An Attempt to Inject Seriousness

The other day I was eating, seated outside a Pizza Hut outlet, and started wondering about the kind of challenges the Pizza Hut guys faced these days. I mean, when they had come to India a few years back, they were new, they had to establish themselves, they had to set up their delivery model, they had to get their infrastructure in place and a hundred other things that I can't even begin to imagine. But now, I guess they are known pretty much everywhere. So what's the challenge for them now? To this, the wise one replied that they now faced the challenge of beating and staying ahead of the competition, both from within the pizza universe and also from the neighboring universes like the burger and fried chicken universes to name a couple. And the wise one pointed out that the changes in their menu from time to time is one among the many techniques used to keep the pizza and the hut ahead of said competition.

When we get down to brass tacks, this is nothing but an attempt to surprise the customer with new offerings so that they don't get bored with you. I started thinking about doing the same thing with the menu here at Noodle House. As of right now, it consists of different flavors of lighthearted, flighty humor extracted, sometimes with considerable difficulty, from my various real and imagined life-experiences. And, so far, I have steadfastly refused to get serious. If only I had shown elsewhere, the same kind of single minded dedication and stubbornness I have shown towards being non-serious here, it might actually have been useful in other aspects of my life!! Anyway, so I was contemplating changing the menu here to accommodate a little seriousness. Just a little.

Towards that end I started writing about heart transplants. The thought process was to go from how these transplants came to be, how they help people, the costs involved, the risks and everything else that makes up the whole nine yards of it. With this fresh in mind, I started and actually managed to finish. The first line, that is. And then a speeding truck, one that had R-E-A-L-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N written in bold all over it, hit me. I didn't have a trained chef in the kitchen here to cook up some serious stuff and I was not even a novice at that kind of cooking. If I attempted it (I have a couple of cook books open) there was a possibility that I might come up with something resembling seriousness but the mathematical probability of that happening resembled a naught.

Because of this reason, I have decided Noodle House will have to do without a menu-revamp. We don't have the in-house expertise to provide brain food of a different genre. And we don't have the deep pockets required to hire top-shelf expertise. I guess I will have to continue being the best in my niche space before I start thinking of taking over others.