The challenge of buying gifts for the family

As soon as I returned from my business trip, I opened my bag, took out the three packages that were on top, laid them carefully on the bed and shouted to my wife and daughter to come over to examine the loot. If you’ve ever had the chance to observe the way a lioness, after capturing a wildebeest at the end of a long and arduous chase, calls her family over to enjoy the spoils with her, you will get the idea of how I was feeling. I too had captured these articles after a long and arduous chase. The gift coupons I had received from Singapore Airlines to purchase items from their inflight shop were due to expire in a few days and I had forgotten to buy anything on my last two trips. If I had let the opportunity slip by again on this trip, the coupons would have to be squandered. Nothing is as heart-wrenching as forfeiting a freebie, but I had not let that happen. Like the lioness, it was only natural that I should feel triumphant.

“What is this?” my wife asked in a manner that reduced my triumphant mood by 73%. She was holding the elegant watch I had purchased for myself by the tip of its strap as if it were an unsightly worm.

“It’s a beautiful watch,” I said coldly, “It includes a chronograph and, when you change time-zones…”

“Ok, ok, whatever,” she said. “It’s ghastly but if you’re going to wear it, no one will notice.” I was confused about whether to feel insulted that she found the watch ghastly or flattered that she felt I could still carry it off with my personality.

“It’ll go with the rest of your appearance,” she continued, making my choice clear.

“You don’t know a thing about men’s watches, woman,” I said, “So please focus your attention on what I bought for you.” I handed her a box.

Brazilian pleasures

In Brazil there are many motels specializing in short-stays that are – how can I put this delicately? – romantic in nature. With alluring names like Swing, Alibi and Absinthe, these establishments offer pleasure-seeking couples a cosy haven far from nosy onlookers, with the right trappings: mirrors on the ceiling, seductive music, subdued lighting and a comfortable bed. (I know all this only through hearsay.)

It was such a romantic setting that Wallace entered on a blazing hot afternoon. As he walked into the motel room, he grunted with satisfaction. Pink curtains were drawn against the bright heat, the bed with red linen looked inviting and air conditioning was keeping the room deliciously cool. Only his companion was missing but she would be here soon. He walked over to the full-length mirror along the wall and liked what he saw.

“You handsome devil!” he said.

The door opened. He turned and took a sharp intake of breath. Rosa was standing just inside the doorway looking gorgeous. He moved towards her.

A few months later, as a direct consequence of this encounter, Wallace and Rosa became the proud parents of six healthy, tail-wagging puppies.

When I read about these new pleasure-motels in Brazil that cater to canine clients, I thought it was a joke because the dogs I’ve known have always been happy to conduct their love-making in the open: the diffident courting with delicate sniffs, the coy back-and-forth interchange (“Should we?”, “Now?”, “Yes!”, “Why not!”) and finally the unbridled action when we, as onlookers, would turn away in embarrassment.

Big mugs of beer

At midnight, soon after taking off from Singapore to Munich, I did the unthinkable: I declined dinner and went to sleep. I woke up at 4 a.m. fully refreshed. No, I’m not a high-flying banker who – after just four hours of sleep – gets up full of energy (and starts lying about the LIBOR rate). It was 4 a.m. in Munich. Exhibiting reverse jet lag, I had cunningly switched time zones in the night and slept ten hours.

Consequently, I boarded the 30-minute train from the airport to Munich Ostbahnhof with a spring in my step. A few minutes after checking into my hotel across the street, I was back at the front desk.

“Is everything OK, Sir?” the receptionist asked.

“Yes!” I said. “Show me a jogging route.”

The man looked at me with admiration as he reached for a map. “The hotel is here, Sir,” he said, circling the place in the map, “and here is the river with a park along its bank.”

“How far is it?” I asked.

“Just five kilometres, Sir. 20 minutes to get there and 40 for one round.”

Obviously I had impressed him more than required. I explained that I could not (a) cover five kilometres in 20 minutes or (b) run for 80 minutes in one go. Instead I asked him to direct me to a smaller green area much nearer to the hotel.

The non-existent benefits of eating less

Do you have a friend you’ve never met and will likely never meet, a friend who doesn’t know you exist? Well, I do: her name is Gina Kolata, she lives in New York and… but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me backtrack, and tell you first about the perfidy of another friend, Rahul, who I have known since boyhood.

A few days ago, my wife and I met Rahul and his wife for dinner. After we exchanged the usual how-are-you, is-the-back-better and has-it-been-raining-or-what, I got down to business.

“Just because he is a waiter, we shouldn’t keep him waiting,” I said and addressed the good gentleman myself. “For starters, how about a plate of samosas, some paneer tikka masala and papadi chaat?”

“Hello!” said Rahul, “That’s way too much food for the four of us…” – actually I had only ordered for myself – “and on top of that, it’s loaded with calories. Here, let me take over.”

He beckoned the waiter over to his side of the table, instructed him to get a large plate of green salad and while I was still recovering from the shock, dismissed him (“That’ll be all - we’ll give you the mains’ order soon.”) He then turned to me and began a lecture on over-eating, calorie consumption and the evils of fried food.

“I’ve been researching health,” he said. “You should go to this site, www.mayoclinic.org. At your age, Paddy, you should be…”

“I’m the same age as you,” I reminded him. “We went to school together.”

Getting more sophisticated about drinking

In a previous column I explained how gracefully Indians have been climbing the social staircase, exhibiting particular elegance when it comes to drinking alcohol. And as in other walks of life, the woman has begun to walk side-by-side with her man on the alcoholic alley, imbibing the stuff with equal relish. With alcohol inside her, she can no longer be relied upon to drive the happy husband home after a boisterous party. She may sportingly agree to a coin toss to decide who wins the right to drink and be driven (but if she loses the toss, she may simply order a taxi and close the argument).

But while both sexes may sip whisky shoulder-to-shoulder, dispensing drinks is still the man’s domain. Showing kindness and grace, the woman allows her man freedom to choose the liquor-stocking furniture; arrange it in a strategic location; buy all the accompanying dispensing equipment – wine-openers, corkscrews, ice-picks, soda-makers and cocktail mixers; ensure their maintenance; select the right array of glasses to serve beer, whisky, wine and juice; keep them all immaculately polished; stock sufficient quantities of liquor to meet the needs of a wide variety of thirsty guests, including the unplanned ones (“My cousins were in town and were dying to meet you”); ensure availability of ice and soda; and finally, serve each drink precisely as ordered. The woman looks on with benign indulgence as we do all this fun stuff.

A few weeks ago, I observed the suave aplomb of the male host as he offered his guest, a portly banker, a drink.

“Name your poison.” He said it grandly but the statement's splendour was slightly diluted by the fact that he had employed it on his three previous guests.

Getting sophisticated about drinking

If you’ve seen upwardly mobile Indians lately – which is a roundabout way of saying if you’ve kept your eyes open lately – you would have noticed how incredibly sophisticated they have become. They drive fancy cars, wear cool eyeshades that match their Bermuda shorts, bark out Americanisms like “cut to the chase” and even play golf. But the area where their progress from crudeness to elegance has been breath-taking is their attitude and behaviour towards alcohol. If you throw your mind back twenty years, you will recall that drinking used to be considered wicked in India, much in the way that gambling was. The two vices were always linked in my mind, probably because the Hindi movie villain would invariably plan devious plots at the gambling table with a glass in his hand (and Monica standing seductively at his side). My mother would lecture me on the evils of alcohol while my father nodded in sage agreement, undeterred by the drink in his hand.

In those days, Indians started drinking when far away from their parents, relatives and well-wishers, usually in the college hostel. And they developed the habit in a quiet, unobtrusive – one might even say furtive – manner, devoid of any ostentation. They usually indulged in the activity with friends at a bar. And they did not consider stocking the stuff at home where it would be visible in broad daylight.  On the rare occasions that they hosted a ‘wet’ party at home, they would serve their guests from the single bottle purchased on the way home from office, about an hour previously. And the bottle was invariably either Old Monk Rum or Bagpiper Whisky: the only choice that the guests had was the amount of water and ice they wanted with the drink.

Amul: the invaluable Kurien legacy

Dr Verghese Kurien, the man behind Operation Flood, passed away on 9^th September 2012 at the age of 90. In 1949, Kurien began the transformation of the dairy co-operative model in Anand into a nationwide institution. Thanks largely to him, India is the biggest producer of milk today. Many Indian prime ministers have recognized Kurien’s contributions, from Jawaharlal Nehru who inaugurated the first dairy “factory”, to Lal Bahadur Shastri who made Kurien chairman of the National Dairy Development Board for his “extraordinary and dynamic leadership”, to Manmohan Singh who described him as an icon of India’s cooperative movement and the dairy industry. In 1989, when Dr Kurien was awarded the World Food Prize, its founder Dr Norman Borlaug called him “one of the world’s great agricultural leaders of this century.”

We are all proud of the dairy legacy Dr Kurien has left us. But we’re equally proud of the brand behind that legacy: Amul, which comes from the Sanskrit word amulya, meaning invaluable. Amul was at the heart of the milk movement, being sold in pouches, UHT packs and as solid infant milk food. However, to cater to a largely vegetarian nation that literally drinks milk, Amul expanded to offer products such as cheese, paneer, yoghurt, ice cream and shrikhand. But the product that has caught the fancy of the nation is Amul butter.

Perhaps the brand is so popular because of its mascot, the loveable, wide-eyed girl in polka-dots who introduced us to “utterly butterly Amul” in 1967. Since then, she has appeared on hoardings across the nation posing as a cinema actress (Madhuri Dixit for example), politician, cricketer, villager, artist, wrestler or just herself, and making tongue-in-cheek observations on subjects of topical interest. The nation waits with bated breath for the hoarding to change and reveal what the sassy girl chooses as the next target of her wit (revisit this ad campaign at http://www.amul.com/m/amul-hits).

Compulsive Clickers

“We’re visiting a museum this evening,” my Korean colleague announced grandly during a recent meeting in Seoul.

“What kind of museum?” I asked, excited at the prospect of perhaps seeing ancient Korean relics.

“That’s a surprise,” she said.

Aha! I thought, we’re going to the National Museum of Korea, known for national treasures like the Pensive Bodhisattva statue and the Gyeongcheonsa Ten-Story Pagoda.

Therefore my disappointment was acute when we entered a building filled entirely with gruesome objects: drawings on the floor, portraits with parts jutting out in an unseemly manner and sculptures in grotesque postures. It is called the Trick Eye Museum, the trick being to place yourself in close juxtaposition to each object and have a picture taken by your companion and then reciprocate the favour by taking their picture. These pictures will capture you doing odd things like picking coins being poured on to the floor by a character in a picture; standing on top of a huge can of Coke; interacting with an animal protruding from the wall; and eating food being offered by some idiot in a portrait. I had myself photographed in a couple of silly situations but on the whole, the Trick Museum left me feeling tricked.

Grouse to Glee at the Olympics

In a previous column I had written about how the English are using the 2012 Olympics to practise their three favourite sports: complaining, expecting the worst and cursing the authorities. However, the Games proceeded smoothly, bookended by charming opening and closing ceremonies; security was competent; the weather held up by London standards (meaning no more than a few hours of rain each day); and commuters never found it easier to get to work. But most important, Great Britain won medals. And Britons have suddenly switched from “despondency to delight”, according to George Cohen of The New York Times. The Economist contrasts the pre-Olympics pessimism about “bungling bureaucracy; national humiliation (and) rain” changing to elation as “the country crescendoed, like a table of diners singing ‘happy birthday’ in a crowded restaurant”. And in the Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway writes that her earlier pessimism about the Olympics “was the biggest pile of hogwash I’ve ever written” and she wants to “retract every whiny, ill-judged, scaremongering word of it”.

I wondered about my English friend Henry Smith, the die-hard prophet of gloom, who had whinged to me two weeks ago about how the Olympics was making life miserable for the commuter (as “transport is in shambles: subway plans are an utter chaos and the bus services are in absolute disarray”), the small businessman (who could be “prosecuted and fined for using the word ‘Olympics’”) and the hapless construction job-seeker (because “construction jobs were taken up by Lithuanians, Romanians and Czechs”). I called him to find out if he was also singing a different tune.

“Hi Henry,” I said, “How were the Olympics?”

“Great! Superb!” he cried. “Couldn’t be better!” he added to drive the point home.

The Olympic English Grouse

I recently learnt that the three most popular sports in the United Kingdom are football, rugby and tennis.  My first feeling was resentment to see that cricket was missing. This is the country that introduced us to the game and watched us make it a national obsession. How would you feel if the person who introduced you to smoking and watched you climb to 20 cigarettes a day gave up the habit himself?

Then I read that these were the three most popular sports that Brits view, not play. For example, 46% watch football but only 10% play it. 18% watch tennis; only 3% play it. Resentment gave way to curiosity: what sports do Brits actually participate in?

A week later I found the answer in an article by Toby Melville in the New York Times. The top three sports that Brits participate in are: “complaining, expecting the worst and cursing the authorities”. When asked what they feel about the Olympics, Mr Melville reported that Brits “gave answers that included bitter laughter; the words ‘fiasco’, ‘disaster’ and ‘police state’; and detailed explanations of how they usually get to work, how that is no longer possible and how very unhappy that makes them.”

My English friend Henry Smith always whinges about the weather: I thought it was because it’s always raining or drizzling in London when I speak to him. But on reading Mr Melville’s article, I remembered meeting Henry once on a bright, sunny April day; the sky was clear, the air was crisp and cool and, even in the heart of the metropolis, we could hear the chirping of birds.

“Hi Henry!” I cried, “Glorious day, isn’t it?”

“It is sunny now, I suppose,” he admitted with a scowl, “but the forecast for tomorrow is thunderstorms in the afternoon. And this is after three rotten days of rain last week! On Tuesday, I was trying to…”

Squinting in the afternoon sun, he described the inconveniences caused by last week’s wet weather.

Growing old gracefully, surreptitiously and very slowly

I have a simple objective: to grow old gracefully, surreptitiously and, most important, very slowly. And I might achieve it if I did not have to fill out application forms or talk to people.

Unfortunately I have to do both, regularly. I fill an application form of some form every week. It’s needed for everything nowadays: to buy air tickets; to open bank accounts; to close bank accounts; to purchase insurance; to rent cars; to join loyalty programs and even to ask questions on some snooty websites. The forms may differ in size, colour and font size, but they are identical in one respect: they want to know my age.

Before the internet era, revealing one’s age on a form was less demeaning. Printed forms had age brackets so one could hide within a comfortable range like “35-49 years” without getting into intimate details. But today’s electronic forms want you to select your exact year of birth from a drop-down menu that starts with the current year (to ensure infants can enrol) and goes down one painful year at a time. I find I have to scroll down several pages before finding my birth-year and often there isn’t much room to scroll downwards after that. Such drop-down menus are patently biased towards youth. A friend of mine suggests that they should reverse the list by starting with 1880 and going downwards till the current year so that maturity is respected, while youth does the scrolling. However, while this will mean we scroll down less, it will make us stand out because we have to scroll down less. Like transferring a heavy burden from your left hand to your right, it will merely reposition the problem without solving it.

A Filmy Rescue of Cricket

I belong to a group of middle-aged, slightly-spherical Indian men that plays an enthusiastic and clumsy game of tennis every weekend. We were relaxing at the court-side after an energetic session a few weeks ago, when a fellow player announced in a voice reeking with smugness: “Sorry, Folks, I can’t play next week. I’m off to Australia to watch the game.”

“Wow!” I said, “When are you going to Melbourne?”

“The Melbourne game is over, ass. I’m going to Perth tomorrow for the third test in the four-test series.”

“There’s another game going on in Melbourne,” I said, “It’s called tennis. It’s the game we just finished playing. But of course it’s only a Grand Slam event, one of the four biggest tennis tournaments of the year. That’s nothing compared to an India-Australia cricket test.”

Sarcasm about the magnificence of cricket slides past a die-hard cricket enthusiast like ice cubes on a marble floor.

“Exactly!” he said, “Unfortunately I’ll only catch the last two days of the test.”