Lights. Camera. RCNM.

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in dreams than in this reality called life when I landed there. Yes, I like to call it autumn. Not the 'fall'. Yes, I've been an Anglophile all my life. I've grown up with the sole belief that books were my best friends. They could understand me and excite me, fascinate me and make me wonder, like nothing or nobody else on the entire planet. My first rhyme was 'London Bridge', my first novel was 'Secret Seven' by Enid Blyton. Famous five, and Rudyard Kipling's children's stories and what not. And I, like many others have picked up J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, and loved it more than most material things. London, to me, meant the origin of this art we call literature. When English is close to your heart, how could London not be so? All those stories describing Hyde Park at dusk, those double decker red buses that Sherlock took rides in, 221B Bak...

Situation at hand - Those of us who had Economics in high school are very familiar with the concept of 'substitutes'. That is, if I cannot get A then I am happy to stick to B. The most widely used example when we explained 'substitutes' in our exam papers was the so-called alternative between tea and coffee. If the price of coffee beans goes up, we wrote, it's not a problem at all -- we just buy some more tea bags and get on with our lives! The Back-story -  After two years of college, which I can safely say were the most caffeine-intensive days of my short life, I can't help but question this concept, because when your assignment is due in eight hours and you've written exactly three words, will a cup of tea do the job? Or when you're having a laid-back hangout with friends after dinner, who wants to gulp down black coffee and stay up all night? So here was the clincher: are tea and coffee really substitutes? And which one do you prefer? N...

Have you seen four hungry dogs fighting over a scrap of meat or a bone? If not, I can tell you it's no different from the nasty 4-way slugfest that has been on since 1992 -the English Premier League. Although there are bigger teams in the fray, the craziest fandom battles have always been fought  between Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Chelsea. Gunning down Arsenal :  Arsenal fans are dying to quench their thirst. The can't do so - because they haven't won enough cups! Nor have they had enough chances to celebrate a victory with champagne. They're usually not too far from the top but they never actually win -now that's what I call being consistently inconsistent! The only place where you'll find them right at the top is when you arrange the club names in alphabetical order! But inspite of all this,  Arsenal's generosity is laudable: every Christmas they start donating 3 points to every club they play against. As if this wasn't enou...