I am always amused at the way people react when I tell them that I had, at one point, worked for a winery. While one person wants to pull up a chair next to me with the intent of discussing the merits of Pinot Noir and Port into the next decade, another takes a few steps back in aversion.
When it comes to wine, people invariably fall under one of the two following categories. Those that
1. Love wine
2. are ignorant about the beverage but predisposed to hate it on principle
Wine connoisseurs, who lead this list, are an intimidating bunch. Trust me for I worked with a whole nest of them at one point in my life. If you can’t look fashionably drunk and be able to engage in an hour-long animated discussion of wine, food and cheese pairings in their company, you better pray for the ground to open up under your feet and spare you the embarrassment.
Don’t know whether Cheddar or Provolone cheese goes down well with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc? Unsure of the year the grapes were harvested after the first sip from a bottle of Chardonnay? Unable to decide if a chunk of Swiss dark chocolate or a box of sweet raspberries compliments a white Zinfandel better? Well, I am no magician but try this. Hold out your hand and introduce yourself - ‘Just arrived from the next Galaxy, name is Idiot.’ It might just get you out of a tight corner or two.
For every winatic (wine+lunatic, if you must know) that is out there, there is another one like me. We are the self-righteous moralists who consider any little human indulgence a step up in the path paved to Hell. So what if doctors insist that a glass of red wine a day keeps the heart pumping away? Who cares if wine has only one third of the alcohol content as a bottle of Bud? Big deal! To a conservative, logic is the first cousin to ignorance which is why the word ‘wine’ is only slightly below ‘blasphemy’ and ‘Tiger Woods’ on my no-no vocabulary list.
So why did I take up a job in a winery? Two reasons really! 1) The way I figured, how much sin can one commit crunching numbers, even in a winery? 2) How else can I see Lucy goofing around in a wooden vat stomping grapes?
Imagine my shock upon entering the first wine-making facility only to find big, giant stainless steel Vats with long winding tubes leading to rows of oak barrels as far as eyes could see! Where was the big wide wooden Vat in which women in bare feet were busily stomping the grapes? What kind of a set-up was this anyway and where the heck was Lucille Ball? Boo to industrialization! I was a heartbeat away from resigning that day.
But having decided to stay, I had no choice but to accept the benevolence of my employer 3 times a year - six bottles of prime wine each year at Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. I don't think my co-workers appreciated my sobbing hysterically each time a HR person walked into my cubicle with my seasonal gift. Obviously bursting out in tears while accepting a gift was not a common custom amongst them. But as the years rolled by, I did learn to show some appreciation. If my effort at peeling my lips wide enough to show at least six teeth as a show of appreciation was misconstrued as an allergic reaction to a Botox injection, I really couldn’t help it.
There is a bright side to this story. Staring at the rows of Chardonnay, Merlot and Zinfandel stacked in my garage one day, I realized that I didn’t have to buy a housewarming gift for at least another decade. An even curious observation was our new and improved relationship with our neighbors who apparently realized that Asians weren’t such bad neighbors after all.
-Meena Sankaran
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Do you ti-ting, chi-ching or di-ding?
Ti-ting, Ti-ting, Ti-ting.............
That was my husband playing with his Droid again. These days if it is not ‘Ti-ting’, then it is either ‘chi-ching’ or ‘di-ding’ around our house. Just between you and me, I like ‘chi-ching’ better than the others.
He had downloaded yet another application for his phone earlier today. And was every bit as enthralled as when he downloaded the other gazillion ones like the leveler app, the compass app and many more. How do I know? He was not being subtle by any calculation. His dimples had deepened considerably for you to miss it and I had to threaten ‘Quinoa’ for dinner before he would clip his phone to his shirt and go in for a shave.
This brand new app is nothing short of a miracle, I am told. With its help, you can use your phone to scan the bar code of any item and find out 1) where they are sold and 2) where you can go to buy it cheap. A tool that facilitates and encourages cheapness? What was the developer thinking? Dangling this in front of Asians is like dunking in a honey tub and standing in front of a bee-hive. Do they realize the serious repercussions this could have on this nation’s business landscape? I am willing to bet my gallbladder that Wal-Mart is, even as I write, planning a class action suit against Asians for loss of business and is naming this app developer as a co-defendant. Who could blame them? Really!
Coming back to ‘Ti-ting’, this morning I watched my husband walk around the house looking for items with a bar code to test his new, ingenious application. Seeing him step into the powder room, my curiosity was piqued. I followed just in time to see him frantically grab the tooth paste, mouthwash, lipstick, soap scum remover, scrub pads and a doormat to scan. Ti-ting, ti-ting, ti-ting, ti-ting, ti-ting and ti-ting. While I stood there watching him with my mouth hanging open in disbelief, he proudly declared the names of all the stores that carry them and their selling price.
I find myself in a dilemma. Should I sue the pants off these Droid application developers or would it be more prudent to have my husband checked into a reputed Droid rehab program? Heard of any decent programs for Droid addiction lately?
In the meantime, I concede that there is one advantage to owning a Droid. Ever since my husband brought this phone home, I have had to dim the lights around the house thereby saving huge on the electricity bill. Who needs lights when he is glowing bright enough to light up 10 Christmas trees like the one in front of Macy’s store in Union Square?
-Meena Sankaran
That was my husband playing with his Droid again. These days if it is not ‘Ti-ting’, then it is either ‘chi-ching’ or ‘di-ding’ around our house. Just between you and me, I like ‘chi-ching’ better than the others.
He had downloaded yet another application for his phone earlier today. And was every bit as enthralled as when he downloaded the other gazillion ones like the leveler app, the compass app and many more. How do I know? He was not being subtle by any calculation. His dimples had deepened considerably for you to miss it and I had to threaten ‘Quinoa’ for dinner before he would clip his phone to his shirt and go in for a shave.
This brand new app is nothing short of a miracle, I am told. With its help, you can use your phone to scan the bar code of any item and find out 1) where they are sold and 2) where you can go to buy it cheap. A tool that facilitates and encourages cheapness? What was the developer thinking? Dangling this in front of Asians is like dunking in a honey tub and standing in front of a bee-hive. Do they realize the serious repercussions this could have on this nation’s business landscape? I am willing to bet my gallbladder that Wal-Mart is, even as I write, planning a class action suit against Asians for loss of business and is naming this app developer as a co-defendant. Who could blame them? Really!
Coming back to ‘Ti-ting’, this morning I watched my husband walk around the house looking for items with a bar code to test his new, ingenious application. Seeing him step into the powder room, my curiosity was piqued. I followed just in time to see him frantically grab the tooth paste, mouthwash, lipstick, soap scum remover, scrub pads and a doormat to scan. Ti-ting, ti-ting, ti-ting, ti-ting, ti-ting and ti-ting. While I stood there watching him with my mouth hanging open in disbelief, he proudly declared the names of all the stores that carry them and their selling price.
I find myself in a dilemma. Should I sue the pants off these Droid application developers or would it be more prudent to have my husband checked into a reputed Droid rehab program? Heard of any decent programs for Droid addiction lately?
In the meantime, I concede that there is one advantage to owning a Droid. Ever since my husband brought this phone home, I have had to dim the lights around the house thereby saving huge on the electricity bill. Who needs lights when he is glowing bright enough to light up 10 Christmas trees like the one in front of Macy’s store in Union Square?
-Meena Sankaran
Thursday, March 25, 2010
How do you measure love? In grams, gallons or bytes?
If you believe in reincarnation, then you should know that my father is a reincarnation of the famous English poet and philosopher Thomas Gray. My sisters and I will swear on this for we were the only lucky ones privy to our dad’s profound philosophical insights.
As children, we grew up on quotations from Thomas Gray’s poem ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’. The following lines from this poem were discussed so extensively, so often that if I were to wake up from a coma with amnesia a few years from now, I will still recite them without missing a beat.
“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
Can you think of a better way to teach your children the futility of joining the maddening rat race called life? Dad enriched our childhoods further with acute philosophical observations like ‘Beauty is only skin deep’ every time he caught one of us standing in front of the mirror unashamedly admiring our own reflections, questions like ‘Were we born into this world with the comforts of a fan and a fridge?’ whenever we whined incessantly about the power outages and the unbearable heat of Chennai. It was only natural that we nicknamed him ‘Mr. Gray’.
Now the point of this whole big introduction is to show you that I come from very good erudite stock. Those who believe in the laws of genetics would naturally assume that I would be, at least a little bit, philosophically inclined.
If you had bet your house on that, all I can say is 'oops'. I am afraid you are about to join the ranks of the homeless. Just like weight loss, philosophy eludes me. But determined to thumb my nose at fate and get the hang of this profound thinking business, I had been picking my brain lately about something that I can think profoundly about. I never had this much trouble even when raising toddlers. After hours of exhaustive brain picking, I came up with a question that might convince you that I am my father’s daughter.
How do you measure love? In grams, gallons or bytes?
The commercial on TV that claims ‘some things are priceless but for everything else, there is Master Card’ is based on the assumption that love is not measurable. I can put a big hole in that theory and for this I have my kids to thank for.
Both my kids love me just as much as I love them. I know this because I can measure their love quite easily.
I can measure my youngest child’s love by how many kisses she blows my way every day. The daily count starts in the morning. On her way to the bus stop each morning, she stops after every few steps to turn around and blow kisses to me. It doesn’t bother her that the bus is fully loaded and the driver, parents at the bus stop, the kids aboard the bus are all impatiently waiting for her to hurry and board so they can be on their way. She doesn’t let a little pressure like that deprive me of my daily love dose and always takes the time to blow my quota of kisses before boarding. At last count, she topped her own record with a round 100 kisses a day. Now anything less than 80, I feel unloved.
My eldest child is unique in many ways and all the more so in her expression of her love. She pats my head to show her support and rubs my head in a circular motion to show her affection. Please be sure to note the difference here. To pat is to console while to rub is to love. The more she loves, the harder she rubs. On days when her love for me peaks, I worry a little about premature balding. For now I am using a special herbal hair oil treatment for damage control. The day when all that rubbing leaves behind a hint of a bald spot, I will have to gently redirect her loving hands to rub my arms. Who knows? I might even save some money on salon waxing!
So how do you measure love?
-Meena Sankaran
As children, we grew up on quotations from Thomas Gray’s poem ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’. The following lines from this poem were discussed so extensively, so often that if I were to wake up from a coma with amnesia a few years from now, I will still recite them without missing a beat.
“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
Can you think of a better way to teach your children the futility of joining the maddening rat race called life? Dad enriched our childhoods further with acute philosophical observations like ‘Beauty is only skin deep’ every time he caught one of us standing in front of the mirror unashamedly admiring our own reflections, questions like ‘Were we born into this world with the comforts of a fan and a fridge?’ whenever we whined incessantly about the power outages and the unbearable heat of Chennai. It was only natural that we nicknamed him ‘Mr. Gray’.
Now the point of this whole big introduction is to show you that I come from very good erudite stock. Those who believe in the laws of genetics would naturally assume that I would be, at least a little bit, philosophically inclined.
If you had bet your house on that, all I can say is 'oops'. I am afraid you are about to join the ranks of the homeless. Just like weight loss, philosophy eludes me. But determined to thumb my nose at fate and get the hang of this profound thinking business, I had been picking my brain lately about something that I can think profoundly about. I never had this much trouble even when raising toddlers. After hours of exhaustive brain picking, I came up with a question that might convince you that I am my father’s daughter.
How do you measure love? In grams, gallons or bytes?
The commercial on TV that claims ‘some things are priceless but for everything else, there is Master Card’ is based on the assumption that love is not measurable. I can put a big hole in that theory and for this I have my kids to thank for.
Both my kids love me just as much as I love them. I know this because I can measure their love quite easily.
I can measure my youngest child’s love by how many kisses she blows my way every day. The daily count starts in the morning. On her way to the bus stop each morning, she stops after every few steps to turn around and blow kisses to me. It doesn’t bother her that the bus is fully loaded and the driver, parents at the bus stop, the kids aboard the bus are all impatiently waiting for her to hurry and board so they can be on their way. She doesn’t let a little pressure like that deprive me of my daily love dose and always takes the time to blow my quota of kisses before boarding. At last count, she topped her own record with a round 100 kisses a day. Now anything less than 80, I feel unloved.
My eldest child is unique in many ways and all the more so in her expression of her love. She pats my head to show her support and rubs my head in a circular motion to show her affection. Please be sure to note the difference here. To pat is to console while to rub is to love. The more she loves, the harder she rubs. On days when her love for me peaks, I worry a little about premature balding. For now I am using a special herbal hair oil treatment for damage control. The day when all that rubbing leaves behind a hint of a bald spot, I will have to gently redirect her loving hands to rub my arms. Who knows? I might even save some money on salon waxing!
So how do you measure love?
-Meena Sankaran
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