There is no such thing as Free Lassi

We had just boarded the train in Mumbai, enroute to Bhilwara and my wife couldn't contain her curiosity any longer. She asked the group sitting opposite us, "Where did you buy the packets of Lassi?"

It was a scorchingly hot afternoon, and while waiting to board the train at Bandra Terminus we had seen this group sipping their lassis. Tempted, we had gone to at least five different food stalls in the railway platform but not one was selling lassis (sweetened buttermilk).

"Oh, we didn't buy them here. We have brought them with us," one of the ladies told my wife.

She went off somewhere and a came back a few minutes later and proferred two lassi packets to us. We tried protesting but she insisted that they had lots of extras and so we accepted. The train started to move. Amul's Rose-flavored lassi felt cool and creamy, just right after wandering in the sun.

Almost as soon as the lassi was done, that same lady said, "We are a big group but we didn't get seats together. Would you mind exchanging your seats with some of the other members of our group so that we can all sit together?"Since you can't really enjoy someone's lassi and refuse to cooperate, we agreed. In a few minutes we had been relegated to one end of the compartment with our bags.

There was no way the lady could have pre-planned this, but I was struck by how smoothly she had operated with great presence of mind. And for me, there were a couple of small lessons of life in India. Always be careful of accepting 'free' gifts. And if you want to get something, be prepared to give something first.

Customs Down Under

The Australian customs official in Sydney airport was angry at us.

“These could be viable seeds,” he said. He was holding our Ziploc bag of raisins and almonds that we had brought along as trail mix for short hikes in the Outback. I actually hadn’t known that raisins could actually be harmful from a horticulture point of view. Australia ranks among the strictest countries about the food they let cross its borders. Our mistake was that we had opened the packets of raisins and almonds in Chicago, mixed them and packed them in Ziploc bags. He wouldn't allow something that wasn't “commercially packaged” and so he took them away to be destroyed.

We were in Australia earlier this month, narrating this incident at my uncle’s place in Sydney. Two young women who were sisters, family friends of my relatives were visiting. When they heard about our raisins, they launched into their own we-can-top-this story.

The girls had an aunt who was visiting Sydney from India. In preparation for her trip she had prepared a huge batch of sweets for her relatives living in Sydney. But the Australian customs officials wouldn't allow her to carry those sweets past customs.

Any food not already consumed had to be discarded, they insisted. She pleaded but they had their rules, they couldn't allow her to walk past. And so the lady decided on a plan of action. She would herself eat as much of it as she could.

Now, if you know Indian sweets, you know that each cube is solidified heart attack. They have 3 main ingredients: Sugar, ghee (clarified butter) and some flour that gives the sweet its name. But since she had prepared it with love and simply couldn't bear the idea of throwing them away, she sat there, right in front of bemused customs officials and ate them one after another.

Apparently, the lady ate one whole kilogram of the sweets, while her relatives anxiously waited outside to receive her, wondering why she wasn’t coming out.

You can have any fruit you wish as long as it is banana, apple or orange

It was true everywhere, but I began to notice it only after Rupal pointed it out. We had just come out of a fruiteria (a roadside fruit vendor) with some bananas in Piste in Mexico.
“The variety of fruits we can buy seems to be going down,” my wife said. She should know because she really looks forward to eating tropical fruits. In my case, I eat fruits because they are healthy, but Rupal actually prefers fruits over packaged snacks.

Soon after she mentioned this I saw evidence of this everywhere. While vendors did carry a few token samples of exotic fruit, mostly they all carried just the big three: bananas, apples and oranges. In the last four months of fairly hectic travel (Europe, Asia and N. America) this has been the case everywhere.

Slowly, the whole fruit-buying population is getting squeezed down to just these three fruits. I haven’t researched this, but my hunch is that this is the rich-get-richer power-law phenomenon applied to fruit selling. (The more famous applications of this power law curve include Netflicks DVD rental choices, Digg posts and the number of edits by Wikipedians.)

The fruit vendors stock more of whatever sells, and the buyers buy more of whatever fresh is out on display. Just be sure to buy some papayas, jackfruit and custard apples before they disappear altogether.

Here are a couple of related links:

-- Per Capita Consumption of Principal Foods (in pounds)
-- Did you know that there is a Fruit and Nut yearbook? (In 2006, Americans consumed 25 lbs of bananas per capita, followed by apples 17 lbs and oranges came third among fresh fruit.)