Today was a very long day at work in Paris. Since away home on a business trip gives me ample time to go out for dinner in exotic French restaurants with colleagues; not to mention we burn money to gain calories.
In the dinner table, we’re four people from four different nations; this naturally brings capricious topics and stories for chit chat. In today’s discussion, we had two interesting stories, which I felt like writing a blog.
The first story germinated when I asked my colleagues, why do they say cheers, when they were about to sip their French wine. For me saying cheers was like one telling the other “enjoy this drink & remember my face because you may not, after you’re drunk” or “I'm the last face you'll remember tonight”. But on a serious note my colleague had a different story to attribute this gesture. He added that long time ago, during the times when people were having great quest for land, power & girls, it was common for them to find several ways to defeat their rivals in order to attain their wish. One among the ways is to poison the victim’s wine or drink. So in those days, when a wine or drink is being served, before they drink, a little amount of the liquid was poured into other neighbor’s drink, just to ensure that one’s drink is not envenomed. It seems they also used to say that we both won’t die, let’s enjoy the drink happily. Later this habit underwent lot of changes and transformed as just a gentle tap of the drink glasses.
He asked me in India if we have some greeting words similar to that of “Cheers” in Tamil and in other Indian languages. Hmm, He testified my Tamil skills for a moment. Later I have to answer him that we don’t have anything like that to wish and indeed consuming alcohol in public is still considered to be rude and impolite. But on the contrary, when I think about the statistics myself, just in the Indian state of Tamilnadu with its giant Tasmac, makes a revenue of over INR130,000 Crores (Crore=10Million) which is in fact more than the GDP of several countries. Isn’t appropriate to research a Tamil equivalent of cheers??
The second story was about the social class of people in England about a century ago. One of my colleague said there used to be a column in Oxford University’s admission application, where one needs to write the class which they belong, he added that Noble men supposed to be ranked top in the social class. My text book knowledge about Noble men was that they’re supposedly wise men, mostly extra privileged, got several titles, inherits lots of property, very kind hearted, well educated etc..
But when I asked him what makes a group of people as Noble, he explained me the concept with another story that goes like this. During pre-modern era, a noble man has invited people from his neighborhood for a lunch buffet. Since he is noble he has invited invariably both rich and poor. During the grand lunch, every guest was served with a bowl of hot soup. Everyone started to scoop up the soup and started drinking it. Since the poor man was a bit hungry and was not used to eat in a lunch buffet, he started making noise whilst drinking the soup. The slurping of soup grabbed attention of the rest of the fellow guests and they started to raise their brows. Realizing this uneasy situation, the host (noble man) himself started to slurp on the hot soup and started drinking noisily. On seeing the host’s style of drinking, the rest of the guests started slurping their soups. That indeed made the host the most noble man:):=))
Indeed two nice stories, they brought back the memories of my school days full of fun filled non-details, short stories, fairy tales.
Love and Peace
Jayabalaji
Visit me at http://jayabalaji.blogspot.com
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