Friday, March 20, 2009

Gluttony and the Laws of Economics

I am a food-lover. So is my friend a gourmet. Our love for good food goes to such heights that we don’t care a toss about customs and traditions when it comes to our gustatory preferences. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday are all fine for devouring all types of foodstuff inclusive of non-vegetarian fare. Every morsel of food is religiously chewed 32 times to enjoy the taste and nutritional benefits to the hilt. Fasting is a vice in our book. Prolonged dialogues on the pleasures of food, especially chocolates are a ritual. I can eat chocolates non-stop Smileys . CadburyFlake and Ferrero Rocher top my list. In my opinion, 1920 was the most important and eventful year of the 20th century as that was the year Cadbury launched Cadburyflake.

We have another friend who shares this trait of ours. Regrettably, this friend is a glutton. This guy shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in taking pleasure in the finer aspects of food, savouring the different flavours of the spices that linger on your tongue and enjoying the immense psychological delights that food provides us. All he seems to understand is wolfing down gargantuan portions of food and assumes that being a connoisseur of good food is equivalent gobbling down larger and larger quantities of food and drinks. It completely beats the point of culinary pursuits. He eats like a pig, stuffing his face on every edible thing in sight Smileys ; he eats humongous quantities of fast food Smileys, has an unquenchable thirst for soft drinks Smileys and commits the cardinal sin of likening junk food with delicious delights. That he is a dipsomaniac does not deserver special mention. Smileys He boasts that no amounts of alcohol can have any effect on the ability of his cerebrum and cerebellum to work in tandem with each other. Policemen around the planet will undeniably disagree with him and medical practitioners may consider this claim as a subject worth researching. I am willing to bet insane sums of money on his liver being as greasy as that of a duck destined to descend on our dishes as Foie gras. Well, to put it simply he celebrates the New Year 365 days of the year! Smileys

We had once collectively tried to drill sense into that part of his central nervous system that includes all his higher nervous centres; enclosed within the skull; continuous with the spinal cord i.e. his head. My friend attempted to bring about a change of the locus of feelings and intuitions i.e. heart. The timing was wrong. We were having a golgappa munching session. She first sought the support of scientific statements. She commenced her sermon by elucidating how his excessive food consumption could lead to hypertension, diabetes, cardiac complications, stomach ulcers, arteriosclerosis and every possible lifestyle disease that she had committed to memory. He rubbished her monologue retorting that he was convinced that scientists publish such gobbledygook simply because they do not have better alternatives for disposing off their research grants and doctors uphold these claims because they derive sadistic satisfaction by scaring all souls in sight. Result = zilch. It was now his turn to launch into a discourse about why and how he would never quit eating and drinking the way he does as he believed that he wanted to die a happy man, happy because he ate and drank to his heart’s content.

My objection to his elephantine consumption was more on the basis of economics. I told my friend to leave him in peace. My friend and I have studied economics. The gluttonous creature has not.

Me: Forget it. He won’t understand. Let’s wait till the marginal utility of all that he consumes hits zero and then becomes negative. It has to.

Friend: Yup you are right. The marginal utility has to hit zero, then it will become negative and finally he will suffer from something!

Gluttonous friend: What do you mean? (Chomping on golgappas)

Me: I think it’s not his fault. The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility does not work in his case!

Me and Friend: Smileys Smileys

Gluttonous Friend: Smileys


I had, economically speaking, proved him abnormal.

2 comments:

Achintya Gupta said...

As for your comment on 'what's in a nick'...I had this childhood best friend whose name was also gullu, and we were great chums... and even till now I dont know her real name!

btw what's this nickname u were talking abt? :)
and as for ur current post... i dont even want to understand it yaar :P

Anonymous said...

Given that I you are an engineer, you won't understand my post. Someone need to have atleast basic knowledge of microeconomics to understand the joke. Hopefully you will understand it after you start with your MBA (that's what all engineers do after graduation right?) ;)

Lastly, I am not revealing my nickname!

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