MY morning coffee, which is over a jug tall, is my addiction, but about a month ago, narry a day went by when the taste of those exquisite beans did not surprise me. The coffee powder was the same, the water I was sure couldn’t change much, the coffee machine whether French press or my filter machine did not seem like inconsistent fellows, and yet everyday my coffee taste was different, from tasting like coffee from the Nilgiri hills, sometimes soapy bath water, to sludge from the gutters nearby.
“Why does my coffee taste different?” I asked myself one day, and my wife hearing my thoughts asked if I’d like trying milk powder with my coffee. I did, and from that onward, my coffee has remained constant in taste. It was all in the milk packets being delivered. Most probably in what the milkman, or delivery boy injected surreptitiously into the packet; how much water and what kind of water!
A few years ago, while visiting my dad and mom in New York, my father pointed to the electrical switches in his apartment and told me any brand would fit into the sockets. “In India,” he told me, “We struggle, because each brand is only consistent with its own products. An anchor plug fits an anchor socket and so on, but a plug from another company, may not fit. Even as we start telling the world to make their products in India, we need to start working on this factor. Being inconsistent like my milk, is very much like being a wishy washy, wavery person who changes his or her opinion depending on the company he or she keeps at any particular moment.
The other day I heard that a friend who sends me good spiritual articles, sends pornographic content to his other friends, who happened to tell me about it. I called him up and had a talk with him about trying to be consistent, and not change the very nature of his being, depending on whom he was connecting with. “Be what you are!” I told him, “and not a different person to different people!”
And yet we accept people like that: Trump in the men’s locker room, who revels in making fun of women and has hands that do not stop their wanderings on the anatomy of the fairer sex, still holds a Bible, and tries to convince his citizens he is a spiritual man. But like my coffee, the people of the US are now looking at their Starbucks in the White House and giving it a second glance, “He’s not consistent!” is what they say, and it looks like the November elections may just prove they need to move from him to milk powder like I did. And how good the coffee will taste..!
