Maslow's chillies

Dabbling in the kitchen for needs arising from the lowest level of Maslow’s needs hierarchy, I discovered over the course of this lockdown, is a far cry from going occasionally into the kitchen to self-actualize by rustling together fancy ingredients into a photo-worthy salad.

This turned into a particularly searing lesson for me today. I mean, literally. Like actually literally. Not ‘literally’ like when people use the word literally to metaphorically mean something patently non-literal. Involving mindful cooking and green chillies, and hours of running laps from the living room to the kitchen madly flapping my palms*.

I have barely ever used green chillies in food prior to this. However, the latest fortnightly survival kit from one of the blessed e-commerce vendors who deigns to deliver to my building included a very, very generous package of green chillies. As my mantra during lockdown is “Waste Not, Want Not”, I resolved to use this entire lot. So it was that I surveyed three of the chosen ones from the pile. Two of them were curved in a particularly, warningly, sinister fashion. Alas, I failed to heed the warning of the fates and proceeded to gut them of their seeds and throw in the angry green skins into my waiting skillet. Within minutes, the cooking for the day was abandoned and the activity marked above with * commenced.

The spouse, patiently awaiting his victuals, was startled by this rather unusual sight. The lingua franca of my movement is invariably limited to plodding, ambling and slouching. Therefore, this sudden interest in indoor sprinting could scarcely go unnoticed. I breathlessly screamed, “Burning hands. Do something, do something.” My movements were so floppy and my manner so panic-inducing that he initially assumed that my hands were on fire. Like, you know, really, literally on fire. Like with flames. Not the metaphorical way people use the word ‘literally’ when you know, they’ve got chilli burn. But dash it, it really did feel as if my hands were spouting molten lava.

Once he got wise to the situation, he broke into paroxysms of laughter. I made incoherent threats (including but not restricted to using the vegetable in question as a weapon) to shake him out of his laughing stupor and google for remedies.

After a few rounds of hits and misses, and after slathering my palms variously with dishwash liquid, coconut oil, baking soda paste, hand sanitiser and aloe vera gel, we recovered some semblance of sanity in the household. Now I know not to take capsaicin lightly. Along with various other snippets, such as its official name: 8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide.

The sole achievement of the day is that the placating party in this story now knows to never, ever offer such helpful trivia as IUPAC names of active spice ingredients while the suffering party is in the throes of chilli burn.

--Please feel free not to commiserate with me on the chilli burn. This is a work of somewhat pure fiction--

Flight to Safety

If you had told me a few years ago that the most striking parallels for the irrational behaviour of markets would come to me not from my perch in the trading floor, but from a bawling child, well…you could’ve knocked me down with a teether. Or pacifier.

Again, had you told me then that there existed a tube-like contraption to extract snot from a creature suffering from a blocked nose, one that didn’t know how to blow its nose, I would most likely have recoiled in distaste. So, it is quite telling that when I was recently introduced to that very contraption, I fell upon it like a pile of bricks, dubbing it the most useful thing invented since MTR Ready-to-Eat.

Markets flit about amongst a set of behaviours that at best times, confound even the most seasoned of practitioners. Risk aversion is that strange thing that causes traders to withdraw into their shells, like a beachful of turtles facing a predator onslaught. It makes them take refuge in old, predictable things like gold, the US dollar and the Japanese yen. And abandon the tantalizing yet risk-fraught plays with more complex financial instruments. This behaviour can play out in counterintuitive and fascinating ways, such as US Treasury bills finding favour when the US was downgraded or the surge in the Japanese yen when a tsunami wreaked havoc in Japan.

So what has all of this got to do with de-blocking a baby’s nose? Well, more than you would think. Like any right-thinking being, my child absolutely abhorred the idea of this thingamajig that (to toddler-eyes) I had clearly thought up as a punishment, a brand new ‘time out’ idea. So, there was much protestation, and I as the perpetrator, would surely bear the brunt of baby-wrath? As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Just like the markets, the baby also has a strange concept of flight-to-safety. When subjected to a snot-clearing attack by the mother, rush to the safest thing you know, ergo, the self-same mother who mounted said attack. For the rest of that day, she resisted all attempts by the father and others at soothing, and clung to me.

Now you know why markets are irrational. They are just the macrocosm of grown up babies.