We are spoilt for choices…..

In one of my earlier visits to Kolkata about 2 years back, I visited the swanky South City Mall. We were just browsing through the different outlets, implementing the concept of “window shopping” and I felt like a village bumpkin faced with an avalanche of choices. In one of the departmental stores, I managed to count 15 types of cheese, around 120 shades of lipstick and about 75 types of deodorant sprays cutting across brands and flavours. Even while picking up a tube of toothpaste, I struggled to decide whether I should choose the herbal variety with added fluoride or the cavity-busting option with baking soda.

The same dilemma strikes you when you are browsing through matrimonial sites, given the countless number of those that have cropped up. Among 500 “prospective” applications, you end up “shortlisting” 50 candidates, but you need only ONE soulmate. An arduous task indeed, since one cannot have a “Swayamvar” these days and polygamy is not allowed in India!!

These days when kids pass out of school, they are presented with a plethora of career options besides engineering and medicine – hotel management, sports medicine, dramatics, fashion design, interior design, clinical research, hospitality management, oral and written communications expert, event management and sports management. Most of these were virtually unheard of even 20 years ago.

When I do visit posh restaurants, the difficulty is not what to eat but what not to. The exotic sounding “specials” are just too many in number, especially if you want to go beyond the middle class budget. I remember listening to a person, who on visiting a rich man’s house, was struck by the ordeal of making a simple choice of what to drink. When the poor guy asked for orange juice, he was asked if he wanted it to be organic or regular, with or without calcium and finally with maximal or minimal pulp. That’s when he switched to tea, but then he had to choose among herbal tea, green tea, Ceylon tea and iced tea. To have his Ceylon tea with milk, he had to choose among goat milk, camel milk and cow milk. To have his tea sweetened, he had to choose between beet sugar and cane sugar!! Finally having got tired of such meticulous hospitality, he settled for a glass of water. Then he was asked Mineral water or normal water. When he asked for the former, he had to confirm whether it would be flavoured or non-flavoured. The poor fellow finally said “I would rather die of thirst.”

Modern society has become so addicted to variety, which is really many many versions of the same thing that sometimes they just fail to keep things simple. They call this variety the “spice of life”!