Parallel Thoughts too

The lady approached him, as he sat in deep contemplation. He was woken up from his reverie, a bit startled. As he gathered his wits, the lady goes ” Hi, I am in the seat three rows behind, but would you be kind enough to exchange them with me? That way me and my daughter could sit together.”

“Why of course, I can do that”, says he and starts towards his bag.

He shifts behind and settles down finally. He is tired and wonders if a small nap would do him good. As that thought drift past his mind, the vision from the cafe enters the coach. The train starts to move. He slides a bit lower in the seat, stretching a bit.

She proceeds to her to find a young girl and from the looks of it her mother. She had the aisle seat. She sits and the train gathers momentum. Mildly annoyed at her intuition failing her, she looks sideways in hope of finding him. The row is occupied by three kids, two boys and a girl, mischief written all over them.

He is now in that inter-state between sleep and consciousness. The train has now gathered considerable momentum. He is gently woken up the conductor, for authenticating his ride. He fishes the ticket out of the pocket, hands it over, takes it back and promptly slides back in to his thoughts. Hovering around sleep, he recollects the times he had spent traveling and living out of a suitcase.

She hands over her ticket to the conductor. For some reason that eluded her like a kite, cut and caught in a draft, she fidgeted with her hair. Her nails were short and her fingers were slender. She looks about but does not find him. Slightly panicked, she wonders whether she was utterly wrong? But he did enter the coach, affirms her self, as she peruses the immediate past. As a worry line creases her forehead, she delves in to her hand bag and fishes out her phone, checking for any messages. There are none. No succour, no distraction for her thoughts. Anger creeps. Is he here or not?

He was unable to sleep. Thoughts kept lashing him back to reality. Sleep eluded him. He still struck by her beauty. Perhaps he should have tried to have a conversation with her. He wondered what her name would be. And that startled him. Never was he one to idly speculate. What would she be? An artist? Performance artist? Laughing to himself, he chastised himself for having such notions. Intuition was never his friend. He had got almost everything wrong.

Not one to delve upon a subject which was out of his control, he extracts a book from his bag and starts to read. He looks out at the window to see a rolling landscape. The mountains on the horizon look enigmatic. He turns his attention back to the book. Midway through the third page, he falls asleep.

Parallel thoughts

She saw him first.  It was just a glance. He was pulling his luggage that looked as if it was waiting to explode. There was no strain though on his part. He pulled at it with great vigour. She wondered about who he was and what he did. She stirred her cup of coffee, to which she had previously added half a cube of sugar. She looked askance, to find that he was approaching the cafe coffee shop she was in. Her heart seemed to skip a beat and then the pounding went up a notch. Subconsciously she pushed her hair behind the ears. Perhaps also straightened up a bit. Her demeanor changed and she was a tad bit annoyed to be behaving in such a nubile way.

While she was gathering her thoughts, he had the entered the cafe and sat with an audible thud at the counter. He did not say a word. She was sitting to his right, at table, for two, by the window. He was busy fumbling with something in his pocket when her phone rang.

She cursed the damn phone for ringing at the most inappropriate moment. He turned to look at where the sound was emanating from. He looked straight at her.

She said, “Hi”.

He turned on the counter stool to look at her. She was a vision. He was enthralled.

But then she proceeded to talk in to the phone. Her eyes moved away from him and looked out. It began to rain. The scene was set. Rain provided the background music. The pitter-patter of rain drops falling hard and fast outside permeated the cafe. It was an intrusion. That sound.

His coffee arrived. It was hot and the vapor flowed up and out from the cup. He fidgeted with the spoon before dropping two sugar cubes in to the cup. He wondered who she was and for whom she waiting. He felt an instant anger that someone would make her wait. Was it that guy she was waiting for calling to say that he was late? Or was it something else? He sipped at the coffee which was excellent. He proceeded to look at the clock when his phone trilled.

She finished her call only to find him answer the trilling of his phone. The ring tone was not musical. It sounded like something from the bakelite era of land line phones. She was intrigued. On second thought, she was downright interested to know who he was. Her mind wandered on about thoughts of him serving in the army.

And suddenly everything went quiet. The rain subsided as if somebody had turned off a gigantic tap. A dog ran past her window having taken shelter at the awning. A vehicle screeched to a stop to avoid running over the dog. Thus began a flurry of activity outside.

He finished his phone call. His coffee was still left. He glanced at his watch. Time was up. He had to catch the train. Leaving behind a large bill, enough to cover two coffees, he lugged out.

She was done with her coffee and proceeded to exit the cafe. Her train was about to depart. She was just behind him and they entered the station at the same time. Now, her heart beat was definitely up and not from the brisk walk.They were both heading to the same train. Her coach loomed up ahead and he was still headed to it.

He squeezed in his over sized bag and sat down. He let out an audible sigh. Her image was still imprinted in his mind.

She waited just outside the coach. All she had was her handbag. She bit her lip, looked at the watch. Three minutes to departure. Should she go now? An intuition said that he was very much going to be sitting next to her. A smile spread across her face. She waited a bit longer to board.

A little patience.

Hey y’all. Been a while. I know. I know. Too many things happened at the same time. Personal stuff. Don’t ask.

Nevertheless, sugar is still a bad thing to guzzle down in large quantities. I recommend you visit http://www.summertomato.com by Darya Pino. She is a scientist and a blogger. Wonderful site with loads of information.

till then,

adios.

A quick update.

I am still gathering data about what we are consuming as food. Thinking of doing a survey at places where I see quite a bit of younger crowd that congregates. While sample size might be small and the survey in no certain way could be construed as scientific, I still feel inclined to do it. More soon.

Cheerio!

What is Sugar?

Do you know the answer? I did not. I only had a vague idea. The first thought was, well sweet. Next was glucose, sucrose and fructose. After that nothing. Let us look much further into the subject, shall we?

According to wikipedia –

Sugar is an informal term for class of edible crystalline substances, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose.^[1] They have characteristically a sweet flavor. In food, sugar almost exclusively refers to sucrose, which primarily comes from sugar cane and sugar beet.

According to wikipedia Brazil is the highest producer and INDIA is highest consumer! Holy smokes! We are the largest consumer. Mind boggling.

World Health Organization, Technical report series 916, Diet, defines the term “free sugars” as -

The term ‘‘free sugars’’ refers to all monosaccharides and disaccharides added to foods by the manufacturer, cook or consumer, plus sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juices.

According to the same report, higher intake of free sugars threaten the nutrient quality of diets by providing significant energy without specific nutrients.

Monosaccharides are also called simple sugars and the most important being glucose. The crystalline white stuff that we consume daily, is Sucrose. It comprises of 12 atoms of carbon, 22 atoms of hydrogen and 11 atoms of oxygen – C11 H22 O6.

Are you still with me? Let us set aside the technical mumbo-jumbo. On a regular basis, we consume sugar, which is sucrose. Sucrose is a combination of fructose and glucose.

In the next post, we will gander a while into present day food system, what we consume and how much sugar is present in it. Till then, cheers.

Ref : Wikipedia, exploratorium.edu and WHO report.

Energy and health

For a while, I have been contemplating on what we consume, for the sheer pleasure and for nutrition. In the last few years I have noticed a tendency to gravitate towards easy food. Some might call it fast food. TV dinner, microwave meal. You name it. Its all there. Not fresh. But processed and packaged.

This category of food seems to have become the staple diet of most people. Especially the young. I seem them guzzling down gallons of soda, gobbling down fried stuff loaded with monosodium glutamate.

In the 50s, and 60s (in continental USA), a trip down to the local burger joint, say Mcdonalds, was considered a treat. It did not constitute the primary source of food and thereby nutrients for our body.

In a series of 4 posts, I plan to highlight the effects of what we consume and how it affects our health. Processed food, if it can be called food, is another major contributor to our debilitating health. And of course not many of us get any kind of physical activity at all.

Comments are very welcome and I hope we can learn from each other for a healthy, sustainable living.

Cheers!

Javashri

This is a long awaited post. I joined twitter on a whim. Neglected it for quite a bit. My updates were extremely sporadic. My handle, when I joined up, was “singlemaltshri” due to my great appreciation of single malts! This was very short lived, like three months perhaps? I changed it to “rustedshri”. Now this handle was different. First, I had a company called Rusted Sphere. The inspiration for the name came from a band – Rusted Root. They are folk rock band and perhaps you would have heard one of their songs which was used in Ice Age – part 1. The song was “Send me on my way”.

During this phase, I started to use update my status more and also interact with other “tweeps”. Post november attacks in Bombay, during which time my usage had peaked, most people knew me was RustedShri.

I changed my handle to “javashri” in February. Quite a lot of people were surprised and wanted to know why! This is that long awaited post. So here goes.

My career started as a programmer, writing C code ( which I still do). Fascination with Java grew sometime during 1995. Sun was still talking about this spanking new platform independent programming language. That was indeed exciting. Now the origin of the language in itself very well documented.

Anyways, I moved to a large Danish company and my specialty was a Java programmer. This was the time when, Cafe Coffee Day started their flagship store on Brigade road, Bangalore and one hour of browsing cost Rs. 160.

Well at work, we had a high speed leased line. I needed to download the latest build and java.sun.com wanted me to register. I did not think much, though my previous ids were pretty juvenile. I registered as “javashri”. Thus began my journey with that handle. I have used that to register in other sites. My “research” in to coffee and my consumption increased substantially after, not before.

So, that is a brief history behind the handle. Nothing very exciting. As, Looney Tunes say, That’s All Folks!