Saturday, January 27, 2007

event update

i actually went kayaking today! more on that in the next post...

All good things reduce in size...

Today, after quite a long time, I had the opportunity to eat Pringles. For the unfamiliar, Pringles is a brand of potato chips which tastes absolutely out of the world...And horror of horrors! The diameter ( if you could call it that , because the chip is oval in shape and slightly curved) has actually reduced since I had eaten it last, which was quite some time ago... The texture of the chip had also changed, being much smoother when compared to the earlier one which had quite a rough terrain ... Of the two, the sadder issue is that the size has reduced... why do all my favourite stuff reduce in size?

What other stuff has had this fate condemned to it , you may ask...quite a few actually! take the once quintessential part of a middle class chennaite's life , the Saravana Bhavan idli or dosa for example.. Im sure all chennaites ( and people all around the world where HSB branches are) will agree with me... The size of these items has been steadily decreasing while the price has been increasing ... even counting for India's present inflation rate... it became completely unacceptable to me to eat a dosa which was a few years back, priced at 10 Rs to eat it at 18 now! and when your dosa actually arrives, its about the size of the average chapatti!

Snickers seem to have less nuts than they used to, Lays chips DEFINITELY don't have as many chips in their 'nitrogen sealed' packs as they used to.. now 75% of the pack is nitrogen.. they probably should put 'FREE! 30% more nitrogen inside!' on it.

tsk tsk.. I actually thought of writing to Pringles , to the email id that is usually given on the boxes that say " we have manufactured this product to the best of standards... if you have any complaints please email us at... " , and further proceeded to humor my thought to see how far it would go. I actually thought how nice it would be if my email actually made it to eh top brass and they decided to increase the size of the chip and it would be one of those 'wow that's cool' stories that come on the news :P ! But then the cruelty of reality brought me back on ground, an with another sigh, I popped a small stack of pringles into my mouth, and walked away munching..


PS / Disclaimer: All names of products in this post/blog are purely imaginative and any similarity whatsoever with any product on the market is purely coincidental.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Some people told me that extremes of emotion make you want to write... Extremes of anger, sadness, joy, desperation, boredom...


Today was a day of extremes... It started off on a sour note when I went to the lab an hour late... Because I didn't wake up earlier...I started to work again after two days of taking a break ... Because none of my experiments were working and I thought taking some time off might help me think better.. or maybe i just needed to freak out...

so today i went thro with a few changes to my existing protocol after some vigorous searching through the internet...full of hope, optimism and positivity.... but God had other plans for me in store... the experiment failed again... and it has been close to a month... i was fed up.. lost.. desperate.. dejected and downtrodden...

i racked my brains hard to think what the problem could be.. And came up with zilch.. And so as the day dragged on.. Coffee break.. chit chat... lunch.. browse aimlessly... Coffee break again.. browse more aimlessly ( dont ask me what the difference between aimless and more aimless is.. that probably is the most aimless question....)... And then it so happened that Vignesh, my senior had booked tickets for a cultural program by the students of NUS... Frankly, given my state of mind, i wasnt quite looking forward to it...

So thats the bad half of the day...The better half will come tomorrow / in my next post , which hopefully should be sometime soon.. Its 1 AM here and my biological clock hasn't seen this time for quite a while..

adios