Snippets - Multiracial London to Tofu in a London Bus

There's seeming so little to write about when you open the editor, and you thought your mind was brimming with ideas only hours earlier.
So here's an attempt to recall and put a few things down in a style unusual to mine. Inevitably, that means it is inspired and thankfully it means shorter sentences and no preaching:)

1. London's amazingly multicultural - going by the number of mixed race couples you see on any given day in the city. Atleast one outdated edition of Lonely planet London claims you see more interracial couples in one day in London than a whole week in New York. Now before I succumb to the 'hey, I am at a better place' feeling, let me move on.

2. The gap in wages between women and men has had many labour economists baffled. Nothing seems to explain the wage gap. One interesting experiment asked a sample of men and women to fold letters in to envelopes. On being asked how much they should be paid - the average woman asked for 20% less wages and did some 20% more work than the average man.
Now who would not want to hire these women?

3. Looking at the news I have been reading, the countries that feature most after India seem to be Netherlands, Belgium, Kazakhstan and Poland. Countries, my life is going to be inexplicably linked with? Odd, very odd indeed. But then, as they say, the only chains are self imposed. A few weak ones might be imposed by your parents too.

4. Telugus have the unusual ability to live in oblivion. For a language spoken by more people in India than any language bar Hindi, it is largely unknown in many parts of the world.
Funnily enough, the only place in the world to get a book that teaches Telugu seems to be Andhra Pradesh - where not many people need it.
Whoever wrote up Google's HR page thought it exotic enough to write 'Googlers speak everything from Turkish to Telugu'
Given that atleast 5o million people speak Turkish, it can be assumed that the writer wanted to suggest geographical reach and diversity of people at Google. Thus, Turkish to Tuvalian might have achieved that objective. But then there are close to 100 million that speak Telugu!

Also worth mentioning is the uncanny ability of their neighbours, the Tamils, to stand out. While those at IIT Madras stood out quite easily for more reasons than one, I took it to be a characteristic of that one particular group.
Alas, it was not to be, there are Tamils in the corner store across the street, Tamils from all over the world at LSE, they are everywhere -A position their neighbours have managed only in the US and the IIT in the Tamils' backyard.

5. All those ideas have made me hungry, rather simplistically for food. That reminds me of that poor bag of groceries which made it to someone else's home when I paid for it. What would you expect if you absent-mindedly leave two carefully picked packs of Tofu1 and Noodles from that rather smelly Chinatown supermarket in a bus? - A nice free meal for two people in some house in South East London.

Well, That finishes my little experiment writing and I have no materials for my experiment in cooking as you now know. So that finishes everything.

NB: 1 Tofu is just soybean curd, or a variant, not deep fried duck legs in green tea - no offence meant to anyone. After all the Telugus fondly stomach explosive red chilli in oil for breakfast, lunch and dinner that can detonate next morning.