A Squirrel

I was playing around with my new mobile phone camera when I noticed this shy squirrel silently licking away the kolam in front of our house. I tiptoed close enough and after several lousy clicks, managed to capture this one :

I later learned that kolams are drawn out of rice flour for precisely the same reason- providing food for insects, ants and other creatures. I was impressed how detail-oriented our culture and tradition is !!

Coffee (v)ending machine

The cafeteria in my workplace has a sophisticated bells and whistles machine which happens to dispense coffee at times. No wonder, this machine will end your coffee drinking habits. I always had a small hunch that this machine was originally invented for caffeine de-addiction.

The machine comes with fancy menu buttons like "Espresso", "Latte Macchiato," "Capuccino", "Decaf" etc that are internally wired up so that the default reaction of the taste buds is always "yuck" , no matter what buttons you press. The only menu that delivers as promised is "Hot water".

The level of sophistication is mindblowing - the milk is fed in separately from a refrigerated chamber , while the required quantity of coffee bean is crushed and extracted every time someone mistakes this gadget for a coffee dispenser. There are also options to set the correct temperature, pressure, gamma radiation constant, boiling point, freezing point etc of the dispensed fluid. There is also an user friendly LCD screen to display lame excuses for not being able to dispense coffee at times- like "Coffee bean dispenser jammed", "Water is not hot", "Please use only buffalo milk", "Try later. Very busy now", "User horroscope mismatch" etc.

All this circus for a cup of hot south Indian filter coffee.

An idea to the Finance Ministry

A passing thought (slightly insane though)- How do we cut down counterfeit notes circulating in our economy and at the same time passively bring the black economy under the scanner of income tax folks? Remove and purge all 500 Rs and 1000 Rs notes from circulation.

If you observe, counterfeiting activity is largely confined to higher denominations (Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes) . The bad guys will not print Rs 100, 50 or 20 notes as much enthusiastically as they would print Rs 1000 or 500 notes. Also, people would turn to cheque, demand draft or other electronic means for large monetary transactions, as it would be extremely cumbersome to handle cash in the absence of large denominations.

Our champions of Aam admi in political circles cannot cry foul, because according to accepted norms, the Aam admi is not generally expected to deal with 500 Rs or 1000 Rs notes !!