When my chores were done this morning, I was feeling peckish. So I grabbed some chips and settled down to play one of the many word games I play on the iPad.

I am a sucker for most word games. This is one where I have to find the right words to fill the little squares from a given word. When I joined the game, I was assigned a name, something like Sweet Turtle or some such, and asked to join a group. I joined one at random. Soon I found out to my dismay that my group was full of lazy bums. As the only active player, I was the lone one accumulating the necessary points and trying to drag the group forward to the next league. One fine day, there was a notification to the effect that the leader of the group had left and mysteriously enough, the game had chosen me as the next leader!

I could have exited the group myself, what with it being full of sleeping partners, I mean, players. But instead I rose to the occasion, renamed the group, chose a new icon, in short generally spruced it up and started playing and gathering points like nobody’s business. What? A leader has to lead, be an example. Right?

Before long the group had moved to the next league, and the next…. with not a single point being contributed by other members. It was me dragging the other members along. As leader I of course, had the option to kick any of them out. The word ‘kick’ is not my choice of word. The game says in so many words that it is the leader’s prerogative to ‘kick’ members out.

But did I kick them out? No. I still had hopes to revive the sleeping beauties, I mean members. Besides, what did it matter, the group was climbing the ladder, even with the dead weight of the non-playing members, just through the points I made. So I let them remain, for ornamental purposes. How can a group be a group without members in it?

Then one day, I opened the game to find, the leader, that’s me, in case you have forgotten, has been relegated to fourth position in terms of points. How? What? When? Apparently, four new people had joined and they were there to actually play the game, not as decoration pieces. Yay! With fresh team members who had already beaten me to fourth position, the game had got more interesting. Besides here was the chance to sail through to the next level with combined effort!

By now you must be wondering what all this has to do with with the title of the post. What happened was this. My hand dove into the bottle, grabbed some chips and conveyed them to my waiting mouth, the teeth promptly chomped on them contentedly. My eyes were all this time on the game, trying to find those words playing hide and seek within the given word.

What do I see when I look up? Two chips, they are jackfruit chips by the way, hanging on to the edge of the bottle and peeping out. They looked a bit sad and forlorn and as if they were trying to tell me something. So, I made up words for them.

**Warning: Silly content ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

‘Hello’ said the chips
‘May we be the next?
It’s no fun inside the bottle
We’d rather, you chomped us!’

Okay. That was pretty silly even by my own standards. But then I am known for driving my family nuts by repeatedly singing to our Spitz, ‘The white dog, drinks white milk, from it’s white bowl, with its pink tongue!’ This time I am inflicting it only on my readers. I bet my family is even now heaving a sigh of relief and saying, ‘Thank God for the blog. Small mercies!’ 😉

© Shail Mohan 2020