On the 19th of December our class got together for our 40th reunion. Of course this didn’t mean that it was the 40th meeting since we graduated from high school but it was 40 years since we had finished school. We had our first reunion 25 years after leaving school and I can never get over the shock of seeing our 16 year old classmates whom we remembered as callow youth with pimples and adolescent angst writ on our faces completely transformed. Some of the boys had come into their own and were devastatingly handsome while other had begun achieving that look of distinction that grey hair and maturity imparts. Most of the girls had grown into young mothers , happy with their added pounds. Some of our classmates weren’t as lucky and had aged beyond belief with frazzled hair and more than excess weight. So I was actually looking forward to this reunion with all of us in our Golden Years. Sadly I had to give this event a miss as I was in the middle of a family reunion that was happening for a wedding and an engagement. But the meeting of the graduating class spurred on a wave of nostalgia that generated a WhatsApp group that has been so active that in the past few days we’ve communicated more enthusiastically than we did in all the years that we were at school!
With all the nostalgia going around especially around Christmas time which we all remember as a time of holidays that started with our last Christmas Assembly where we sang Christmas Carols with great gusto. I’ve received several Christmas Greetings on this group and I’d particularly like to share one of them :
So Merry Christmas all of you !
Way back in school when we had just learnt baking, I decided to make a cake at home. I followed the recipe to the last comma and full stop being a newbie cook. But when I went to remove it from the oven after the required time I found that the tray was empty. Till today I can’t figure out what happened to make the cake evaporate/sublimate or whatever – but vanish it did.
Yesterday I had a strange experience when I was making Shrikhand – a dessert made of hung curd. Now if you want to know how this is made, please visit my other blog where I’ve given the recipe of this delicious, creamy dessert.
However this blog is not about the recipe. It is about a strange phenomenon that made the total weight of the dessert less than the individual weights of the ingredients. In other words, how did
1 kg hung curd + 500 g grain sugar = 1 kg Shrikhand?
Mathematically speaking since you can’t add apples and pears, hung curd and grain sugar can’t really be added hence you can’t get a total weight or combined weight of two dissimilar entities.
On the other hand, physically I did manage to combine 1 kg of hung curd with 500 g grain sugar – spending a good hour in the process – so what happened to the 500 g of sugar? How did I still land up with only one kilo of Shrikhand?
For that matter, even the volume remained the same, so did that mean that the sugar that dissolved actually had no weight? If that is the case, why does the 1 scoop of icecream reflect on my total weight when I stand on the weighing scale?
Someone, please do tell me!
