My life, my loves

Disclaimer: I am responsible for any mental trauma caused by the reading of this crap but there's jack you can do about it. I would blame it squarely on the late hour and the film The Big Lebowski, which I watched just prior to writing this.

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Apart from the noble purpose of seeking enlightenment and such, my existence is driven my love of 3 things: toys, thrills and travel and my greatest passion of all: FOOD!

Let’s save the 3T’s for some other time and go straight to the good part. Food… of all the millions of tastes and flavors, let me just bring up 3. Why 3? Because, 3 is a prime number…not just any prime number but the first lucky prime. Three is symbolic… the holy trinity (the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva…well, also Christianity’s Father, Son and Holy Spirit), the 3 fundamental particles, the 3 primary colors, ancient Rome’s triumvirate, the 3 musketeers…wait a bloody second…what the heck am I blathering about? Digressions are sometimes unavoidable, but this one is just too much. Am I digressing again by talking about a digression? Wow! (Pure genius, I know!).

Well, where was I? Ah, the 3 flavors: chocolate, coffee and chillies. What is it with me and groups of three items starting with the same letter of the alphabet? I don’t know. There I go blathering off again.

Chocolate…mmm…chocolate…it exists, therefore I do. I love chocolate for the chocolate and not for the sugar, i.e. the more bitter, the better. Legend has it that the Aztecs and Mayans, who discovered chocolate (the greatest contribution to humanity…ever!), reserved it for their royalty (I’d say those folk had it better than the Greek gods with their ambrosia!) and commoners found stealing chocolate were put to the death. As much as I abhor violence, between me and my chocolate is a bad place to be.

Coffee. Being a full-blooded south Indian, it is only natural that I love coffee. However, I go beyond quintessential cup of filter coffee and embrace coffee in all shapes and forms save for that weird stuff they brew in the Philippines from cat droppings. This is not one of my quirky jokes… I kid you not. I do have one criterion – coffee is meant to be strong. Not strong as in strong enough for you to smell the caffeine but strong as in strong enough for a cup to wake up a sleeping elephant. Bring on the caffeine. (All godless decaf drinkers will have their livers ‘roasted’ in hell!* - roasted, coffee…get it?) I divide my days in two – BC (before coffee) (that’s when I’m pretty much wasted or irritable (read homicidal) or both) and AC (after coffee).

Chillies…yes, chillies. Why chillies, you might ask. Ears turning a slight shade of red, sweat beading on the brow, watery eyes, a drippy nose, lips on fire, lack of any sensation whatsoever on the tongue… those who know these sensations well, know the pleasure that follows it. It’s true…chillies cause the body to release endorphins. An acquired taste most definitely, but one with more depth than most realize. Those who get past the initial burn recognize the many shades of heat… from the tongue tip burn of green chillies to the sharp point of heat traveling through one’s alimentary canal characteristic of habaneros.

These are more than just my favorite tastes…they are my passions. Let me put it this way. If I were to be faced with imminent death, I imagine memories of my life would come flooding (cliché, I know). But not all those memories would be visual, they would be disconnected emotions, smells…TASTES - and my 3C’s would definitely top the list.

PS. I guess this is what happens when I try to write something in a lighter vein.

PPS. * - I stole that one from the ever-so-funny former dis-Information Minister of Iraq, Mohammed Saeed al Sahaf. He said, “God will roast the stomachs of infidels in hell at the hands of Iraqis.” Here’s the part I don’t get. Does he mean to say that all Iraqis by default go to hell? Or is/was there an elite group of Iraqis handpicked by Saddam to work the ‘hell detail’?