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.
