Wine in a paper bottle
Every time there's a discussion about wine, what comes to mind are glass bottles.
And slender long glasses. People swirling wine in their mouths to taste the 'bouquet'
It's all rituals meant to keep the connoisseur's edge over commoners.
Because the average drinker is only looking to get sloshed with loads of whatever is the fastest road to inebriation.
Environmentally friendly paper packaging for wine looks odd to say the least.
Frugalpac (love the name) claims to reduce the environmental footprint by as much as 84% as compared to glass.
But the rounded paper bottles can have interesting colours and graphics imprinted on them.
It remains to be seen if wine producers will make the switch. And that won't happen unless customers speak with their purses. And vote for environmentally-friendly packs.
Packaging printers will push for this because the switch could generate good business for them. And glass bottles are heavy, so paper packaging could be significantly lighter on the logistics front.
What will tilt things in their favor is to get a few blue-blooded reviewers to serve wine in paper bottles and make it acceptable.
Otherwise, customers are just as likely to think that the wine tastes like the cardboard in which it has been packed.
That could be disaster for an industry that seems to rely entirely on perceptions.
Enough articles abound on the snobbishness of the wine circuit. It is as much about the performance, as it is about the product.
And while logic may play a role, one thing no one wants to be perceived as 'cheap'
You can be sure that the glass industry will not welcome this intrusion into their turf.
The hi-tech innovations in food bottle caps
They are manufactured in the millions every day.
And we use them without ever thinking of what goes into the design of bottle caps.
How easy they should be to open. How tightly they should close and prevent the entry of bacteria.
Food products stay for months on retail shelves. And they undergo several tests to ensure that the contents are edible for the notified period.
Tomato ketchup has a different consistency from sauces. And oils or water.
All of this has to be taken into account.
It's not about simply filling up a bottle, sealing the lid and sending it out into the market.
Several things have to be taken into account - the user experience, the cost of manufacture, the food grade materials that have to be used and the scale, where millions of caps have to be made.
Heinz says it has put 185,000 hours and 45 prototypes into reinventing its squeeze bottle cap to improve recyclability.
That's because the existing cap has multiple plastic materials making recycling difficult.
And this was not a requirement a few decades ago.
Sometimes, the packaging design is the most distinctive part of the brand.
A case in point is Vita Coco, a coconut water brand in the US.
It is the most successful and part of the success is due to the reassurance it provides every customer.
Unscrew the lid and the protective seal comes off. Just like it does when the vendor lops off the top of a real tender coconut.
Subliminally, that is conveyed. It's a more convenient coconut.
And it took clever engineering and execution to make it happen.
Pitch Black
A lot of people find absolute darkness terrifying – but it has been proven to be beneficial for deep sleep and better health.
Waking up in the middle of a night in a remote location in Kerala, I found that I could not see my fingers in front of my eyes even though they were wide open. Looking all around did not help either – there was no light source close by.
The only option was a torch and sweeping my hand gingerly on the floor, I found the torch and switched it on.
The bright rays pierced the darkness with an intensity that was disconcerting, throwing sharp shadows and wall textures into sharp focus.
We’ve grown so used to ambient light in cities that it’s hard to imagine life in complete darkness. We take a lot of trouble to ensure that light is always at hand, the moment we are awake.
We don’t turn off all lights, we merely reduce the intensity. Driving through a jungle road late at night, and focusing on the road behind – not lit by the headlights was an army of fireflies.
Flickering brightly like hundreds of points of brilliance created an effect that cannot be captured by cameras but needs to be experienced in person.
And the sky looks like a blanket of millions of stars. They form an endless carpet you can gaze at for hours out in the open. In our cities, we see just a few of them with the profusion of lights that transform night into artificial day.
It’s only the absence of light and sound that sharpens our appreciation of the elements. Campfires are great generators of atmosphere.
The light is never constant – it brightens and fades in irregular patterns casting faces into expressions and colours that soften features and give people a glow that stays in memories for years on end.
Discussing a fairness cream brief long ago, the conversation turned to why people are so fixated on fair skin. And there were no easy explanations – unless one went back into light and darkness as positive and negative forces.
We are taught from early childhood that light dispels darkness – as if it is something to be feared and mistrusted. Even though the natural rhythm is equally split between day and night, especially in the tropics.
Light by itself it not good and darkness is not evil. But somehow, the myths have evolved that way.
So we never think of darkness as a calming influence – as a way of connecting with our inner self.
The best time to meditate, the best time to think is often the early hours just before sunrise, when it is the darkest.
Pitch black is not necessarily a bad thing.