Twenty- five Seven

When 2+2=3

December 16, 2014

Well, if upon seeing this title you think I’m a dud at Maths, I won’t blame you. I have never really been good at maths and once I ran out of 10 fingers, I just couldn’t add any more – especially not in school when it was compulsory to wear socks and shoes. Of course I could resort to making lines or other such signs to help me count but everyone knows that there are just so many lines you can draw on a line/page before having the sum drowned in lines. Besides, this post is not about my mathematical ability, it is about how 2 + 2 doesn’t always add up to five. At least not in my kitchen.

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!
The 4 L’s of Richard Branson – The Virgin Way

December 15, 2014
Product Details
Paperback

Publisher: Ebury Publishing (January 1, 2014)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0753519887

ISBN-13: 978-0753519882
I haven’t had much time to read lately but it is luck or is it coincidence that the two books I’ve read back to back had to deal with LUCK?

The last book I read and reviewed was Ashwin Sanghi’s book 13 Steps to Bloody Good Luck and within a week I found myself attracted to Richard Branson’s book ” The Virgin Way”. Richard Branson has always struck me as being brash and bratty so I picked the book out of sheer curiosity. I must say, after glancing through it, particularly after reading the preface, I was hooked.

His preface is entitled ” Life’s too short – Don’t enjoy it? Don’t do it!”

Nothing in this book is new but somehow, reading it afresh makes it seem new, particularly the way in which management concepts are presented. His subtle British humour self deprecating anecdotes and examples from real life case studies serve to bring home serious truths that are the very foundation of Virgin’s success.

Richard Branson has often been touted as the classic case of a school drop out ( he voluntarily left Stowe – a modern Public school- at 16 to launch his own magazine Student) who made it big and indeed this book shows that his success with Virgin as an enterprise that spans sectors as diverse as entertainment, travel and hospitality is partly due to luck and partly due to hard work.

According to him:
- Luck begins at home – you have to be lucky to be born in the right family because leadership lessons are learnt at home
- You have to work hard to become lucky
- You have to learn to listen before learning to talk
With pithy one liners that are both his and others’, Branson puts across his message very clearly – that in order to succeed every entrepreneur should learn the Four L’s that are imperative for success:

Listen
Learn
Laugh
Lead

So what are you waiting for? Get the book, read it and then try and make your next million.
My reflection smiled I didn’t

December 14, 2014

I’ve been brought up on this adage and have conscientiously followed it. In fact I am known for my smile and everyone thinks I’m the original SMILEY because I find it hard not to smile. There are times when I find myself smiling to myself when I remember something that makes me smile.

And smiling they say is instinctive so that even if you don’t want to really smile, you respond naturally to a smile with a smile when you see a smile. Much like a yawn which is equally contagious.

Credit- Wikipedia

But there are times when you want to smile because you are happy but you can’t like it happened to me one day.

The day that I happened to sink my teeth into a soft, chewy, caramel toffee.

Now I must confess that despite the fact that I am a grown woman with grown children, I still haven’t outgrown my predilection for toffees – the gooey ones that stick to your teeth. This toffee that day stuck steadfastly to my tooth so that when I tried to pull it out, I pulled out my dental fixture otherwise known as false teeth.

Imagine my horror when I saw those beautifully crafted ceramic crowns fitted come off so perfectly in the sticky toffee.

That evening I heard some news that would have ordinarily left me grinning from ear to ear but when I saw myself in the mirror, my reflection smiled at me. I didn’t

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.