10 signs that you should run away from a restaurant

Have you ever entered a new restaurant in two minds? Whether to risk it and have food there. Or run away at the slightest hint... Here are 10 signs that should force you to do the latter -

1. Valet parking guys are fighting amongst themselves to take your car; for all you know, they might have to wait many days for the next customer
   
2. There is a longer queue to the restroom than to the restaurant
3. The number of waiters is greater than the number of people eating in the restaurant; also - a few of them are having their own joke after seeing you come in while the others are busy fetching parcels from the opposite restaurant
   
4. The perfume smell is awesome; however it is not emanating from the non-bathed rich folks but from the room freshener used to remove the food stink
   
5. The ambience is confusing and shady - the walls have too many paintings to cover the cracks, or there are too many coochie-cooing couples with hardly any food in their plates, or the customers look like goondas from a Rajini movie
6. The phone is continuously ringing but the answerer asks for the person to come the next day, to collect his money
   
7. Instead of music, you can hear a soft prayer, from those eating the food
   
8. You are confused if the bowl that went past was a soup bowl or a finger bowl
9. The menu serves both Idli and Chinese Noodles
10. People are congregating in the center of the table, emptying their wallets, watches and chains to pay the bill

Anything more, add in the comments section!

10 reasons why eating in a buffet is similar to playing cricket

Yes. A pretty vague comparison. But if you look at it in-depth, you will realize that going for a team buffet is very similar to playing a cricket match. And here’s why…

	In cricket...	In a buffet…
1	The team-split between batsmen, bowlers and all-rounders	The split is between grass-eating veggies and non-veggies who only eat something that walks, crawls, swims or flies on earth. The fence-sitters are the ones who hog on both well enough.
2	The Abdomen Guard	Your guard is a paper towel – used around the same area to ensure that you are not mistaken for having an awry bathroom break
3	Taking stance to observe the field	Doing a quick survey of what food is present in the buffet so you can plan accordingly
4	The cautious opening to not lose your wicket	Ensuring you don’t eat only the starters and fill your stomach
5	Running the quick singles but saving energy with boundaries	Taking quick trips to take any good item twice but stocking up on two big plates so you don’t have to leave your seat often
6	Placing in the gaps for maximum benefit	Ensuring the correct distribution of food in the stomach so it can take in more
7	The bonus free hit	The complimentary mock-tail that is thrown in sometimes
8	The slog overs before the innings-end	The dessert round where you go for the kill because the buffet is going to end
9	The commentators. And the general public	The been-there-done-that folks who have already visited the restaurant passing expert comments on the food! And those ala-carte folks who are sitting around you passing comments on your eating capacity.
10	The umpire who finally gives you out	The waiter who gives you the bad news in the form of the bill

Any more similarities, please ensure you update them in the comments section...

Arbit Thoughts - Why would you ever change caterers...

Today, we had the umpteenth change in our caterer for breakfast. I am sure this happens in almost all companies regularly. There are several conditions under which this usually happens, some of which include - (a)The Facilities Dept. decides to do some extra work (b) Jobless employees crib to death on your bulletin board (mind you, they always crib about all food, or rather, about everything under the sun) (c) >5 cockroaches were found on the same day in the food. Almost always, it takes off from points (a) or (b).

Just as Rachel responds to Ross in F.R.I.E.N.D.S, "No uterus, No opinion", people should probably be told, "No cook, No talk". After all, mediocrity in catering is the established norm. From the caterer's side, you can well imagine their predicament. If they increase the quality of their food, that puts them in direct fight with their industry counterparts who will boycott them. They would also be made fun of, that they’d rather be in the restaurant business, not in the catering business, if they want to do cook really food. If they reduce the quality of the food to abysmal levels, cribs reach all time highs. So they have to maintain a standard in mediocrity perennially.

If the people in your org crib about an existing caterer the next time, the best strategy to follow is to implement the revolving caterer policy. This is how it works – you have one test caterer every week for a period of 4 – 5 weeks, after which the employees can themselves choose the best one. The first day always starts off with cribs about the speed of service. The second day is about the lack of variety in items. The third day is about the general quality of food. The 4th day - a cockroach would have been found in the sambhar. And the 5th day of the week, well no one actually cares as they eat out! So by the time the caterer’s test period is over, he is more or less out of there. After 4 – 5 weeks of painful tries, people would just want to go back to the original caterer since he is a known devil. For once, too many cooks, do not spoil the broth!

Top 10 unwanted exercises when having food

Eating food is part of our daily life. However, there are various interruptions and physical activities that annoy us at different points in time while performing this important activity. The following list contains the top 10 pain points* in my list, and proposed mitigation strategies to overcome them...

1. When: During any buffet
   What: Standing in a line for food + Walking and eating + Sheepish grin to the server for second helping
   Mitigation: Wear a shirt with enough pockets for storage, so you can go hide the food and go home and conveniently have it in your plate
2. When: Washing your hands using a finger bowl
   What: Water is just not enough and you can't use it after 2 seconds once dirt mixes with it
   Mitigation: When no one is watching, pour drinking water on your hand into the finger bowl; In case of a Chinese restaurant, you can utilize warm Chinese tea as an alternate to ice cold water
3. When: Badly made 'bakshanam' (thats Tamil for oily snacks / sweets!)
   What: Chance of losing a few of your remaining teeth
   Mitigation: Utilize a road roller** that might be near your house / grinder inside house to have a liquefied / powdered snack
4. When: Eating curd / rasam rice from a banana leaf (in South Indian marriages)
   What: The buttermilk / rasam generally has a liking for flowing out of the leaf on to your lap
   Mitigation: Befriend the cook and get a small plate to have 'liquidy' items (also utilized by Maamis for stealing the extra payasam or sweet for their beloved sons)
5. When: When you are stuffed to the brim by your in-laws
   What: Showing you have not wasted too much food
   Mitigation: Disperse the wasted food across the entire plate / neighbour's plate (obviously, when they are not looking at it)
6. When: Separate coffee, milk and sugar, served in aircrafts and five star hotels
   What: Any mix of the above always ends in a crappy product to drink
   Mitigation: Have tea or better, alcohol!
   
7. When: Chapathi / Roti
   What: Tearing out a small piece, one after the other
   Mitigation: Tell spouse that it is very romantic if he / she does the tearing and feeds you (in Tamil, called 'ooti-vittifying')
   
8. When: Food is too hot
   What: The 'oof - oof' blowing to remove the vapors and the endless wait thereafter
   Mitigation: 1 minute in the freezer
9. When: Pizza with fork and knife
   What: That feeling of a wood-cutter working hard, with sweat all over.
   Mitigation: The hand of God!, rather use your own hands
   
10. When: Spreading hard jam or butter on bread
    What: You end up cutting the bread or breaking it rather than spreading the jam or butter
    Mitigation: Adopt the idli - chutney mode of taking a piece of idly and mixing it with chutney / sambhar and having, where bread = idly and jam / butter = chutney (fall back option for #7 above in case you are pained with that as well)
    

Any more, please add them in the comments section along with the mitigation strategy...

* All in jest, so don't take any comment personally against your region's food
** Adopted from Koundamani suggestion in the movie Yejaman (Tamil)

Long live paunches!

It is that time of the year when everyone makes resolutions. I did too. And one of my new-year resolutions was to do away with my paunch. But coming to think of it, I am seriously reconsidering this resolution. Paunches are so in! They are a sign of prosperity, of holistic and well-rounded development in all spheres of life.

Here are 10 reasons why I think they are a man’s best friend…

1. My paunch is the first thing that I see on waking up, without having to move a muscle. Lying down, you open your eyes and there it is - like a mountain behind which the sun rises. The last thing you probably see before you sleep is also the same paunch.
2. It makes traveling in crowded buses much easier. Standing on your two feet, you can do a circular movement like that of a pencil on a drawing compass. You clear away all the people who are cramming you for space. And thus, have all the place to yourself…
3. The paunch acts as a good sensing device since it goes to all places well before you yourself do. With time, you can understand its sensing power and evade those people that you may not want to meet.
4. Big paunches are generally accompanied by reasonably big rear sides as well. However, since the paunch greets people first, it takes away their focus completely. Jokes on your front are typically more appreciated than those behind your back! (pun intended)
5. You can stuff a lot of items into your paunch for meetings without people doubting that you have done so. That chips packet, that gaming device, the music player, the small chess-board etc. that you always wanted to carry into the meeting room to keep you occupied are well within your grasp. People cannot notice a 2” difference in a 48” waist. They can, on a 32” one.
6. It acts as an adjustable pillow for your wife. Olden-days romance involved the spouse lying down on the husband’s thigh and singing a song. New-age romance calls for the husband’s paunch to be the adjustable pillow for the wife to have a comforting nap.
7. When it gets too boring, the paunch acts as your complete gaming device. You can place small objects from spinning tops to marbles and coins and watch their Brownian motion by altering the contours of your paunch. If not guided well, some may come and hit you on your face. Others may go hit you on other parts below…
8. The paunch is a great percussion instrument for an orchestra. The bigger it is, the better the sounds that it emanates on tapping it at its various locations. There are some paunches that can generate even more variations than a ghatam or a tabla!
9. Mosquitoes get completely fooled. They think that they can attack you but the multiple layers of padding make it far tougher for them to penetrate through. In desperation, they typically fly away for leaner and greener pastures!
10. Last but not the least, if you are ever in a soup with the traffic police or the police, you can escape scot-free. They would consider you one of their kind. The paunch is the great unifying factor. So you can rest easy in life.

More instances where the paunch acts as a great friend for mankind are appreciated in the comments section of this post!

(Disclaimer: It may not be in the best interests of your health unfortunately :( )

A typical South Indian dinner at the in-laws place

Sunday evenings are typically reserved for visits to the in-laws place. My entry is treated like that of a king entering his mansion. As soon as I come in, I suddenly experience a never-before felt cool breeze in the peak summer of Chennai, courtesy a couple of ACs which get switched on when I set foot out of my own house!

Soon after arrival, the madam goes into the kitchen to talk to her mom while I start a conversation with dad-in-law on various topics including but not limited to health, wealth, career etc. Discussions typically veer towards what is going on currently on the TV channel that is presently being watched.

After sometime, tiny sounds (generally heard as “kada-muda”) from my stomach act as alarm bells to the in-laws. These are sounds of the type that are heard from the stomach of a person implicitly starving for a long time in anticipation of a feast; sounds that happen after the feast are reserved for later. A cup filled with three gulab jamuns comes flying at me like a tracer-bullet (word copyright expert commentator Mr. Ravi Shastri)

Thoughts of the word “diet” that had so eagerly arrived on my mind a couple of days back slowly start dissolving in the sugar syrup that surrounds the three large-sized gulab jamuns. Any word of refusal immediately raises eyebrows and low decibel conversations between mom-in-law and my madam asking whether hubby has developed sugar trouble. To ward off any such thoughts, the jamuns are gulped down the throat at the pace they came at. Here, some amount of caution needs to be exercised. If the speed of gulping down is too fast, more jamuns fill up the cup in no time. If it is too slow, frequent voices from inside the kitchen to finish off the sweet-dish interrupt your TV viewing.

Once the sweet dish is over and done with, the TV viewing typically continues for around 3.5 to 4 minutes (basically for the next set of items to get heated inside the kitchen). Then, there is a call for dinner. As I slowly tread towards the dining room, a large table awaits me and the madam. In the center of the table are three dishes that stare at me gleefully with ‘high cholesterol’ written all over them – urulai (potato) roast, fried pappads, and vethakozhambu (tough to explain – in short, a south Indian spicier dish similar to sambhar)

Nice shiny stainless-steel plates, resembling those carrying unlimited extra-jumbo meals in Saravana Bhavan, are placed in front of me. An additional sweet-dish (typically rava kesari or halwa) is served in line with the “start-with-a-sweet-dish” sentiment. Then lands a big mass of white rice: measures such as removing the plate away and use of force to hold up extra servings of rice are outright rejected. Typically, half the plate is filled with rice before you can realize what is happening. The other half is reserved for the aforementioned side-dishes.

A spoon with an extra large capacity to hold the dripping nei (ghee) gently passes over my plate. Within half a second, the white mass of rice is nicely soaked in the same ghee. Then land litres of vetha-kozhambu, and tons of urulai roast and fried pappads.

My History class in school would have ended sooner than the rice in my plate. Mammoth efforts to eat the food seem to all go to waste as I witness a never-ending supply of items in my plate. Desperate measures such as loosening my pant-belt and talking while eating (to let the ingested food digest) seem to just be desperate gimmicks without any success.

When finally I do manage to just about finish the rice on my plate, more rice, first with rasam and then with the customary curd / butter-milk (thayir-saadam) follow in equal quantities with even more side-dishes that literally seem to pop out of hidden corners in the kitchen. My concealing tactics are greatly tested here as I try hiding unfinished portions of the food under half-eaten pappads and potato chips. In parallel, I am constantly reminded of the weight I have lost over the last few weeks (the weighing machine always has a different opinion here) and how I should eat a lot more.

Eventually, after what seems like a patient Dravid inning, it is time to get up and wash my hands. It is not a good practice to meander on at the eating spot without washing one’s hands. But when the food is fully present uptil your throat and your pant belt is not the way it is supposed to be, you really do not have a choice. The 3 meter distance to the wash basin seems like that last mile for the completely exhausted marathon runner.

As I put in that last ditch effort to get up, there lands a plate of freshly sliced banganapalli mangoes. At this point, I cannot even open my mouth to talk, leave alone voice any denial. As the smooth and silky mango slices slowly but surely find their way through the food maze into my stomach, I more or less start thinking on when I am going to regain my capacity to talk and walk!

After the finger-bowl style washing process, I manage to get up, go and sit in front of the TV. As I try to muster up a smile and a nod of the head in response to every question, one can hear appreciation on how the son-in-law is such a nice silent guy. I very silently thank the food that is sitting right till my throat for the gentle remark.

According to our traditional Tamil culture, a glass of milk is essential to round off the day* (see footnote for explanation). At this point, you have totally lost all control of what gets into your system. The milk manages to find its way through the mouth of a half-conscious me. I have already started thinking on whether I would fit into my car door on the way back home and whether the car will be able to take the extra load. After the customary good night and the promise to come same time next week for an even better dinner with more items (like they do usually for next-week show announcements on TV), I walk in a trance towards my car, guided by the madam.

As soon as I get into the car with the madam, thoughts about the impending diet for the coming week to compensate for this food start afresh in my mind…

* - No references of any kind whatsoever exist