Have a great Christmas dudettes and dudes and whatever... Haha! `Tis the season for everything.

I am currently flipping through this wonderful chocolate cookbook called, brace yourselves for it: "Chocolate!". And I must say that it is exquisite. This book depicts chocolate in its very best aspects; sensual with the silken chocolate cheesecake, warm with some chocolate drinks and sometimes, even vulgar with the very decadent brownie pudding cake. But that`s the thing with chocolate, it reaches us at every level of our moods with its decadence or sophistication. My sister lent me this book this weekend, which she got from her boyfriend, in a somewhat unconcealed attempt to lure me into baking something for them. But really, I don`t need much pressuring for baking, especially when it comes to chocolate...

Now you see, fusion food is not a bad concept in itself. I don`t know if you`ll agree with me, but we do that all the time at home. I sometimes add curry leaves to my spaghettis or soy sauce to an oriental recipe. Examples like that are varied and they depend from person to person. People have got their own interpretation of classic recipes and no one is judging them, except when they decide to make money out of it. Then, I`m the first one to be judging them harshly.

The thing is, if fusion food is really well done, it is comparable to a fantastic culinary voyage into novel and peculiar tastes and flavours. And if it is badly done, then, to put it plainly, it is crappy. And I don`t want to pay for crappy food. I don`t want anyone else for that matter to pay for  crappy food and to be misled into thinking that Thai or Italian or Indian food is crappy just because they tried it at the wrong place.

Well the Kindle is cool if you`re a bookworm, if not, then you would certainly look down on it as a useless tool. I am a bookworm and ever since I got the Kindle it seems that it is accompanying me everywhere, except, of course, to the loo. Even if I was taking it to the loo I wouldn`t be telling you about it, right?

Yeah, so, well the Kindle is accompanying me everywhere. Even today as I was having lunch all alone `cause my colleague and partner in crime was out for a conference, I was reading the Kindle, a wonderful novel my Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if you want to know. I wouldn`t tell you where I got the books though.

Anyway, anyway, all those blabbering to let you know that the Kindle is awesome, that I took a day off the day I got it to be able to read all day long, that its cheap and that the battery life is a miracle. 

If you happen to have one, you`re a lucky bastard. If you want one, go for it. 

Oh and by the way I got the orange cover. Cool, ain`t it?

Granted today was a special circumstance. Something pressing. One of those events when people insist that you go home 2 hours earlier. But that kind of circumstance won`t be repeated in the near future. But I`m just saying, I`m more productive when I leave home 2 hours earlier...

Working 6 days a week sure takes its toll on me and I need some serious vacations!

So long dudettes and dudes, I`m off to watch a horror movie, that`s another one rare pleasure.

Work is cool! It's the typical Dilbert thing (with Catbert, the evil HR), except that I'm the Catbert in this case. At first I was tender at heart. It's hard to call people for interviews and not giving them the job, it's hard to hear the hope in their voice when they believe there's a possibility, it's hard to see them signing a contract which unfortunately does not match their expectations. But well, it took some time for me to toughen up and adopt a holistic way of thinking instead of considering cases by cases.

But well, the good thing is that we`re adopting new HR policies that would soon make everyone`s life better, including mine. So that would soon be a win-win. 

Talking about the long weekend, on Friday 12th we celebrated our country's Independence day. I spent mine with Jev at Choisy with Mauritian foods and drinks. And on that day I got to know something great about him, that he is a patriot. You see, I am a patriot too but I guess that those are the things that we don't really say out loud. It's kind of hard to start a conversation with "Hey honey I'm a patriot! Did you know that? What about you?". And so we ended up not saying this to each other. But it was on Friday when he was buying flags and quadri-coloured ribbons that I actually got to know this aspect of him. And so it was while we were hanging out in the car watching people making the most of their day at the beach that we talked about what the independence day means to us. This brought me to comment on Eski's Independence Day ad campaign.

Our "national lemonade" brand has plastered billboards all over the country showing hands of people from explicitly different races and religions doing friendly gestures. All this is fine and I'm sure many of us are already befriending people irrespective of religion or other differences that society has created, except that it feels wrong and quite hypocrite when you actually show people doing it in advertisements. 

Taking my own example, my friends are varied, in a lot of aspects but I'm not about to pronounce myself as an equal opportunity friend. Friendship just happens, it does not happen because of the colour of someone or his/her religion. It just happens because something clicks. It did not occur to me that "Hey Deborah we are so different, let's be friends because I have to befriend someone from your religion." It just happened that Deborah is a foodie and so am I. 

And so I thought why not show real friendship? Friendship as it really is? Sometimes it would be with people from the same religion or caste as you are and sometimes it would be people from completely different religions. Because friendship happens with the people and not with the religions or races. The sooner we overcome the religion, caste and race barrier, the closer we would be to the actual state of equal opportunity...