Non-dairy icecream

In my quest for recipes which are non-dairy, easy to make and great to taste, I never thought I will come across one for an ice-cream. And yet in an email from my father was a link to just that. Diced overripe bananas. Frozen. And finally zipped in a blender. As simple as that and it is absolutely unbelievable how overripe banana which used to be considered good only for baking or binning transforms in to this very ice-creamy avatar. We have been having it almost everyday and RRJ's favourite is the one flavoured with fresh strawberries (well, we freeze them prior to blending).

Life ka formula

I had a bit of a jolt last month when I had to visit the doctor after a week long dull headache. Thankfully the doctors didn't find anything serious but the fact that they thought that it was a stress headache and prescribed some stress-medication has caused much anguish and perhaps even more stress ever since. Who me? And that too now? I feel so sane, so content and so insanely happy, surely the internal stress meter had it got all wrong or perhaps not.

Just today, the theme of discussion in the class was fatigue in metals and how people over the years have tried to characterise it by identifying the key parameters and coming up with expressions which describe the experiments reasonably well. The key parameters were words we use in day-to-day life, like stress, strain, fatigue, endurance limit, life etc. etc.  As it was about time to wrap up the class I thought it was about time I did a dimensional analysis of life and arrive at the formula for stress in life that would be simple enough and yet captures the essential features of the phenomenon. So right after the class, on a sheet of paper some serious rocket science was done to identify the key parameters that affect the stress level, and I came up with these:

1. f: the fraction of ideal that meets one's approval. So if there is an ideal ice-cream. If one is happy with something that is just 10% of the ideal, f=0.1. If it takes only the ideal to satisfy, f=1.0. I feel as a kid one's f is usually low, and rapidly increases with age.
2. n: number of people one feel responsible for. It includes every one for whom one feels one can do something to improve their situation, be it immediate family, team members at workplace, or the person living in some part of the world who is dying of starvation while you are throwing away some food to empty the fridge.
3. m: the number of people who appreciate your efforts in general.
4. p: the level of details that your plans have in a scale of 0 to 10. The more you want to control the more you feel stressed.

 After some more rocket science, the final expression was narrowed down to

The more picky you are (high f), the more people you feel responsible for (high n), the more you want to control (high p) all lead to higher stress. And after all that if no one appreciates your efforts, no matter what you do the stress tends to infinity!  Ouch!

So does my formula work for you? What are your controlling parameters? Tell me and become part of m!

Ode to joy-I

Sometime during the discussions on bone mechanics with my student this idea, which seemed so perfect at that time, took its final shape that if bones can be easily cut using a wire saw then why can't I use it to take off a little material off the nut of my guitar. I had been pretty convinced that what lied between me and a fluent guitarist is not the ear for music, or agile fingers but the gap between the strings and the fretboard of my guitar. The wire saw was central to the solution.

Most efficiently the student got a wire saw issued on my name, and I headed home pretty determined that it was about time that the guitar was made more suitable for learning music. The sight of me with the guitar in one hand and a saw in the other perhaps perturbed RRS a little but it was easy to ignore the gentle murmur he let out about how I was about to destroy a perfectly working guitar. I took out the guitar from its case and laid it on the bed, and started to unwind the first wire to be able to access the groove in the nut. TONG. The wire recoiled, it had broken at the beaded end! The source of the gentle murmur registered the sound and nodded to my elaborate explanation about how I had tried to unwind thinking that it is a right handed screw and how actually it was anything but that because when you hold the guitar and tune you do it with left hand and all blah blah blah. Having the guitar already 10% injured even before I got down to sawing off stuff did dent my initial enthusiasm to some extent. And after sawing the nut a couple of times the name of that tea we used get in Kanpur 'Runglee Rungliot' flashed in my head which apparently means 'this far no further'. 

I packed the saw back into my bag-pack telling myself to be wiser about anything students do efficiently.  Really, just because your guide tells you to get a wire-saw, should you? When will they ever learn to think independently and have the confidence to question my judgement but there was no point what was done was done and immediately the net was accessed and a shop was narrowed down and we headed for getting the guitar fixed. To be contd.......