Resisting Lady Nicotine

I am one of those weird nuts, who succesfully resisted the temptation to smoke through my teen years and college, only to succumb to it after I got out of Grad school. I guess one reason I resisted smoking was the suspicion that I had the addiction gene. It ran in the family. But smoking had a kind of fascination to it. As Ayn Rand describes it in Atlas Shrugged:

"I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

Ayn Rand's books had a tremendous impact on me, changing me from a left leaning teen to right of center adult. But one of the bad side-effects of her books had been to reduce my resistance to smoking. Also the camaderie that comes with sharing a cigarette, finally made me take up smoking. For the first few years I thought that I could quit anytime I wanted to. But soon realized that I could not. For the last eight years I have tried quitting many times, so I have a lot of practice. My attempts have lasted from all of ten minutes to a maximum of 48 hours. But invariably they have failed as soon as I took that one puff. No matter how much I convinced myself that this one cigarette would keep me going for another day, I relapsed to my regular pattern withing a few hours of that one puff. As I enter the second half of my life, I am making yet another attempt. Right now it has been three days since my last cigarette. It is very difficult and the cravings come in waves. From all my readings, these cravings can last for upto two weeks. Can I be strong enough?????

Jet Blues: Morons are a dime-a-dozen

For the past couple of weeks, Jet Airways has been in the news for the wrong reasons. A company who also has registered the name Jet Airways, but does not operate a single plane has aked the Dept. of Homeland Security to deny permission to Jet Airways(India) to fly to the USA, on the grounds that Jet may be linked with Dawood Ibrahim and in turn with Al-Quaeda. While the American company may be trying to make a few bucks out of this, today an arm-chai expert on evrything, Muthuswamy Moorthy, has written to the authorities to ban Jet too. Moorthy is a well know kook and Muslim-baiter-hater, who loves to hear the sound of his own voice,(or the sight of his name in print). He even sent a copy of his letter to the Hindustan Times, who were jobless enough to publish the story. Moorty who runs a website , is a jobless nuclear scientist, who spends his days writing long winded and boring essays, which he calls analysis on his site. The rest of the time he wastes trying to promote his ideas on Suleka.com. While he can be ignored as a Kook, he seems to have generated a following in the cyber-parivar, which is the online version of the Sangh Pariwar. Made up mostly of underemployed insular Indians, who are unhappy with their life in America, but would not make as much money in India. These guys live their insecure lives dreaming of India's golden age, which they think was destroyed by the Muslims. Ramesh Mahadevan has a good writeup about their outlook in life. Anyways, these guys have a lot of time on their hands and can be of high Nuisance value to Jet Airways. Its for all of us who are looking forward to a decent Indian airline to oppose them.

Alphonso Burps

Finally the taste of the incredible Hapus! A couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to visit Toronto and taste the Alphonso mango after 13 years. Oh!! USA you do not know what you miss by banning this King of Mangoes from the country.