Nothing; I screamed ! It is an insult to this bottle! Their son in law quickly agreed with me. " Pour it over some ice cubes for us"! Our hosts were surprised!" Isn't scotch bitter" ? They were confused! "That's the whole point"; I said! Had to explain to them that a sophisticated drink like that needs to be sipped slowly in its full strength and swirled around the mouth gently a few times before swallowing. You need to experience the heady aroma and smokey richness of the golden liquid in order to fully appreciate it. It is not meant to be diluted ; hastily gulped down the throat ; get high fast and slink down from that chaise lounge in a drunken stupor!
They still added water to their glass; a lot of water! Ouch! There ; that was the coffee theory in real life! What! You have never heard about this theory?
I joined a company and worked there for ten years. Early, around beginning of year two, It became clear that hidden racism and inbuilt biases will not allow me to reach anywhere close to the initial potential that opportunity falsely promised. I kept diluting my drink metaphorically! If not this year ,maybe next; or next! Tomorrow it will be better; or the day after! Kept scaling back my goals; changing my targets; tried to branch out into areas of little interest, chop this, forget that..... nothing really was taking off and I stayed for another eight years out of fear; ego; pride; confusion...! Absolute cowardly of me. I am ashamed, I should say! I made a hard decision only when there was no other decision possible! They kept breaking one promise after another and kept me boxed in where I belonged in their estimation. I had to break out. It sadly was too late ,too little! I had flushed down the toilet a lot of prime time; become a lot less desirable older hire and lost my professional edge. Serious costs of which I am paying on an ongoing basis. It is a self goal!
Had I accepted straightaway that it is a bitter pill to swallow and made the decisions I made ten years later.... If nothing else I would have been richer than I am. Of course there were more aspects than money involved; but more money never known to hurt! Does it? They say that most of our troubles are because we resist what is ! That in nut shell is the coffee theory. We add milk to coffee; it is bitter! We go on and add a bit of cream to it; it is bitter. We add sugar on top and amazingly it is still bitter! Just a different kind of bitter each time! We do all of this because we are resisting the fact that coffee intrinsically will be always be bitter. We should drink something else ; good old tea perhaps!
Do you know who buys art? Nobody! That's who! As an artist I realized it soon enough. Lucky for me as I adjusted to this bitterness in my own unique fashion rather than get increasingly frustrated year over year and do something drastic like Vincent Van Gogh or Mark Rothko. I am in awestruck admiration for both of these world famous artists and both committed suicide! I won't!
If you go to Khajuraho you can see that amazingly large complex of temples. Purely indescribable beauty and world heritage site of exquisite art, architecture and sculpture. Poetry in stone indeed! We know some of the names of the architects and sculptors. Vachchharāja; Pahasaga; Deda; Jajega; Śrī Jasa; Chhichchha are some of them and there are others too marked here and there on the structure. How I wish I had a fraction of their talent!
Understand that Chandel kings financed this massive endeavour as their kingly duty to their subjects. No other axe to grind. In a way it was financed by public money since king collected tax from people. To his credit he gave it back in the shape of these public buildings. Temples anyway were way more than a place of worship in Indian society. It was a social club ; a school and library; a repository of art, culture and wisdom; centre for astronomy & celestial sciences; a grain storage and a safety vault of valuable assets; simultaneously with being a pious house of God !
Kings do not exist any more! Art is bought by a few rich people to save and make money for themselves. So here is how it works: Someone buys a painting for let us say $1000. He keeps it in his basement for a couple of years. At which time he gets it officially appraised. The new value for the painting is determined. if it is up and it mostly is; the collector donates it to a museum. Let us say the new value is $ 10,000. Now the person goes ahead and deducts $10,000 from his taxable income. He keeps the $9000 profit and also gets the tax rebate. There is no aesthetics; culture, beauty, art or civic duty involved. It is a pure business deal and the donation sounds philanthropic to boot! Superb for PR! I kept the numbers small to explain the process and it takes years ; decades; even a life time and a lot of luck for an artist to reach that initial stage where his work can get picked. Bitter but true! I am an artist what sugar can I add to this?
We unfortunately tend to sugar coat everything; dilute everything and resist every fact staring us in the face. We keep quite about someone's obnoxious behaviour hoping that it will become better. It becomes a pattern and we learn a new normal till it becomes worse! We do nothing till we have to burn the house down in order to bring some sanity. Trust me we can never come out unscathed or not singed ourselves! Our personal, professional and social life is rife with this malady. Most of the fault is our own!
Listen; if they wanted to, they would have! People always show themselves up in their true colours. Believe them the first time! We need to wake up and smell the coffee! It will be bitter! Stop complaining or stop drinking !
Coffee theory!
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