famous Ganesha temple, a definite plus of imbibing the ‘holy water’ BEFORE visiting the God rather than after it.  The Ratnagiri to Ganapatipule road was simply breathtaking with the ever changing vistas, those of hills and the ocean.

Back at Atithi Parinay, we all had vowed to skip dinner.  Some roaming around, chitchat and a few cups of teas later, the little temple next to the property came alive with high decibel chants of songs in praise of Lord Krishna, who apparently is just a day younger to me, a fellow Leo!  No wonder he’s such a great guy!  The songs and the sometimes torrential rain seemed to try to drown each other out.  For us, the rain provided some much-needed dampening of all the high-decibel devotion congesting the already-damp air around us!  We went to the main house, more to escape the noise but ended up gorging on the fantastic dinner!  As the ‘Birthday-Baby’, I got specially treated with sweet ‘Ukdiche Modak’ (steamed dumplings with coconut and jaggery filling), a famous local treat.  As always, the hostess and the cook ensured we ate much more than we should have!  After the dinner, over small talk, it felt as if we were at home in a joint family: the hostess, my family, my cousin Shantanu’s family and another unrelated guest family!  It’s truly a testimony to the way Atithi Parinay epitomizes ‘home-stay’.  You get all the good things about ‘home’ without having to carry any of them and with the freedom to simply walk away from any undesired fallout of being in a home-setting (such as doing the dishes!).  At Atithi Parinay, as in any ideal homestay, you are given an invisible remote control.  Press the button and you feel at home, press it again and you can distance yourself whenever you want.  While sitting there after dinner, I pressed the button a few times.  Then I saw the grandmotherly hostess squatting down on the floor to play cards with our daughters and I never realized when and where the remote control disappeared altogether!

The devotional noise thankfully stopped sometime in the middle of the night.  Unfortunately it was morning of the 22nd.  Time to leave.  A few more cups of tea and another sumptuous breakfast later (with an unexpected treat of Jalebis), we found it very difficult to leave.  Every gravelly crackle of the tires on the way back thru the driveway seemed a soulful cry of parting, of not wanting to overcome the sticky friction between us and the grandmotherly earth of Atithi Parinay and the quintessential quaintness that it epitomizes.  As a kid, I used to look forward to visit grandma’s home every summer.  And instead of going stale, it seemed to nourish my soul.  Years later, I feel I have found another place that once again has that long-lost potential!

“Whoa, whoa, mom, go easy on the chappatis, please remove this latest heap from my plate!  I am full!”

“What?  You hardly ever ate anything… a growing boy like you needs to eat more.  A few chappatis are nothing!”

“Mom, I already ate 7-8 of them”

“Shhhhhsh!  How many times have I told you not to count them?  That reduces appetite!”

And you know what?  Mom was right.  Our appetite seems to be ever-increasing as nobody’s counting how much we eat!  But WHY do we over-eat?  In a table-breaking, plate-busting, goblet-shattering article on the issues around Serving Up Smaller Restaurant Portions, the researchers found it’s inconclusive whether it might work!  Awww… that’sh vely vely dish-appointing you poo-ul leash-ul-shulsh!  We ekshpekt kwik kan-kloo-shunsh!  But the leashulsh.. I mean research infers seven important points:

1. People are swayed by visual clues: if something looks like a single portion, they think it IS a single portion and try to eat it all by themselves!  The researcher puts it as: people will eat everything you present unless they know that plates, forks, napkins, tables, salt-shakers, waiters and other guests are not edible.  Thankfully most people do!
2. People are programmed NOT to waste food, so bigger portions get eaten up even beyond their gastric capacity.  Apparently even at middle ages, people imagine mom’s kunckle-bonk on the head if they wasted food in a plate, even though no mom is around, theirs or anyone else’s for that matter!
3. Large variety makes people eat more.  Young people are more prone to this.  For example, when I graduated from a boys-only highschool and went to a co-ed college, the large variety of beautiful girls obviously made me extremely hungry as evinced by my stomach churning up into big knots.  I don’t really know why this is an apt analogy, I just ate a lot of vada-pavs in the canteen… alone… until I ate my way out of Fergusson College… alone… sob.
4. People think of ‘Healthy Food’ as a monstrously oxymoronic absurdity.  Whenever any restaurant says this, they magically hear it as ‘Healthy Cardboard’ or ‘Healthy Dog Food’ or something.  They then clear away from it in search of ‘Sinful Food’
5. People often trust their environment more than their intelligence, often thinking a Maid in Manhattan would be more gorgeous than a Dame from Dharavi.  The article makes the same point in a much less colorful way: people estimate even ghee-dipped blob of cheese in a Subway to be healthier than a shrivel of lettuce at a McDonalds!
6. Restaurants hate smaller portions because that means less revenue (really?!).  Waiters hate smaller portions cause that means proportionately less tip.
7. People rationalize splurging on desserts or over-stuffing themselves as a way to compensate an otherwise healthy meal.  This is equivalent to ‘hanging out with the guys’ every weeknight to compensate for a weekend with wife, which is a problem.  You do that two weeks in a row and the wife is sure to hang you out the third!

So it seems like a gerbil’s spiral: people are offered bigger and broader selections which makes people order more and finish it all and demand more which results into more supersizing of offerings which people gulp down with even more gustatory gusto and so they are offered more….

“But Pray Why”, you’re sure to ask, “would people be offered such wider and bigger selections in the first place?”.

And to that, my first reaction is: Good God, you seem like a fairly nosey, sherlock holmesy character, to be asking questions in such archaic english!

And my second reaction is this: People are offered such big portions because it’s much more profitable for the restaurants!  Anyone with a basic highschool education can understand that if you sell something profitably, then you sell more of it even more profitably!  And especially if you sell all that more stuff to the same guy, he soon become a golden-egg-laying-goose!  The only exception to this basic understanding is those that graduated from my highschool, where the official motto read ‘Walk the Talk’ and the unofficially practiced version said “We’ll break your leg if you talked in class”.

As with many obnoxious things in the food industry, the ’supersizing’ trend seems to have started with the fast-food restaurant industry.  In his category-creating retail discipline, Paco Underhill mentions research in his phenomenal book “Why we buy” that when prompted with a seemingly friendly question such as “do you want to supersize that?” at a fast-food counter, almost 50% of the people blurt out a salivating ‘yes’ like headless chicken they’re about to consume!  Imagine that!  50%!  That means if the guy in front of you at a fast-food restaurant refused the supersizing offer, you MUST take it!  That’s what statistics forces you to do.  No, of course I am kidding.  But the point is that a big number of people, who had NOT asked for supersized food at the counter, suddenly change their mind and willingly pay more (both in monetary and health terms), just because an acne-scarred youth at the counter asked them to!  How bizarre can that be?  And what about that ubiquitous quest of all fast-food patrons: the Combo Meal?  Combo Meals are insanely profitable for the restaurants for two reasons.  The first is simply that you sell more and that ‘more’ is the lowest cost things: sodas, fries etc.  The second reason is also economic and the real reason behind the emergence of Combo Meals in the first place: Counter Efficiency!  Fast food restaurants became very popular but soon realized that long lines started forming at the counters because people would crawl up to the counter and then just keep staring at the menu board, trying to make up their mind, wasting eons of time:

“May I help you?”

“Ahh.. yes.. lemme see… am gonna haave… a whopper… no, make it a quarter pounder…. no wait… Honey, what did I eat last time?”

“You ate 4 quarter pounders and slept snoring like a slug, driving me so mad that I felt like grilling you… you were reeking of beef patties anyways…  Johnny, do NOT shove those french fries up your nose…”

“Sir, may I help you?”

“Ahh… lemme see…………………”

To avoid such nincompoops from jamming the counters, the fast-food restaurants devised a clever solution: the Combo Meal!  Now you could just sleepwalk into the restaurant, choose a numbered-meal, step aside, get poked in the groin by some little devil of a kid playing with his action-hero toy that came with his kiddie burger, get a tray full of your meal pushed into your hand in the name of ’service’, overstuff yourself, and sleepwalk back to your car, which could have now run entirely on biogas after that mean meal you ate!

And soon, everyone else followed suit and we started punishing those restaurants who didn’t supersize or offer combos and before you knew it, the whole thing just went out of hand… and pants… and blouses… and…  It became such a pervasive problem that calling people ‘fat’ failed to describe their humongous ultra-lobular fleshiness and that’s how the word ‘Obese’ became popular!  In a perverse sense, the more benign ‘fat’ has become politically incorrect and the more insidious ‘Obese’ has gained political currency!  Nobody cares about political correctness if it screws up the happiness of only a handful people.  Like all things political, even correctness needs a critical voting mass!  And the voting mass is now so obese that it lives up to the word ‘mass’.

But what should the restaurants do if people are hooked on to big portions and why?  The ‘why’ is easy to address: Restaurants are some of the biggest links in the food chain.  Americans spend almost 50% of their food expenses at restaurants, way more than the entire GDP of Switzerland!  And if you thought it’s a uniquely American problem, think again!  Average urban Indians in the metros take almost 8 meals a month in restaurants!  We’re not the homeboys anymore eating mostly wholesome home-cooked food as we like to claim, are we?!

But the ‘what’ (as in what should restaurants do to help tackle obesity) is a hard problem!  Should we start admonishing people for devouring more? (”Good God Mr. Paranjape, you’re eating with the grace of a hungry hyena!  Have some mercy on the food, or at least the bowl!”)  Should we price them high so people would eat less?  Should we serve smaller portions and give people an option?

At Grubshup, we have been sensitive to this issue since our inception.  Not just driven by obesity but also by the environmental impact of food production and wastage.  Americans waste enough food that the energy wasted in producing it (almost 350M barrels of oil!) is more than the total annual energy needs of Switzerland.  I have no idea why all researchers use Switzerland for all such comparisons.  The Swiss must be feeling pretty inconsequential by now!  We have been obsessive about preventing food wastage, sometimes at the cost of delay in cooking (means irate customers!).  On the portion size, all our a la carte servings have been about 100gm each and priced accordingly.  That’s generally sufficient for an average one-time hunger, especially coupled with a couple of parathas or rotis etc and costs about Rs. 100 including the breads.  We serve them in an appropriately sized bowl but the first-timers often complain, just based on visual cues, that it’s insufficient.  We politely ask them to finish it and see if they are satiated and most people are.  That way, they also get to taste more variety.  You can always order more, can’t you?  And on a unit weight basis, we’re cheaper compared to most other restaurants in our category.  When we gave people the option to order ‘Half’ of a sandwich, we got tremendous response.  Today, almost 50% of our sandwich orders are for half portions!  Our smaller portions also waste very little food.  In giving people more control over the portion sizes, we have definitely observed that people eat what they need and waste little.  It means less revenue for us but hey, in this fight against obesity, threats to energy and food security, every bit of food saved is a weapon, as they used to preach during the world war.  We’re proud of our ways and the fact that our customers support us.  And that’s one delight we will happily offer to ‘Supersize’!

Shakahari is in the new Marriott on SB Road.  The hotel lobby is as boringly posh as any other stone-n-glass new crop of 5-stars.  It tries to dazzle you with all the big and bold and somewhat crassish opulence.  Every structure tries to make a statement, at least its creator wants it to.  With its somewhat smallish and narrow proportions, dictated by the space constraints, you feel the new Marriott Lobby with its garish opulence resembles Paris Hilton making a statement: not a real good eye candy with absolute pompous vacuousness at its worst.

A flight of stairs leads you to Shakahari, the entrance framed by a huge stone frame with huge wood and glass doors, with queer-cut little wood poles on the sides.  From then on, it’s a dead jungle in there.  There’s so much wood on the ceilings, tables, walls, partitions, chairs, and shelves that I couldn’t betray the guilt I felt patronizing a place with its interior looking like a forest mausoleum rather than a restaurant.  For some weird reason, on both sides of the big dining hall, they have built partitions of wooden poles to break the place visually into 2-3 zones to give some sort of privacy for big parties.  The partition poles are about a foot apart, wide enough to walk thru, thereby giving as much privacy to the parties on the other side as Pamela Anderson’s boobs.  I don’t know why I came up with that analogy, maybe because looking at the useless wooden partitions that are really bad to look at, I was fuming at the naked architectural, moral, environmental, visual, and intellectual bankruptcy of it all.

OK, now onto food.  Geez… I really got carried away with the interior, didn’t I?  As the name suggests, Shakahari is all veg.  There’s a full bar on one side which beckoned loudly.  Drooling badly, I walked by to ogle at it but the first thing I saw was 6 bottle of Erath Pinot Noir!!  This gorgeous wine from near my home in Oregon was the last thing I had expected to see there.  Eyeing the bottles brought nostalgic tears into my eyes.  I suddenly fell in love with the place, at least the bar.  There’s ought to be a very good sommelier somewhere in Shakahari.  Still drooling, I came back to the table.  The buffet is somewhat weird.  The salads and desserts are arranged in the typical self-serve buffet style.  Then there’s live counter for some of the appetizers such as tikkies, cutlets etc.  The main courses need to be ordered and are brought to your table.  You get a choice of 3 main courses with rice and breads (all unlimited).  The whole buffet sets you back Rs. 550 (plus taxes, half-off for kiddies 5-12).  The main courses represent two cuisines: Indian and Far-Eastern.  We ordered garlic fried rice, another brown-rice variety, and Yakisoba for Sunskriti.  A braised BokChoy+Okra combination, and Crispy Veggies for Urmila and Cashew Mutter Subzee and Dhungri Daal for myself, apart from an assortment of breads.  Here lies the first issue with this weird structure of the buffet.  Because the main courses are served at the table, you have no idea how much is enough.  So even if we would have liked to taste more options, we ended up ordering only a few main courses for the fear of wasting food.

Various salads, a combination of fresh-cut and tossed make up the salad bar.  Salads were good, but nothing special.  Amongst the live counter appetizers, the best was Scallion Pancakes, which was a loose patty made of scallion (green onion) and grilled, topped with cream and stuff.  That was D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S!  Rest of them were this tikki and that tikki types: good but nothing to write about.  But the Scallion Pancakes made me enough happy to love that entire appetizer counter, the chefs, their mothers and the whole khaandaan.

As we had feared, the main course portions were big.  The garlic rice and brown rice were absolutely delightful, the garlic in the garlic rice perfectly balanced with subtle earthiness of rice and veggies.  The brown rice brought out the raw earthiness of brown rice very well.  Yakisoba was good too, although Sunskriti thumbed her nose at it, opting to gorge on garlic rice.  The crispy veggies were absolutely delightful: somewhat sweetish, nicely crispy, fresh and a subtle tang and hotness.  Sunskriti gorged on that too.  BokChoy+Okra combination was good but not very inspiring as the others.

The big letdown were the Indian dishes.  The daal was bland although enough buttery and creamy, which I like only rarely.  The Cashew-Mutter subzee was very bland and a colossal floury waste of cashews.  I could manage a couple bites and then sent it back.  The rest of the food was enough (and tasty enough) to feed us satisfactorily.

The dessert bar was made up of Chocolate Mousse (absolutely yummy and delightful), Umali (very very tasty), and the trio of Badam Halway, Gulab Jamun, Kala Jamun plus a couple pastries.  I reached Nirvana with the first two and didn’t care for the rest.  Sunskriti filled herself up with assorted candies and that made her day.

The staff was very friendly, well groomed and mannered with very good communication skills and had very pleasant demeanor and a ready smile, something not very common in Pune!  The crockery was very good, mostly stoneware and makes your meal special.  The staff indulged Urmila with a nice single shot of espresso, I was too full to even move my lips.

All in all, the non-Indian food and desserts were good enough to salvage an experience that teetered on a big disappointment, stemming from very un-tasty Indian food consumed in darkish interiors sprouting out of an entire dead forest.  If it was not for the Asian food and the Chocolate Mousse and Umali, I wouldn’t go there again.  And oh, the Erath Pinot!!  Anyone who chose that needs to be felicitated in public and awarded the title of the ‘Jewel of Pune’ (if there’s no such title, make one for goshssake!)

According to a recent report in Grist, increasing temperatures and consequent longer summers have made a bunch of Colorado Marmots (furry mountain creatures living in Colorado Rockies, which are a bunch of rodents and not some white-supremacist Coloradans which, by the way, are also rodents) blissfully horny.  Marmots hibernate for 7 wintry months, only to wake up during 5 months of spring-summer when they eat, court, produce, nurse, raise, educate, contribute to state 529 plans and send their kids to community colleges before they hibernate again.  With global warming, the summers are longer, food is more plentiful and consequently the Marmot numbers are exploding.  And that’s exactly what Europeans will do as well, except that they don’t contribute to state 529 plans, there being none in Europe.

A ground-breaking 2001 study conducted by the ‘European Society of Human Reproduction’, conclusively proves that large spikes in European births around April each year, means Europeans were much more ‘playful’ 9 months before: in summers!  This report raised a very important question in my mind: What EXACTLY do they DO at the European Society of Human Reproduction and how can I become its member?  Years ago, I had attended a meeting of the ‘Society for Creative Anachronism‘ where we didn’t just sit around and talk, we actually donned weird suits and helmets and dove headlong into European History by enacting it.  Does the ‘European Society of Human Reproduction’ take such active and direct headlong dive into their subject of interest?  Is it OK if the members engage in a little ‘recreation’ while practically researching human ‘procreation’?  If the answer is ‘Yes’ to both these questions, please send me the wire transfer instructions.

If you put the two studies together, you can confidently claim that Global Warming will result into longer and warmer summers and just like Marmots, the Europeans will breed much more profusely than they do today (which is hardly any!).  I can confidently say that you can confidently claim this because all of us have been confidently claiming various things with no underlying proofs, just like some of the IPCC scientists.  OK, so Europeans will breed like crazy, but what about their friends across the pond, the Americans?  The same study by the ‘HumRep’ (short for European Society of Human Reproduction) also mentions that American birthrates, on the other hand, spike in July/August/September, which means Americans are at their reproductive best around Thanks-giving and Christmas!  This is normally attributed to the cold weather that forces people together indoors, which makes them watch rerun after rerun of ‘Desperate Housewives’ and ‘Sex in the City’.  What happens next is anyone’s guess.  But the big question is: in spite of equally cold winters, why do Europeans not breed more at that time?  Scientific research, which I cannot find right now, points to three reasons:  1) Their homes are so cramped that when forced indoors, they get on each other’s nerves rather than on each other.  2) Since they are much more liberal than Americans, they understand neither ‘Desperate’ nor ‘Housewives’, thereby not even comprehending the point behind such silly soaps.  3) They are much lazier, state-spoilt brats that don’t want to spend their summer holidays all bloated and huffing and puffing in lamaze classes or maternity wards, so they time their pregnancies much before the Holidays  4) I said THREE reasons but I am sure I can come up with one more, so just reserving this space for later.

This is all good news for Europeans, who have been so beset by abysmally falling birth-rates that they have been secretly encouraging immigrants from former colonies, in the hope that the immigrants would do all the menial work and look good without their veils while doing so.  But hordes of these fast-breeding future Europeans will no doubt clash with the faster-breeding immigrants, even figuratively removing whatever veil of friendship the old and new Europe shows to each other today.

According to a recent article in ‘The Globe and Mail’, the recent economic crisis has already turned the ‘European Dream’ look more like a ‘wet dream’ than reality. In the 20-30 age-group, only 1 in 5 Europeans is working today, which causes the remaining four gang up and harass him/her for working like a donkey!  The European Dream of full-time employment contract with generous vacations and benefits is getting jettisoned faster than Obama’s Afghanistan policy du jour.  A whole generation of Europeans is getting out of college, finding they have no place in the economy.  There’re a couple of reasons why I am saying all this economic crap in this blog-post:  1) to tell all those millions of European readers of this blog to go ‘easy’ and not emulate the copulatory practices of Marmots and 2) to give this blog an extra air of scholarliness by saying ‘economic crisis’.  Now that I have forced that phrase into the blog, let’s move on…

If all this marmot-style boom, doom, and gloom brought into Europe makes you think that Global Warming is all bad, think again!  A recent article in Indian Express, claims that “Oz Women’s breasts bursting out of bras sans implants” (seriously, I am not making this up).  And they are not talking about wardrobe malfunctions.  In the last fifty or so years, women’s breasts have tripled in sizes (No, they are not talking about any particular woman, just on average!) and have now employed alphabets beyond DDD upto J!  The article quotes one of the foremost experts on this issue:

Editor of men’s magazine FHM Guy Mosel said it is hard to ignore the difference in breast size, with even the skinny women sporting over-developed breasts.

Yeah, sure Guy, as if you really tried to ignore!  This trend is not found just in Australia, it’s also the same in Britain.  Apart from the pill, the cause of this Breastplosion is attributed to food and also water out of plastic bottles!  Although it’s easy to see the strong linkage between plastic bottles and breast sizes, I have left that as a mental exercise for all you alert readers.  But as a hint, all I will tell you is that there is a strong correlation between plastic water bottles and global warming.  So if there is a strong correlation between the water bottles and breast sizes, it is safe to conclude that there’s a strong correlation between global warming and breast sizes.  And the old scientific adage is that when in doubt, assume correlation also means causation!

The big question is why would an Indian Newspaper carry this news, without any comments on Indian womens’ breast size increase or lack thereof?  It not only baffled me but many readers of Indian Express and then I found the answer when one of them vented their frustration with comments such as:

Why don’t you do some additional research before re-printing an Australian news report? Who knows what is 10B or 12B or G size or J cup? You should convert the measurements to a known standard or to actual measurements in inches or cm. Very weak journalism. Your only intention is to generate salacious interest from a scientific report.

Generate salacious interest!  Now who in their right mind would resort to such cheap tactics to just beef up their readership?!?!

But that’s not the point really.  The point is that if you turned on Mozart before cleaning the toilet, the chances are you’ll be cleaning it much faster and cleaner!  German researchers have discovered that playing Mozart thru special speakers to the microbes cleaning the muck in sewage plants, actually increases their efficiency to break down the sludge.  No-one knows why this happens.  Of course, the microbes know but they were unavailable for comment, busy chomping the sludge, listening to ‘The Magic Flute’!

Reportedly, microbes are particularly partial to harmonies and rhythms, said the German researchers who discovered this phenomenon.  ”Mozart’s music has a special quality of harmony in correlation to his rhythm”, said Anton Stucky, the MD of the speaker company that did the study.  My highly scientific and educated conclusion after carefully studying this report is that Britney Spears would be much more effective in breaking down the organic muck faster than Mozart.  Well, not herself… but maybe that too!  Britney scores over (no pun here) Wolfie on both counts: her monies and rhythms.  She has made tons more money than Wolfie could even dream of.  And rhythms?  Oh my my… When she performs, her entire body is rhythm personified.  Lately, it has been rather chaotic since different body parts seem to rather incoherently jiggle to different rhythms at the same time but that’s rhythms alright!  The only problem is that Britney CREATES a lot of muck, so the net muck-cleaning could be negative.

As a highly responsible scientist and musician myself (my pee-brained distractors prefer ‘reprehensible’ to ‘responsible’ as an adjective but since this is MY blog, they can’t do anything!) I set out to prove or disprove this ‘rhythm and harmony correlation stuff’ myself.  I moved my music system to the toilet, turned on my amps full blast and blasted the crap out of the toilet with Mozart’s ‘The Marriage of Figaro’.  And lo and behold, it really blasted the crap down the toilet much faster than anybody’s business.  Then I tried the same with Britney’s ‘Oops, I did it again…’ and NOTHING happened!  And then it really dawned upon me.  Are you ready for this?…..

See, just like us humans, the male microbes try to make the female microbes do all the dirty work of muck-cleaning and all.  The female microbes (called Galcrobes in scientific terminology) being liberated these days, don’t readily oblige.  On the other hand, the guycrobes (which is another scientific name for Male Microbes) are glued to the TV and beer, watching ESPN and Playboy channels simultaneously.  A cold war ensues, galcrobes finally threaten the guycrobes with dire consequences ‘at night’, the guycrobes reluctantly try to help the galcrobes with the cleaning and that really actually slows down the process as it always does when any male tries to help any female with any work.  When Mozart is played, the galcrobes get into an euphoric state of mind and would gladly clean anything in sight while the guycrobes are too stupefyingly stunned to be able to ‘help’ the galcrobes at all.  This speeds up the process enormously.  When Britney is played (on the stereo, that is) the opposite happens.  The guycrobes ACT disgusted but are secretly bewitched into seeing how they can help after ‘Oops Britney did it again’.  The galcrobes, however, stop in their tracks and bitch to each other about everything Britney.  Hence, nothing gets cleaned.  And that, dear readers, is the real reason behind how it all really works!

So next time you have to clean your toilet, remember to turn on Mozart.  And for particularly gruesome and hard-to-clean muck, try Eminem instead!

Andy Grove is Concerned About The Loss of US Manufacturing Jobs

In a recent Seattle Times Op Ed, Andy Grove, that poster child of Silicon Valley successes, said he’s really concerned about the job losses in the US.  Well, nobody disagrees with him about the loss of the kind of white-collar jobs that he himself held once upon a time.  But what Andy is lamenting is the loss of ‘Manufacturing Jobs’.  This is somewhat queer coming from the ex-captain of an industry which sent a lot of them outside the US.  To be fair, I am not so sure now if Intel’s overseas manufacturing operations started during Grove’s tenure or his successor Craig Barrett’s.  But even if it was the latter, Andy was Intel’s board chairman at that time, so he finally approved it all.  And to be fair yet again, Intel never shut down their US manufacturing.  In fact, a lot of it is still in the US.  Anyways, the point is Andy now feels it’s a big mistake that US is shipping all manufacturing overseas.

Losing Manufacturing Know-How is Losing Overall Technological Edge

His argument?  US not just loses its manufacturing practice and know-how but the entire chain of capabilities lose as well: from product architecture to design to manufacturing to technical marketing to everything else.  In my Intel days working in their Design Dungeons, the designers indeed worked closely with the process design and the manufacturing folks.  And being able to do that is one of the biggest advantages Intel designers have.  Having tried my hands at managing teams from the US, Israel and Malaysia working on a single project, I can imagine the advantages of the ease of  getting the US-based manufacturing guys’ mindshare.  It does not still solve the problem of ‘throwing a problem over a cubicle wall’ but at least the wall is not virtual and things can be sorted out easily!

Unlike Europeans, The US Will Have Better Labor Pool To Keep Manufacturing On-Shore

There’s another angle to it.  If Europeans sent the ‘low end’ manufacturing jobs overseas, at least they have declining and aging populations to pawn as a supporting argument.  The Americans don’t have that problem, at least not as bad as the Europeans do.  Its porous borders allow many more legal and illegal immigrants who would love to hold some of these manufacturing jobs.  And unlike the European immigrants, the American immigrants find easier assimilation in their new homeland.

But Forcing Manufacturers To Keep Jobs Onshore Is Dangerous and Futile

What’d be the implications of doing what Grove proposes, which are Obama-esque taxes and levies on companies shipping manufacturing jobs overseas?  I don’t think it will help a lot, not such half measures, as corporates will surely find ways around it.  And more draconian measures will throw us back into restrictive and competitive commerce and consequent political, societal, diplomatic and military problems.  Besides, is that really the best solution?  Can we achieve what Andy proposes thru more Open Globalization than Guarded Globalization?  Open Globalization does NOT mean Rampant Globalization.  It just means more Sensible Globalization: Globalization where it makes sense to Globalize.

Maybe We Should Take Sustainable Globalization Seriously

I strongly feel the answer lies in ‘Sustainable Globalization’.  Make product costing account for all the hidden costs of pollution, labor abuse, dirty manufacturing practices, human rights abuses in the supply chain, energy consumption, carbon footprint, trans-ocean transportation et al.  Will this preserve American manufacturing jobs?  Not necessarily but it will make global supply chains much more efficient and environmentally friendly.  And then Americans, as all nations, will find their right groove, the right products and industries to globalize.  Shipping raw material from all over the world to the US plants, just to save US manufacturing jobs, and then ship back finished products all over the world to sell would be rampant abuse of resources.  Andy is worrying about the US’s technological edge in the future.  I am worried about the future itself!