Breakfast And Tolkein.

This post was originally inspired by a post by Cathy on her adventures with breakfast.

In that post I had commented about my own experience with breakfast and I want to share some insights on that with my other readers.

Right from childhood, I was taught to leave home in the mornings with a full belly. I carried a light lunch in a tiffin box to school, despite having which at around noon, I would be hungry by the time I would return home.

That brainwashing came in handy when I started to work as a salesman when I was not certain whether I would be any where near a decent eatery to have a meal and so would have a big brakfast before starting the day. If I did get to eat lunch, that was a bonus! Whenever possible, my breakfast would have been something like this.

I carry that habit even now and my biggest meal is the breakfast but not quite as elaborate as the one shown above. On the odd occasion that I do not have the quantity and the quality that I am comfortable with, I feel uncomfortable throughout the day, even if I catch up with a good lunch later.

Recently my friend Nandu and his lovely wife Praveena had come to Pune for a short visit and the three of us had breakfast together. To say that I had my usual breakfast would be unfair as we spent a lot of time talking and paid little attention to eating. Here is a photograph taken after the breakfast and I am sure that you will see that all three of us look hungry alright.

I introduce that day here to highlight another aspect to that day. I was traveling to Chennai that afternoon and was on a no frills airline and would not have lunch at the normal time. So, on my return home after meeting Nandu and Praveena, I had my usual breakfast. Yes, a second breakfast. I was not therefore uncomfortable till late in the evening when I was able to have dinner. I was grilled by our daughter in law Ranjani about what I did for lunch and I told her about my double breakfast which came in handy to remember some stories for my grand nephews about Hobbits.

That little discussion on the second breakfast took me back to those good old days when in corporate life we used to have breakfast meetings when it soon became corporate lore that I would only leave home/hotel after a breakfast and whatever I had subsequently was the second breakfast. Some folks came up with the name Bilbo Baggins for me for that reason. Naturally, I came to know about that much later but was quite amused with that very apt description. It therefore was a disappointment when my brother Barath decided to call me Gandalf the Grey last year. And that happened as a consequence of Conrad the TOF deciding that he was my ring bearer!

See how breakfast and Tolkein have played such important roles in my life? How can I be without breakfast? Or for that matter people in my life straight out of Tolkein?