Friday, September 12, 2014

Marriage & Moral


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Marriage and Moral

(With apologies to Bertrand Russell)

As a young physics faculty living in the Bachelor Hostel at I.I.T. Kharagpur, I was a habitual late riser and used to regularly miss my morning coffee in the mess. 

So, one day I bought a can of Milk Maid condensed milk, some sugar, a jar of Nescafe, a glass tumbler, an electric heating coil, and started making coffee on my own. 

A few days later, I found that, without a fridge,the condensed milk gathered fungus and had to be thrown out. I got used to black coffee and started relishing it. 

A couple of days later, ants got at the sugar and the sugar bowl had to be emptied. That was O.K., the bitter coffee tasted Nature-Fresh. 

A few days later,  the cheap heater coil  fused at one point and the open ends had to be snipped and tied up fast. By a cussed law of physics, the shorter the coil got, the sooner it burned out.  After a few trials, the heater had to be decommissioned. 

No problem, I put some coffee powder in the tumbler, filled it up with tap water, stirred it and gulped down the, well, Cold Coffee. 

Then again, the glass tumbler slipped and fell from my hands, and was as broke as myself. Not one to give up easily, I used to put a spoonful of  coffee  powder  in  the  mouth, suck up some tap  water, swallow the concoction, and rush to  the lecture class as fast as I could.

Then came the rains; and one morning, I found the coffee powder in the jar congealed into one solid mass.

That was the last straw. 

I gave up and got married.

But my medico wife bullied me to quit smoking by her first  wedding anniversary.



Moral

Life is like that: you win some, you lose some, it is a zero-sum game...


...Posted by Ishani

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