You and me Locked up in a Room

This is how a famous Bollywood song goes:

Hum tum ek kamre mein bandh ho, aur chaabi kho jaay!

Such an ambiguous song it is. You and Me locked up in a room – which one? Bedroom or bathroom or the Kitchen or the store room? and the Keys are lost, what keys? You have keys for rooms? is it the House Key or is it your Car keys? or is it even your key! With so much ambiguity in the song, the Guy must be an idiot to expect romance from the girl and the girl must be “idioter” to romance him anyway!

But this is not the point of the post, this is just a pointless introduction of this pointless post.

People have weird experiences when they shop in weird Indian stores in US. Let me assure you that the Indian stores in India are a 100 times better than the Indian stores in US.

This particular Indian store is more like a Godown or a storage room. Seriously, I have stopped going there as I had a few bad experiences with Billing and Customer service. There are other Indian stores here that are not weird, packed with nice friendly people and a neat place. Coming back to this one weird store, it was sometime last year when I went there for regular weekend Grocery. My job as a husband was simple, drive the family to the store, hold the then 1.5 years old daughter in the arms and just randomly move around the store.

I like random, you can be at your will. You can have a sense of freedom. But in this particular store, there is only a few ways of being random. There are only 3 aisles with each aisle enough for just one half of a skinny person to move freely and that half is his lateral section and not his cross section. On the extreme left there will be a lot of varieties of bags of Rice and wheat stacked like a mountain. You will see people desperately trying to pull out a bag of rice, without impacting the balance of the bags placed one over the other. If you walk through this aisle, there are chances of bags accidentally falling on you. Perhaps they should have a sign that says “Falling Bags” like the ones you will find on the freeways through mountains that says “Falling Rocks”.

The walkways between the aisles are not left alone. They are stacked with more stuff that can be sold. It is a marketing technique. People don’t look down, so what happens is they very likely stumble upon the stuff on the floor and fall flat. Then all they have to do was see a nice shiny glowing Potato and go “Wow!” and then grab a pound or two of it. Trust me, it really works, even though you will see more people falling than walking, it is more business this way than having less stuff stacked around.

The best way to stock up the merchandise is during the peak hours of people shopping. How else you will see the store’s stock person goes around the aisle arranging and stacking up new merchandise. It is like the Old Hutch cellphone ad – wherever you go we follow. This guy is just like that, he will be there whereever you go, he is omnipresent. He can shout at the top of his pitch to the cashier when the cashier asks him the price of a certain item. He is usually a Middle aged Indian Uncle who is a partner in that store business, with neatly Dabur amla oiled hair, a belly with the shirt unable to cover it fully.

Sometimes it can be a check mate with all the stuff lying around. As I was trying to work my way randomly through these flow restricted aisles, I entered an aisle to look for some ready to eat stuff. It was a trap, I couldn’t get out of it one way as the stock person had left a bunch of items there blocking the way. He then walks through me literally and begins stocking things in the freezer on my other side. So you see now I am in a check mate position and I can’t move out of the aisle until he finishes stocking, and I am left there reading the expired expiry dates of freshly stacked Ready to eat items.

My worst nightmare came true. The stock person sang the famous ambiguous Bollywood song -

“Hum tum ek kamre mein bandh ho, aur chaabi kho jaay!”

This time, it wasn’t ambiguous. It was straight on. I started sweating profusely and was about to faint but my love for my 1.5 year old daughter held me up on my feet and reminded me that there is still room for hope in life. I looked around and I saw there was not even room for placing one bag of chips around me with all the things lying around, where would I keep hope. Besides, the Stock man was insisting on singing the next lines of the song.

I was saved by a ray of hope. Some guy walked from the side where he was stocking in the freezer and said “Ekskuse me” in a thick North Indian Accent. That’s it, the gap was made. It was enough for me to sneak through and get to the other side, like the South Indians who sneak through in the Tirumala Tirupathi queue for Dharshan of the deity.

Perhaps Clint Eastwood should make a movie with this “Escape from Indian Store”.

PS: “Dimple Kapadia” is in the tag list, just to increase the marketing value of this post.

Worries

Everyone worries about something at some point. It is just that “the some point”, is very different for Men and Women. Men and Women worry about things at different points and believe me, that makes all the difference. Here are a few case studies:

CASE 1: THE LAUNDRY

A Woman buys a Churidhar. She starts worrying about how to wash it right from the time she buys it. The dress is beautifully worked, but the only problem is it can only be hand washed. So, she is worried that she should remember not to machine wash it.

Now, the Man of the house always likes to impress the Woman for various reasons. So he rolls up his sleeves and tries to do the laundry himself, in the pretext of providing a surprise help. But the problem is he does a machine wash. Until this point, the man is not worried.

Man: “Honey, I’ve washed all your clothes!”

Woman: “Oh, that’s so sweet! wait … what about that churidhar?”

Man: “That too Honey, and you are very welcome”

Woman: “Oh my God, you can’t machine wash it!”

Here is when the Man starts worrying and prays to every god in every religion, to save that one churidhar from the evil effects of the washing machine.

CASE 2: THE COOKING

A Woman knows how to cook, because she is worried about what to cook even before she enters the kitchen. All your trips to Grocery stores to buy vegetables and stuff is because a Woman is worried 7 days in advance, as to what needs to be cooked the whole of next week. She doesn’t write that down, but she keeps them in mind. (Why else you think you are sent to the Grocery store? To stuff the Kitchen shelves and fridge for decoration?)

So if she says she is going to cook “Venn Pongal” and “Sambar” today, it means that she has already worried about buying all of its ingredients, 7 days in advance. This is exactly why you are having that dish today. Not because of some magic.

A Man on the other hand, only thinks that he knows how to cook, but he is far from it. The problem is the Man assumes that there are house elves that take care of putting the items in Kitchen shelves and fridge. So, he sets out to surprise his wife by trying to make a simple dish – Pasta. He promptly lets the water to boil and as soon as it reaches slightly above boiling point (noted from excessive smokey water vapour from the container) he begins looking for the pasta.

This is when the Man starts worrying. Too bad, he needs to leave it to luck to find the pasta and even if he finds the pasta, it is usually the case that there is no pasta sauce in the house 99% of the time. The legend has it that this is how Man learnt to make boiling water.

CASE 3: CLEANING

A Woman is worried about disorderliness, atleast to an extent. She is worried if the house will get clumsy and look bad to the guests. So she indulges herself in keeping things clean, decorating the home and basically tries to keep everything in order, even before it gets dirty and clumsy.

A Man just lives. He starts using things, takes the remote from the table and puts it in the couch, keeps the coffee mug without the coaster on the table, eats as he roams around the house and spilling stuff, runs cables from one point to another to setup wireless connection, and much more. After doing all that, he starts worrying that the house is now in disorder and it needs to be cleaned and sorted out.

This is when the Woman of the house, hands over the Vacuum cleaner to the Man.

CASE 4: LOOKS

Woman are worried about how they look, even before they look or any one else looks at them. I have one word for you – Make up. Ok, that was 2 words, but the point is, the worry about the look starts from the beginning.

Man walks to the closet and fetches the nearest available clothing to wear for the day. It will be too much effort to reach for the good shirt in the corner of the closet. He may or may not comb standing in front of the mirror, but he is hardly worried, how the clothes look on him.

A Colleague walks by the Man and says “Hmm… Interesting shirt for the pants!”.

That’s it, the Man is completely worried now. Not because the shirt makes him look like a clown, but because it is usually difficult to pass a witty reply for such comments.

CASE 5: BLOGGING

A Woman thinks a 1000 times before she blogs about a topic. What if people think I am stupid? What if people don’t like it? What if I get flamed?

A Man publishes the post. He then worries about a 1000 things, but then he just updates the post with those 1000 things as tags for the post “I-may-be-stupid”, “People-may-not-like-it”, “Inflammable”.

The Indian man who went to buy Chicken but came down with a lot more

I had already mentioned sometime back that doing Grocery Shopping is an Ordeal here in the US.

On a usual work day evening, I had to face the ordeal for the millionth time again albeit due to my own fault. I suddenly had a craving to eat Hyderabadi Chicken Biryani and so I wanted to hit the store to get some chicken for next day. I was all dressed up (which is wearing a T-shirt that would beg washing and a Shorts that would wish it was worn inside out) and checked with my wife if I should get 0.5 or 1 pound of Chicken, as I was the only chicken-eat-tarian in the family.

Wife: “0.5 would be too less, you won’t get much for making the 65. 1 pound will be too much, you won’t be able to eat it fully. 0.75 pounds! How about that?”

And so w(if)e decided that 0.75 pounds is the right quantity of chicken I would need, if I should minimize the wastage, never mind that the Grocery store itself wastes tons of meat every single day that could not be sold.

The Hitchhiker’s guide to Grocery states that, If you know what you are going to buy, you should never turn back and check to see if anything else is needed. Because 100% of the time, you will be asked to get more. As I am someone who hasn’t read the guide (heck, the guide doesn’t even exist!), I ended up going for the door knob and making a courteous turn around and asked the dreaded question.

Me: “Do you need anything else?”

I could have simply opened the door and walked away merrily with just 1 item to buy, but no I had to be Mr. Nice Guy and turn around and ask. Little did I realize when I asked that question, that I was in for a big list of things to buy.

Wife: “Oh sure, we certainly need milk. I forgot about that!”

It is like Dominoes. You just tip one and the rest of it follows through and falls down. Now, being in US buying milk is not as easy as going to the nearby bakery and getting a half litre Aavin milk packet. It is much more confusing than you think.

Me: “Which ones?”

Wife: “Hmm… half gallon of 1% milk, 1 gallon Fat free and 1 gallon Whole milk” (Good luck trying to understand how the word “Milk” became such a long sentence).

Me: “Ok, I will get them.” and I thought I would be spared and that’s all I might have to get, but no. We are now going full fledged.

Wife: “Let me see the fridge!”

That is when I realized I would need a paper to write down the list, because my brain cannot hold more than 2 grocery item at a time. I already had 4 (Chicken and 3 kinds of Milk). I quickly grabbed an old receipt lying on the kitchen countertop and tried to look for a pen. After fighting for 2 minutes with the daugther over the only pen I could spot, which she was using to scribble notes on from her previous experiment, I was ready to take down the rest of the list.

Wife: “We need Apples. 4 or 5.”

Me: “4 or 5? Please give me one number and no, we can’t do 4.5″

Wife: “Ok 5 it is. You and your obsession with accurate numbers. We will also need a bananas. Just get a bunch whatever number you feel like and the usual Bread that we buy”

Choosing a bread itself is a big task. There are thousands of varieties to choose from. In India, it is easy to buy a packet of bread, you just walk to the nearby bakery and ask for a bread packet. That’s it your 2 minute bread shopping is done. But here, you have to choose if you need white or wheat or honey wheat or whole grain or multi grain or thin sliced or anorexic sliced and the list goes on. Thankfully, we just like the Sara lee Honey wheat and just stick to it. So no big deal there beyond your first few attempts of trying to choose and like one from the variety. We have already attained nirvana in the kind of bread that we need.

Wife: “And finally a Cabbage. Make sure it is white in color, it shouldn’t be green”

For a moment before that I thought the list was over with the bread. One more to the list didn’t hurt and so I added cabbage to the list.

As I was ready to shop in the store, working my shopping cart through the multitude of aisles, I realized that Cellphones are necessary evils. I have a separate post on themselves that I am waiting to post. I say this because, with an already confused mindset I get a phone call from home adding 2 more items to the list.

Wife: “Can you get 1 bunch of Cilantro and a bunch of Green onion? I forgot about them”

Me: “What? wait I don’t have a pen, I can’t write it down, I can’t remember the other ones, what did I buy, what else I need to buy, my god my brain is short circuiting, I see sparks.”

Wife: “You need those for your Hyderabadi Biryani tomorrow!”

Me: “Oh ok, let me just get it then, hang on!”

Butchers can easily upsell you.

Me: “0.75 pounds of Boneless skinless chicken thighs please!”

Butcher: “Sure!” and puts it on the scale “Oh! it comes to 0.84 pounds”

Me: “Take a little bit out please!”

Butcher: “oh, it is 0.64 now! that will be too far away from 0.75, you want more or you want less?”

Me: “Got me, I want more. Let’s do 0.84 pounds”

And so my friends, an average ordinary Indian Man who was quenching to eat a Hyderabadi Chicken Biryani one day, set on a mission to buy 0.75 pounds of Chicken but came back with a big list of items – 0.84 pounds of Chicken, 3 kinds of Milk, 5 Apples, 6 Bananas, 1 Bread packet, 1 Cilantro bunch, 1 Cabbage and 1 Green Onions bunch.

This post should have really been title “The Ordeals of Grocery Shopping – Part II” but I thought it would be cool to make the title rhyme like a movie and hence I titled it “The Indian man who went to buy Chicken but came down with a lot more”. Anyone wants to guess the real movie name that sounds like this title?

Edit: And the winner for the Movie guessing contest is Nikhil. The answer is “The Englishman who went up the hill, but came down a mountain”, starring Hugh Grant.

Price of Rice

I wrote this article a couple of months back on my old blog and even though some of the information is little outdated, it is relevant. I was tempted to repost this article after reading Nita’s Society’s badge of honour in which she talks about being friendly to the environment as one factor. When it comes to caring about environment talking about food is as vital as talking about energy consumption. So here it is:

A few years back sometime around early 2005, the price of a 20 pound (about 9Kg) rice bag costed us from $10 to $12. Three years later the price of rice in this region has jumped almost a 100% and it now costs us $20 to $24 for the same amount of rice. I remember spending around 15 to 20 rupees per KG of rice in India in 2004 and I don’t know how much it costs now. There have been various theories going on in the media and I would like to summarize what I know over here:

1. Our quench for Fuel never subsides. We consume oil and now we want ethanol. How do we make Ethanol? Using Corn. So as the demand goes up for ethanol, farmers cultivate Corn instead of wheat and more corn goes towards fuel for cars than as food to humans. With lowered Wheat production (due to the cultivable lands going towards corn production), people substitute wheat with Rice causing a demand for Rice. This is the case in the US and Europe. I had already talked about Ethanol in one of my previous posts.

2. People of developing countries like India, China want better nourishment and hence the demand for good food (read Rice as staple food for most of Asia) has increased. Well, we can’t really blame them for wanting good food, can we? I have an interesting link on this topic

3. Hoarding. That’s right, merchants still buy Rice in bulk and store them in a secret godown which no one knows or can see, which is called Hoarding. They sell it when the demand goes up. Hoarding is a huge issue especially in India. I do not know about other countries but the Govt of India has promised to raid and capture all these hoarders. Another Govt. promise that no one knows what happens to it after a few months of promise. It simply gets replaced by other problems and people forget about it.

These are the 3 main things that any media conglomerate will state. None of the above points can really be controlled by an Individual like us. If you are not a Corn farmer, how can you stop the production of Ethanol? If you do not live in the so called Developing countries, how can you prevent a demand surge? and don’t even think of getting into a shady Godown and fighting our dear “Hoarder Merchant”, That can only happen in a Movie.

There is one important thing that not many talk about – Food Wastage. I only read about them in some blogs. In our normal life, we tend to waste food. I have done that myself before. We buy a lot of Grocery, use as much as we can and trash the rest. Sometimes, we trash a lot, we forget we bought those and we never use it and just trash it when it expires. Is this something we can quit doing? You are damn right. This is what we need to do as an Individual. It is an undeniable fact that we waste food and now is the time for us to look back and see what we bought and what we use.

- During your next Grocery purchase, buy only the things that you used. Be efficient and never allow food to go wasted. By wasting less, we can have a huge impact on the price of food. You will be sending a direct signal to the economy that you are consuming less, there by the demand is less. You do not need to starve to lower the demand, but definitely avoiding food wastage will help it a lot. If you go to a restaurant, make sure you pack the left overs and eat them the next day. Go ahead give it a try. You will also save some money in the process.

- Avoid Impulse buying. When you go to grocery stores especially in developed countries, it is not uncommon that items are placed in strategic positions to increase sales and we know how much of an ordeal it is to buy Groceries here. We tend to have a lot of stuff in our cart that we didn’t intend to buy at all and this remains one of the main causes of food wastage. Stick to the list and you will save money/avoid food wastage.

- Avoid Panic Buying. Just because a Rice bag now costs you $20 and you expect it to go up, don’t go hunting around stores and stock up on rice. You are causing the conditions to get worse by creating artificially pent up demand. Sam’s club (A big wholesale grocery store in US) has done the right thing by rationing 4 bags of Basmati rice per customer. But we are geniuses, so we still stock up on rice by visiting multiple Sam’s clubs in that area. If you want the situation to improve, please stop carting out all the 4 bags from all of your local Sam’s club. Hey, if you buy so many bags there are chances of infestation, if you do not store the Rice bags in proper storage place.

- Consume lesser rice and substitute with Fruits and Vegetables. Well, one good reason to go healthy. Everyone knows too much of rice is not good for the body, so why not take this as a chance and replace one serving of your rice with a fresh salad (veggies or fruit). You will bring down the demand for rice and increase the demand for other vegetables, but overall it should work out fine.

If you have any thoughts yourself, Please leave it in the Comments section. Good ideas are always welcome.

The Ordeals of Grocery Shopping

In those days Grocery shopping was pretty easy. It usually involved only a few steps:

- Mom makes a list of things to buy in a sheet of paper.

- You take the shopping bag and walk to the store with the list of things and some money.

- You struggle a few minutes to get Balu, the Shopkeeper’s attention. This is the only tough part and requires some skill of Tamil Yelling and hand waving and saying “Anne”(Brother).

- You hand over the paper to Balu.

- Balu begins packing your list for you, while you count the stars during the day, look at the nearby wall poster of the latest Rajinikanth movie, try to put bracket for the girl next door who is standing near you.

- Balu completes and you walk away with the things.

The whole process is completely seamless, as in you don’t seem to have the need to bother about anything. Life was so simple in those days. It can also be pictorially represented as follows:

The figure is not to scale, but who cares really. It is just 2 boxes and arrows.

But now, to shop for Groceries requires Super Human powers. The steps are similar but they are laborious:

- Wife makes a list of things to buy in a sheet of paper/you bring wife with you.

- Drive the cart with kid on the front seat in a huge supermarket as big as a foot ball field.

- Look for signs to find where you get Coconut milk and end up in the Pets Aisle.

- Look for Icecream and end up in Greeting cards Aisle.

- Lose track of where your wife is and go up and down the aisles looking for her, while kid is getting tired of simply sitting in the cart and trying to do the Minority Report Stunt.

- Deciding on which brand of items to buy.

- Read Ingredients and Reject items with High Fructose Corn Syrup as per Dr. Oz’s advice from the Oprah Winfrey Show.

- Count calories from Fat and Sugar on the label using complex abstract algebra with differential equations and transformed with Lagrange’s theorem.

- check expiry dates on each item.

- Mathematically and logically compute which cashier’s lane will move you faster.

- Ransack your wallet to decide which credit/debit card to use.

The list goes on.

There are so many things that the super market carry, you just wish that there was a Google Grocery. A web based tool for your mobile phone to show you the shortest distance to the item you are looking for in Aisle 7, or you just feed the list of things and Google Grocery gives you the shortest distance map of all the things. Of course, there will be ads of nearby and related items and you shouldn’t be distracted by that. But one such thing like Google Grocery is needed for us dear shoppers. If Google doesn’t come up with one then we will all have to evolve Supervision, which will help us track down the items that we need through our high powered Supervision Eyes, like the Terminator Robot.

But until then a common man like us will have to suffer the ordeal of grocery shopping and here is how i will pictorially represent it:

Legend:

Blue Rectangular Strips – Aisles of racks with grocery items

Yellow Rectangular Strips – Cashier Lines

Yellow Star – You are Here (Duh!)

Green Diamond – You need to be here.

Red circle with a strike – You don’t need to be here but you will end up being all over here more than once.

Little blue square – 100x Magnified view of your house.

The grocery store will be gigantically huge that your house will be just a dot when compared to the store’s size. In order for your naked eye to catch the glimpse of your house a 100x magnifying glass provides the necessary enlargement for your viewing pleasure. This makes the diagram not to scale.

Good luck with your next grocery shopping. If you have more fun facts and ideas about this please feel free to drop in your comments.

The Minority Report Stunt

When Tom Cruise gets accused for a future murder that he is yet to do, he has no other choice but to run. In the movie Minority Report Tom says “Everybody Runs” and takes off into the futuristic Lexus car on the multidirectional freeway. But when his car gets taken over by the system, he just gets out of it and jumps on to another. This is one of the best action sequences I have ever seen because even though Speilberg works so much to show how a futuristic highway looks like, in the end it is completely the physical effort of the protagonist to perform the action in the chase.

As I was doing my weekend grocery shopping the other day, I was walking down the aisles trying find the things in my list. My daughter was enjoying the shopping cart ride but quite soon she seemed to be getting bored. She begged for attention and invited some gimmicks out of me as I continued my futile search of Vegetable Stock.

She then slowly pulled her legs out of the front opening and crouched on the seat holding the bar in front. From the crouch position she lifted herself up still holding the bar and gave a shout. I looked at her and politely asked her to sit down and continued glancing the racks for vegetable stock. She then released her hold on the bar and just as I started pushing the cart, she did a slight jump and reached me and grabbed me by her arms around my neck.

That was one hell of a Minority Report Stunt.