Double-Edged Deliberations

I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink for the 27th time that month.  There it was.  Not many had noticed it.  Yet, it was unmistakable.  My heart stupidly pounded with needless elation.  'Shave it off', said the devil on my left shoulder, 'you can use your dad's razor, you is a big boy now'.  'Don't', said the angel on my right, 'that would be wrong, and besides, if you shave it off, how would you flaunt your new upper-lipholstery to your friends?'  I sighed and reached for my father's Wilkinson Sword double blade cartridge razor.  My peripheral vision confirmed that I was alone.  With a trembling grip, I touched the cool blade to the skin below my nose.  I had seen my father do it twice a day for as long as I could remember, so I was pretty sure I knew the technique.  I closed my eyes.  With the feeling that I was about to commit a major familial misdemeanor, I applied the first shaving stroke of my life.  

That evening in the winter of 1996, I got a proper dressing-down from my father for using his razor; everyone had noticed the fresh laceration on my suddenly light-toned upper lip.  That same evening in the winter of 1996, I was also sent to the neighborhood provision store with ₹12 to buy my own Wilkinson Sword double blade cartridge razor.  It was a double rite of passage for me entering the coveted state of adulthood, although I had pretty much forced my way into it by committing the above crime.

For all the exhilaration and head rush I had experienced at the time of my first shave, my facial hair pruning journey so far has ended up being a bromidic story, one of retrogradation of sorts, with the exception of some embarrassing periods of my life when I was inexplicably convinced that a mustache or a goatee was appropriate.  On the whole I can confidently say that my adult life hitherto has seen a greater percentage of days spent with an unshaven Neanderthal visage than those with a clean shaven well-bred look.  This percentage has ballooned specifically in the last year or so due to the lockdown/work-from-home situation, the only justifiable reasons for shaving being the occasional visits to the office and Facebook Live concerts every once in a while.  

And the reason I say that my shaving journey has been a story of retrogradation is that while the rest of the shaving world has been busy upgrading their equipment to include fancy shaving foams, gels, and cartridges with more and more blades (cartridges with up to 6 blades are available these days), I have downgraded myself to using shaving soap in a mug, a faux badger shaving brush, and an old fashioned single blade safety razor; you know the heavy kind made entirely out of metal, the kind that you have probably seen your grandfather shave his whiskers with, the kind that you could salvage blades from to sharpen your pencils.  I do have an economical case for this choice though.  A lifestyle relying on old fashioned blades is certainly a lot cheaper than the conventional multi-blade cartridge based way of life.  For example, a 100 pack of Astra blades cost me a mere $8 on Amazon and will last me all of 4 years (@ 2 blade changes per month) as opposed to $30 for 15 pack of Gillette Mach 3 cartridges that usually last a mere 15 months (@1 cartridge change per month); yielding a staggering 91.667% savings rate!  

Based on this technologically devolving trend, don't be surprised if by the time I am ready to dip into my 401k for retirement, I downgrade myself to the super old-fashioned straight blade razor; you know the kind an Indian barber would apply to your neck as Altaf Raja unapologetically sang on Vividh Bharati's FM station on the transistor radio behind you.  After all, this humble उस्तरा uses only one half of a blade at a time, the economics of which would allow me to save at an astonishing rate of 95.833% relative to conventional cartridges!  Unless of course I fall prey to social pressure to develop some sort of midlife crisis, begin donning leather pants, and start riding a Harley cross-country while sporting a long grey beard.  

Book Reviews - Sapiens and Fast Food Nation

Although I used to read a lot as a teenager, I grew up a persnickety reader.  I would almost exclusively read only fiction, and I stuck to the typical mystery books symptomatic of my adolescence.  Sure, I read some Wodehouse here and R.K. Narayan there, but my brain essentially binged on the Hardy Boyses and Hercule Piorots.  I am not talking these books down, mind you.  These are some of the greatest novels written.  Even in adulthood, my go to books have all been fiction; Wodehouse, Ayn Rand, Robin Cook, John Grisham etc.  It has taken me a lot of time and effort to branch out to non-fiction.  I have been spending the last few weeks trying to find my niche in the non-fiction macrocosm.  After suffering through some agonizingly dry financial guidance and self help type of books, I finally found two non-fiction books that hit the spot for me - 

The first book, "Sapiens" (ISBN 9780062316097), written in 2011, is an incredible account of the egregiousness of our species, Homo Sapiens, or the member species 'Sapiens' of the genus 'Homo'.  Author Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, strikes a chord right off the bat by impressing upon the reader that various species belonging to the genus 'Homo' (which Harari collectively calls 'Humans' ) have existed for about 2.4 million years and that our current species 'Sapiens' have existed for only 150,000 years, a mere 6% of the total historical timeline of humankind.  The book compartmentalizes this timeline into a series 'Revolutions', namely, the 'Cognitive Revolution' that began 70,000 years ago marking the beginnings of ingenuity of thought we associate with humans today, the 'Agricultural Revolution' that began 11,000 years ago when humans started moving away from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming, the 'Scientific Revolution' that began 500 years ago, the 'Industrial Revolution' that began 250 years ago, the 'Information Revolution' that began 50 years ago, and the current 'Biotechnological Revolution'.  Although Harari sounds a bit presumptuous when he says the current revolution will lead to the annihilation of humans by bioengineered 'post-humans', he does embed a wealth of thought provoking narrative as part of the discussion of each revolution.  For instance, how the 'imagined order' of religion, money, laws, human rights, government etc. invented by sapiens enables us to live in harmony and how the same 'imagined order' acts as the impediment to this very harmony, how this order organizing our lives exists only in our imagination by living only in the material world and is yet inter-subjective and shapes our desires, how agriculture was essentially a 'Faustian bargain between humans and grains' meaning that 'we did not domesticate wheat, it domesticated us', and how the fundamental structure of our emotions and desires has remained the same over billions of years; '...today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah...', leading to the significant proportion of the world's population constantly crave sugar and fat, the sine qua non for today's obesity epidemic.  As part of the timeline, Harari also addresses pivotal aspects like the development of language, the evolution of polytheistic and monotheistic religions (although I felt he could have addressed Hinduism a little better), the evolution of money, the proliferation of empires, the maturation of trade and capitalism, etc.  An arresting read for sure.

The second book "Fast Food Nation" (ISBN 9780060838584), written by American investigative journalist Eric Schlosser is a polemic against the American (and now global) fast food industry.  Extremely compelling and at times disturbing, the book is an attempt at addressing the different pieces of the surprisingly complex puzzle that produces a typical fast food meal.  As I understand it, this book was the first of its kind, so while it is by no means a comprehensive look at the fast food industry, it is a great start.  The book starts off with almost biographical accounts of some of the pioneers of this industry viz. Carl N. Karcher of Carl's Jr, Richard and Maurice McDonald and Ray Kroc of McDonald's.  Schlosser also discusses the complicated relationship between Ray Kroc and Walt Disney, and the role Disney played in developing the ominous marketing strategy of advertising to kids to maximize profits, a method that ultimately became the name of the game in the fast food industry.  Schlosser estimated that Americans would have spent shockingly more than $110 billion in 2000 as against $6 billion in 1970 (I have not researched on what the actual figure was in 2000 or what the figure is in the current year), the economics of which have lead to scarcity of fresh food but an overabundance of chemical-laden unhealthy food.  Schlosser calls this the 'McDonaldization' of the planet.  The book addresses topics like the economics of franchising, meatpacking and manufacturing practices, and the pyramidal structure of the business behind fast food (containing a very interesting account of J. R. Simplot, the potato baron).  Schlosser talks about why a McDonald's fry tastes so good and how chemical components contribute to this.  In a true documentary style, Schlosser chronicles some heart wrenching accounts of the lives of ranchers, workers in the meatpacking industry, and the animals that are slaughtered.  A lot of pages are spent critiquing the meatpacking and slaughtering practices.  A particularly gut wrenching section is where the author describes a visit to a slaughter house.  Beyond all the blood and gore he describes, what really impacted me was the way he portrays how cattle are ushered into the facility in a single file line, each animal wondering where it is being transported to next, only to get zapped by a stunbolt gun prior to getting slaughtered.  Schlosser also addresses the rise of E coli and ties it to the centralization of the meatpacking and slaughtering industry.  Since the book was written back in 2001, and was essentially an enlargement of a Rolling Stone article by Schlosser in 1999, one wouldn't be imprudent to assume that the information contained might be a bit dated.  Surely things aren't so bad anymore, right?  Or have they become worse?

Pi Day

You could wrap a string around the edge of your favorite coffee mug, measure the length of the string (C), measure the diameter of your coffee mug (d), and use the equation π = C/d.  Alternately, you could use Ramanujan's equation 1/π = {(√8)/9801} Σ_(n=0)^(∞) [{(4n)!/(n!)^4}{(26390n + 1103)/396^4n}].  Your neighborhood pizza joint couldn't care less.  Come the fourteenth of March, they do however strangely want their clientele to feign solidarity with Archimedes of Syracuse for exactly one day and use that as an excuse to pad their arteries with grease from cheesy pies at discounted rates.  After all, it is Pi Day!  It's a harmless seasonal business strategy, they say, notwithstanding the part sophistry played to the ego of their patrons to make them feel like intellectual blue blood.  And once the cortisol juices start flowing, the customer loses the ability to reason rationally.  He falls for the glossy ads that manifest in his mailbox exactly one day earlier, replete with photographs of a cheesy slice breaking away from a pie with an ample cheese pull, conveniently letting slip from memory another Pie Day (note the e after the i, National Pie Day is Jan 23 started by Charlie Papazian) just a couple months ago when he had fallen a similar glossy ad depicting a sweeter cousin from the pie family.  After all, in today's climate of dietary indiscretion, a "just because" indulgence (as the American Pie Council puts it) is simply a click away.  As easy as pie!

If you would like to truly experience Pi Day, visit https://www.piday.org/.  It is a pretty fun website and seems to have been built primarily for school kids.  Check out the "What is Pi" and "Celebrate Pi" tabs.  Also check out the "Calculators" tab, which not only has pi related calculators but also an annuity calculator and compound interest calculator.  Those who find more joy in edible pies may visit http://www.piecouncil.org/.

A knife that doesn’t cut it

It's a Friday afternoon.  A subliminal hankering to binge indiscriminately on chaat lies in wait of sundown.  The Friday sundown.  The sundown that is indicative of the culmination of an entire week of dietary policing.  The monomaniacal mind rapidly checks off the items needed for the assuagement of this idée fixe.  Puris - check.  Soaked and frozen white peas - check.  Tamarind-date chutney - check.  Mint chutney - check.  Onions, cilantro, barik sev - check, check, and check.  As much as the mind prognosticates the ambrosial explosion of different flavors and textures in the mouth, it also looks forward to the assembly process with equal, or possibly more, eagerness.  It can almost see the chef's knife effortlessly slicing through a crisp onion revealing perfectly concentric layers of successive pink gradations, hear the 400 bpm cadence effected by the swift chopping action breaking down the onion to a fine brunoise, smell the fresh and citrusy aroma of the cilantro as the knife slices through the stems, imagine the almost silent sizzle arising from the succulent ingredients perfectly soaking only the uppermost layer of crunchy half broken puris while keeping everything below still crunchy, and visualize the Euclidean space that is the final dish with delicious fractals of all taste groups that would ultimately manifest with an equal balance in every spoonful.  The said mind can almost hear a 100 piece symphony orchestra playing Strauss’ Blue Danube, or Voleti garu's Surutti raga alapana with MS Gopalakrishnan on the violin, depending on taste.  However, there is one little thing that is holds back the the proprietor of the said mind from forging ahead with the above plan de action.

A ridiculously blunt chef's knife!

Over the course of one's life, one picks up sundry skills from a random miscellany of vocations.  These seemingly unrelated skills then uncannily come in handy at indiscriminate times, sometimes in isolation and sometimes in combinations, to not only serve to fulfil micro goals of life, but also provide some sort of gratification to one's mind.  One such curious skill I picked up during my days of employment at a sandwich joint was vegetable cutting.  Although not really needed on the job, the kindly African American cook in the back kitchen schooled me in many knife cuts for vegetables.  In a matter of weeks, she ensured that I had gained considerable mastery over the julienne, allumette, brunoise, dice, slice, and mince cuts, albeit without knowing the names!  She also did not fail to emphasize the prerequisite of having a well sharpened chef’s knife that could deliver these cuts with finesse and with minimal pressure.  The knife’s weight, not the cutter’s strength, must make the cut, she would say.

Fifteen years later, cutting vegetables remains one of my chief de-stressers.  There is something about the exhilaration derived from a perfect cut through a crisp bell pepper, when coupled with the knowledge that vegetable cutting has a greater contribution quotient toward running a household than other mainstream de-stressers such as watching television or scrolling down aimlessly on your Facebook feed, that greatly helps decompress guilt-free.  However, I have to sheepishly admit that I never spent any time understanding the art of sharpening knives.  Cutting vegetables with a blunt knife is akin to whittling on a stick with a paring knife and can ironically deliver more cuts to your finger than to the vegetable.

It’s that Friday afternoon again.  As the mind vacillates between abandoning the chaat plan and subjecting my fingers to a life on the (blunt) edge, the bell rings.  An Amazon package has been delivered.  And lo and behold, there lies nestled inside a mantle of styrofoam - a knife sharpener!