OIL IS WELL...

Sometimes, people ask me - for no reason. What do you think of the oil crisis?

I say there is no crisis. Why should there be? They walk away, as they normally do after talking to me.

But I REALLY think there is no crisis, because we have paid too much of attention to just one type of oil.

The world would have been a better place if we had paid a little more attention to other types of oils. Say, coconut
oil, to begin with.

Coconut oil is used for strong hair. You must have seen ads that reflect the sentiment, where a stuck truck is pulled
out by a lady with oily hair. Do not attempt this at home. The lady might drag you down a slippery slope, as she
normally does in an argument.

Coconut oil is also widely used in a wide variety of cuisine - Thai, Malay, Indonesian, Singaporian (though they are
all different names for the same cuisine) and yes, well, cuisine from Goa, Kerala and places where they could not
play cricket and therefore started playing football. The preparations are easy. All that the chef does is dip his (pardon
the gender bias, since most chefs are males) head in a pot of hot water, and you have the base for most preparations.
No need to worry if you find hair in such food - they have been personally passed by the chef.

In fact, Aaj Tak (sab se tez aur sab se galat) reportedly reported a girl who took oily cuisine too seriously. Finally a
6-inch diameter ball of hair was removed from her stomach by surgery. "It was quite a hairy sight", said one of the
surgeons. They discovered different flavours of coconut oil in the ball - Jasmine, Rose, Vinegar, earwax and even
plain vanilla tender coconut. She also seems to have had hair laced with Thanda-Thanda cool-cool Navaratan oil for
dessert.

Coconut oil is a cure for lice. Lice, as you know, make quite a lousy pet. They make you scratch your head for
solutions. Not such a big problem at a place like TRDDC, where most people are scratching their heads. 1%
pretending to think, 39 % truly confused, and the rest doing it because it is one of the things that seem fashionable to
do in TRDDC. But in a normal place, scratching could be an embarrassment.

The good news is that the lice find coconut oil to be quite a slippery customer. It seems to give them no head-room.
Most of them are left hanging by a hair. The same coconut oil can be used for many types of lice! Did you know that
there are several types of lice? They have evolved to suit their environment. There are lice for straight hair also
called the Expressway lice (you might have accidentally come across them), for curly hair called the Z-Bridge lice,
even for dense labyrinthine hair called the Budhwar Peth lice. They just tend to get lost. Then there are speedy
Metro lice which only thrive under cover. Himmesh Reshammiya knows. Not nose. Well, that too. I will refuse to be
surprised if there is an undiscovered variety of invisible lice specially adapted for bald heads. But, use coconut oil
and they would be out of your sight - again.

The largest source of Coconut oil is not coconuts but blue bottles. Most of them are labelled parachute for some
unknown reason. Some people have tried using a coconut oil bottle as a parachute while sky-diving, following the
clear instructions on the bottle - 'PARACHUTE - twist head to open'. They were found with twisted heads in the
end, though unfortunately, none of them succeeded to tell us the tales. But then, as many SMS jokes I receive say, if
you are in the habit of not succeeding in the first attempt, sky-diving is not the sport for you. Try angry birds so that
you can keep playing despite crashing hard. Of course, you need to consider the fact that in all these cases, the
bottles were found unopened. So, blame it not on the ineffectiveness of coconut oil, but the inappropriate design of
the bottles that makes it hard to open them while sky-diving. Maybe they can provide openers. But then, openers
around these days are not entirely dependable. What did Sehwag do yesterday?.... Huh. Most problems are more
difficult than they are imagined to be.

Hey, but that does not mean there is crisis. In fact, for the last five to seven minutes, we paid more attention to
coconut oil rather than that other type of oil, and we did not think of any crisis.
And that's why I believe that coconut oil is the hope for a brighter tomorrow. Especially if you use it to light lamps
or something. So tap your chests and say 'oil izz well', 'oil izz well', 'oil izz well' till you resuscitate the dying child at
the end of the vacuum cleaner.