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Yet Another Self-Important Blog.
Rohit Singh
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[Fri, 09 Jul 2004]
Plain Philter Coffee
Every (sub)culture with far too much free time
gets more and more involved in elaborate food
prepration. Case in point being the French. Even Americans are getting into the whole "eating good" thing.
Since their notion of cuisine had been limited to the 'BBQ', they
have a bit ways to go. Still, they are getting there. Here's a brand new
hypothesis: half the people in Utopia will be cooks (or, atleast, fancy
themselves to be cooks) running small bistros. The other half will fancy
themselves as foodies and will go around
sampling these bistros. The problem is that the Utopians
will be incapable of eating a TV dinner.
Once you get used to nice food it's hard to accept
quick-fix food.
Seriously, even getting coffee in my office is now an elaborate exercise in decision making. Stata has numerous coffee sources. Many of these I have access to, especially when no one's watching. The old, "put-on-a-pot" coffee-maker is about antediluvian as my family's first TV which had a knob for selecting one of 8 channels. You can use the funky mini-espresso maker in the W3C wing on my floor. That coffee is good only with milk and sugar. If you want good black coffee, the place to go is the 8-th floor where they have another funky coffee maker. This one takes small prepackaged boxes with just enough ground coffee for one serving. Pick the flavor you want, pop the box in and, presto!, the machine will brea fresh coffee for you. This one's coffee is quite aromatic. The cheaper cousins of this are the flasks on the 6th floor which the gnomes fill with really nice coffee. The coffee they use is nice, but isn't always fresh. Finally, on the topmost floor sits the grand-daddy of all coffee-makers. It's a full-blown espresso maker, complete with a shiny insert-and-twist-thingie and a shot glass. Took me about 30 min to get it to work the first time around. Even its froth-maker works.
And of course, there's StarBucks. Since the closest one is too far (about 400 yards), they are opening a new one in Stata's ground floor in Fall.
I forgot to mention the gazillion varieties of tea (regular and herbal) available for your drinking pleasure in the pantry.
Bare Branches...
There has been a lot of hand-wringing in India over the
past decade about worsening female-male ratio. In some northern states
like Haryana
it's already quite bad while in other places, e.g. Kerala,
its starting to get bad. NYT has a book review
relevant to this situation. The book essentially says that with new
sex-determination tests, China and India are starting to have quite skewed
sex-ratios. The book says that this surfeit of infant boys in China and
India will lead to a whole bunch of what the Chinese call, quite
interestingly, "bare branches"-- unemployed, unmarried men who generally
make nuisances of themselves. I guess this whole skewed male-female ratio
thing has older roots in China- what with their tales of female
infanticide in medieval times and so on. [I am quoting Tintin here, so I
might be wrong.] No wonder they even have a name for this social
phenomenon.
Anyway, the book then goes into doomsday-mode saying that govts will pick wars just to keep these men busy or there would widespread social unrest. Kinda flimsy. But the point that such a skewed sex-ratio is unsustainable needs to be made. Which is where my rant comes in.
I acknowledge that female infanticide and abortion of female foetuses are heinous crimes. Actually, I find the whole notion so outlandish that I can only think about the problem in abstract terms. And that is when I feel that the doomsday prophecies are overblown. There have been some recent stories about how hard it has become for guys in Haryana and (parts of Gujarat) to find brides. Women are being bought; polyandry is happening and what not. Well, if women were to become scarce, dowry will go away. Indeed, reverse-dowry is becoming common in parts of Gujarat. With this, the main motivation for preferring boys goes away. And the sex-ratio will gradually tilt back towards normal. So I think worries about lots of unmarried men making nuisances of themselves are somewhat overblown. The situation will fix itself over the long term. Short term is another issue.
[/rants-and-raves] permanent link