About thirty years ago, a company called Real Value, that made fire extinguishers that did not look like they were for exclusive use by the Asian Weightlifting Champion, decided to make a new product called the Vacuumiser. The principle of this gadget was to put your leftover food in their specially-designed dishes, which were then vacuumised under a motor, making it last forever (make sambar in summer, consume in monsoon, sort of thing. You get the pic, even if it seems yucky).
The company I worked for then had a ‘hard furnishings allowance’ (which is the dumbest idea for tax-saving ever. Ever. Take it from me). Not needing any furnishing, hard, soft or in-between, I bought the vacuumiser with that allowance, because the ad by Trikaya Grey, an agency that specialised in doing funky ads for gullible imbeciles who had hard furnishing allowance, looked good. The product was clearly useless for us, since we had a cook who used to come in everyday, and hence I bought it (most of my decisions follow this pattern. If you are looking for someone to take charge of a nuclear reactor, ignore my job application in the larger interest).
The first day, I vacuumised the leftover idlis from breakfast in one of their dishes and put it in the fridge. On day 2, the idlis had shrunk like a Chinese T-shirt (XXL to M in one wash, guaranteed, says the label, but in Chinese). They were also flatter than a helipad and were now a colour best described in the Asian Paints brochure as Zinnia Bloom.
The math is as follows:
Idlis without air inside = bricks without air inside
Remove ‘without air inside’ from both sides.
Idlis = bricks.
After nearly losing two of my finest teeth, I abandoned the effort to eat them. So did the neighbourhood cow that, with a look of disgust, deposited some dung in clear expression of opinion and I briefly considered shipping that dung (vaccumised in one of their bloody dishes) to Real Value. In a week, we realised that anything with air inside – which is about 97.245% of all food that I know – would no longer have air inside and hence needed rehydration therapy, meditation and motivational speeches and tender loving care before consumption.
Yesterday’s vaccumised chappatis tasted like the ones found while excavating Harappa, and the chana could be used in construction, particularly of highways, no questions asked. And the khichdi was transformed into a grim forbidding cake, needing a knife, protection glasses, two hammers and GPS-type navigation.
When I told my friend and senior at IIMB, Aloo, who was at Trikaya Grey, that I had bought a vacuumiser, he seemed aware of it. He told me this after he had stopped laughing, which, from a guy who is the closest human form to a potato, was the last straw (no, not a vacuumised straw. He liked his carbs.).
He was thoughtful for a minute and then let me know that it wasn’t the vacuumiser, but the fifteen customers who were the only purchasers of this bloody liability who were the Real suckers.
