Another kind of bad apples

I like a particular kind of apple. And when people gift me (or my family) the "wrong kind of apples", they deny me from eating my kind of apples

I have written before (on the predecessor to this blog) about “bad apples”. Basically, when you have an apple at home that’s going bad, you refrain from buying more apples (“oh, apple already exists at home, so I don’t need”), but don’t eat the one at home because it’s “going bad”. And so, until the apple has rotted sufficiently that you have no choice but to throw it, you forego apples entirely!

However, in my experience, this is not the only kind of “bad apples” that one can encounter. You also have the “wrong kind of apples”.

When you (or your partner) go through pregnancy and childbirth, you can expect people to give you lots of gifts. Now, gifts are fundamentally a deadweight loss on the economy, but sustained by the feel good factor (of both giving and receiving). And so sometimes you have “default gifts” - like a bottle of wine when going for a party, or a clock when attending a housewarming, or a Ganesha idol when you go for a wedding.

Similarly, when you are visiting someone who “can do with better health”, a common gift to take is apples. And pregnancy and childbirth can be considered as events where the mother “needs to be in better health”, and so apples are a perfectly legit gift to take.

My only problem has been that people have been getting the wrong kind of apples.

I’m fussy when it comes to apples. I like Indian apples when they are in season (what is known in the apple as “Delhi apples”). These are largish apples that are a bit soft and not too juicy. They are usually available only during the peak season (August → November). They don’t hold well on storage or long journeys, so you don’t find any imported apples like this.

So, during the Indian apple season I like to maximise my consumption of these “Delhi apples”. This year, though, a bunch of gifts have thrown a spanner into these works. At least four sets of relatives have given us juicy “foreign” apples.

Similar to “rotting apples”, wrong apples can also lead to non-consumption of apples. For context, I’m the primary apple consumer at home. My wife doesn’t like them (she was once shocked when our daughter asked her for apples. “Who even likes apples”, she wondered). Our daughter likes “juicy apples” (precisely the kind I don’t like), but largely depends upon me to cut and give them. And since an apple is too large for her to eat alone, her eating apples is contingent on my sharing them with her.

Occasionally, I grudgingly eat these “wrong apples” (usually prompted by my daughter). But other times, these apples just sit there, lying uneaten, and preventing me from buying better (from my perspective) apples. It’s a suboptimal outcome all round (these apples get wasted, I go without apples, sellers of good apples see their sales drop). A case of a gift being truly a dead weight loss on the world.

Related to this, last night my daughter (now 7 years old) said something absolutely spectacular. I was drinking wine, and remarked that “this is not the best wine”. “Then why are you even drinking it”, she countered. “If I keep this for longer it will get worse”, I said, “and so I better finish this off today”.

“But if you don’t like it, why are you even drinking it”, she went on. “You should just throw it drown the drain”.

“It isn’t that bad also”, I said, “and took another mouthful”. I should have taken a smaller sip, as she said “then let it stay for a few more days. It will then become bad enough that you can just throw it instead of torturing yourself by drinking it”.

I had a tough time keeping the wine in my mouth. I ran to a wash basin, but managed to gulp it down.

Later in the night, when I’d gone to tuck her into bed, my daughter once again asked me “appa, did you do what I told you or did you drink that bad wine?”.

Maybe I should be more like her and less like her mother. Even if there is “good but wrong apples” at home, I should continue to buy my kind of apples and eating them. There is no point in denying myself of good apples just because someone decided to gift me bad apples.