Food Sense- I Have None!

Ice Cream

This post revolves around ice creams and tea. Long time back when I was a Ph.D student at Kanpur, I went out for dinner with a visiting faculty from Sweden, one of the few people whom I consider a thorough gentleman. He, I think, was fond of food. One has to marvel how he survived on the mess food for a year on campus. And he is one person who beat me at every single TT game I played with him. On top of that my feeling is, it is because of his generosity I could make 14-15 points with him, if he wished he could thrash me under 10 always. But then I am digressing.

So, that night at dinner, the food was over and we were ordering desserts. We decided to order ice creams, he was very sure he wanted to eat Kesar Pista (an Indian flavor) and I vaguely ordered vanilla. Some discussion about our choices occurred and I remarked, "I am really quite indifferent to food." A little later we were eating our ice creams and I told him, "Mine tastes good." And the gentleman that he was, he said "Because you are eating mine." I must have gobbled at least a quarter if it by then (the waiter served it wrong!) but we exchanged the ice creams and I had to finish the bland vanilla one. I told him, "See, I am that indifferent to food." This incident is almost a decade old, the time when I didn't need to watch the number of ice creams I ate in a week or even in a day.

I was reminded of this incident because last week I was drinking 'black coffee' and I was telling someone that it is not good, there is too much coffee in it. And I was told, "Well, it is not coffee, it is tea."

Hmm, a decade later I am as bad, still not able to differentiate between tea and coffee (but only black) but I am sure I would know a vanilla ice cream now, or better still I will not order a vanilla ice cream anymore!

Club Mahindra- Table Tennis Tales

Table Tennis Table- Picture from Kiruba's Blog

It all started with an email from Arun Nair of Club Mahindra. He asked if I would be interested in visiting Coorg on their expense? Can I ever resist such trips? The only catch in my mind was the flight from Delhi to Bangalore, but he agreed to take care of that too. Now what more could I ask!

While planning the trip, Arun and I talked on the phone sometimes. He mentioned that Kiruba was the person who suggested my name. I of course knew of his blog but I was not sure how he knew about mine. Anyway, I hopped over and saw the picture of TT table on his blog. So, I wrote a few lines to him, thanking him for including me on this trip and asked if I should carry my TT bat on the trip? He replied quite enthusiastically and said we could definitely try it out.

Kiruba told me during the bus journey (Bangalore to Coorg) itself that no matter what we would play TT once we reached and I should not say I am too tired, etc. Sudhir and Amogha also wanted to play. The three of them played singles with me and to cut a long story short I will quote them about what they said afterwards-

This is what Sudhir wrote to me in an email-

Am also working on my T.T game, so the next time we meet - you should expect a much tougher match :)

And this is what Sudhir wrote on his blog-

It was quite clear that she had primarily 2 great interests, Travel and T.T. The latter of which she was so menacing in, that soon enough but for the wall, she had noone to play with.

Amogha told me this while leaving and I am paraphrasing-

You say you can play with your own bat! Next time I will practice, and come with my own band baja, my cheer girls and what not and then let us see what happens!

While I was playing with Kiruba, the ball went quite far away on my side and he offered me to bring it. I said, "No I am used to it. I play daily with my colleagues and they offer me no concessions, in fact they play quite aggressively and I often beat them!" After the game he said, "I perfectly well understand how your colleagues feel."

OK we were playing games of 21 and they all managed single digit scores, though over 5 :)

And did I say we bullied Arun into getting the TT hall open after 9.00 and they were sport enough to comply!