world war in a bottle!

I am sitting outside in office these days and I have a new best friend. The youngest member of the team is a guy born in 1992. Wow. That is young. To put things in perspective – he was born after Manmohan Singh started liberalizing the country and born a good one year after I started college. That also makes him born after I met Jasmine. Age - after a  point of time is very funny. We are old. I am Uncle. When some entrepreneur friend talks to me – I think it’s my experience that he is after.

So this boy here is right now soaking everything I say like a sponge. I explain stuff to him and he tries to understand it. He googles stuff, learns and then thinks. He tries to ask questions and I am more than happy to teach. I can teach forever. Just yesterday I had gone to the supermarket near my house and bought a lovely French jam (the pack says preserve). Whatever. When Jispa was much younger we tried buying the normal Indian main stream jam that was available. Soon Jispa stopped eating it and we had to finally throw or give it all away. This kid hated jam. But I then later realized that it wasn’t her fault. Our jam is crap. There is no fruit in it. It basically sugar, pectin, color and flavor. Just to call it fruit jam they put some fruit pulp in it. It is crap. So we now buy these jams which have at least 50 percent fruit content in it. It tasty and nice and flavorful.

So when I bought this bottle yesterday, my young neighbor asked me what it is that I have bought. I explained to him that this is World War 2 in a bottle. The second world war was fought outside of eth Americas. I think only one Japanese bomber managed to bomb the mainland (Nobuo Fujita). Fujita later made several goodwill visits to the place of his bombings and was later declared an honorary citizen of the area in US. Really a lovely story. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/03/world/nobuo-fujita-85-is-dead-only-foe-to-bomb-america.html Though it seems there have been a total of five attacks on US in WW2 read this interesting link, http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/5-attacks-on-u-s-soil-during-world-war-ii . The most curious of them all is the fire balloons. Ww2 is full of interesting history and the limit (or lack of thereof) of the human mind in the face of crisis. The fire balloons were thought of by the Japanese. The idea being simple. The Japanese realized while flying that there was a current of air flowing towards American mainland at high altitude from Japan known as the jet stream. So someone thought of putting bombs on balloons that would be carried away by the current and drop on the mainland. It required some clever science and engineering as the day temperature and the night temperature would be different and the hydrogen balloon would need to be at a constant altitude to reach across the ocean. So they put in place altitude meters that would drop the sand bags to gain altitude and a valve to release hydrogen to loose altitude, and finally a mechanism to release the bomb in roughly three days by which time it should have been roughly over the mainland. Very very cute and clever. They released 900 of them with the expectation that 900 of them will reach America.  Around 300 of them were spotted and the rest seemed to have landed in the vast open areas causing no damage. Only one incident has been reported where 6 people were killed thanks to the balloon. They were largely ineffective. The funniest part was that the Japanese made the balloons from a paper made from mulberry bushes and they had to be glued together using edible glue called konnyaku. The poor and hungry Japanese workers used to eat the paste while making the balloons. Hehehe. This is the reason I love WW2. It’s full of interesting anecdotes and insights into the craziness of human mind in the face of severe hardship and stress.

So largely the mainland America was unaffected by the war. The war for them was fought on a different front altogether. They had to cross the seas, thousands of miles away and fight. Their supply chains extended across continents. Unlike the Europeans. These guys fought the war in and around the home land. They fought the war in their backyards and in their cities. They fought in in their farms. So the US industry grew around making canned products which essentially were soft and reduced to a calorie and taste devoid of all texture. The Europeans retained the texture in their food as they did not have an industry set to mass produce canned products.

As Indian poor grew a little richer they began to have demand. This demand was essentially fulfilled by big firms trying to give a ton of calories at the lowest possible cost. They turn to the American model. Reduce anything to the lowest common denominator, remove all semblance of texture and make it easy to swallow. I have written about this – the favorite foods are Maggie noodles, pasta, margarita thin crust pizzas and cream biscuits. Nothing with texture.

So when I was asked about this preserve bottle, I was actually explaining about WW2. After such an explanation there was no way I was going to get home without opening the bottle and sharing with everybody. So I ordered for bread  from the pantry (sadly it was the simple white sliced soft loaf) and gave jam sandwich to all. I asked them to feel the texture. The berries, the seeds, the rough edges to the jam. They all loved it. I was amazed that all of them very so surprised to taste it and they did not realize what crap they were eating all this while. I then got the normal kissan jam bottle from the pantry and opened it and asked them to smell that. Yuckkk… I think I permanently spoiled normal jam for them. Good for them. I am introducing the play of texture for them in their mind even for while eating a humble jam.

Here – who would have known that between these two bottles lies the history of war conflict and countless suffering. Just dig in and enjoy the smell, the texture and the taste.