I always want to diet...

See, I came to college today, not packing my lunch, though my cook was churning out a nice aroma of a typical coconut based Kerala curry and associated paraphernalia for a good lunch for my mom and son when he comes home from school.

I thought, since I had a nice sumptuous breakfast late, and since I had the liberty to login slightly late for work, I would postpone lunch to teatime when am back home from work.

Right now, in my staff room, there is this tempting aroma of a typical South Indian meal arranged for the practical exam examiners.

How can I resist going there and having a bite of nice fried pappad? And when my taste-buds gets simulated, how can I resist my brain directing my legs to walk up to the canteen and just have a peek at what they have?

Just a peek...that's the intention. But reaching there, my stomach would have the biological craving to just have a "shmaaaaal bite" of a poori-saagu or some rice-bath.


May be I can try re-directing my legs to a nearby canteen where they sell samosas, kurkure, fruit juice. :-)

Hmmm... no amount of will-power works for me. Born a foodie, meant to be foodie, I guess.

That is until my body gets the inherited diseases such as diabetes, high cholesterol, blood pressure etc that is part and parcel of my family tree.



If you notice, I have always wanted to diet. It’s only my brain, my taste buds and my family tree that prevent me from having an "Oh so slim" appearance! :-)

--- Confessions from an out and out foodie who strongly believes in "Live to Eat" rather than “Eat to Live"!

Couch "Dum Aloos" the next species?

Why such a "crazy" title, huh?

Being a foodie I sometimes visualize life as a variety of dishes into which all of us are put as ingredients making the overall experience sometimes hot, sweet, tear-jerking, cold etc. Each dish I feel, educates us of the various flavours of life and their intensities.

Dum Aloo is an Indian curry where we select baby potatoes to cook the dish. Are we bringing up a generation of "Couch Baby Potatoes”?

I see today's children preferring to watch Pogo, Disney, Cartoon Network etc instead of going out to play.

They also take great pleasure in putting in their computers the game DVDs of cricket, football or logging on to the internet and playing cards, chess and whatever else they fancy, instead of "actually playing" these games with their fellow kids.

Would these children miss out the other flavours of life and savour only curries like Dum Aloo? Is that a good sign?

Would these Dum Aloo ingredients around the world slowly learn how to extract chemicals from the air as food for themselves thus making the stomach, intestine etc vestigial organs? Would they learn to transport themselves from place to place using their brains? Would they use telepathy for communication thus making utopian the notions of body language?


Are we seeing the evolution of the next species on planet earth? From "Homo-Sapiens" to "Homo-Craniums" as the only well-developed organs of their body will be the brain!!

Generation Gap?

Yes, that much used phrase to shake your head when you just can't tune in to the thought frequency of the person trying to make you understand his or her viewpoint!

Recently a group of students and me were trying to figure out how to revive a forgotten dead dinosaur of my college department magazine given free of charge to students.

We hardly had a week to get it churned out and we were at level zero with no contributions of articles for the magazine, students busy with exams and other academic work and the biggest hurdle--no money to get the magazine printed on paper!

I was taken aback by the energy level of my students in whose sphere of thought optimism reigns high and things happen in a jiffy!

From my perspective the whole stuff was studded with hurdles and I could sense them chuckling at my extreme pessimism!

That's when it started sinking in that the decade's gap between the times they and me were born on this planet earth is the classic example of this thought frequency mis-match called 'Generation Gap'. It seemed just yesterday that I was cribbing to my friends over a packet of popcorn at a movie theatre about me unable to comprehend my parent's notions on some aspects!

Now I seem to be part of "that strange generation"!?
This set me wondering, is the older generation really weird? If so, what makes them weird? If not, why this age old concept of Generation Gap?

My answer came in the end-result of the above said magazine. The students were right. They could get the ball rolling and managed to get the contributions from their classmates, juniors and seniors. Their productivity levels were so high that by spending just a few hours at the computer they could get all the stuff on-line.

But, I was right too. My "experience" told me that solving the financial puzzle was the biggest hurdle. So we couldn’t get the stuff printed on paper as planned.

I got the answer to my puzzle!

Generation gap is inevitable due the experience gained by the older generation because of the larger number of years spend interacting with different forms of the human species.

Probably, we appear "weird" when we stick to our "Iam older, therefore wiser, and always right" stance.

I feel its up to us to widen or shorten the "gap" between generations. We could share our experiences with generation-next, so they are not caught unawares, but what is stopping us from accepting that they are much quicker, much more tech-savvy, have much higher levels of concentration that we can ever hope to have/sustain?

Yes, Let our body age, let our mind stay young!