A Shade Lighter

My bad habit of leaning over the bath tub to apply nail polish on my toes got the better of me yesterday. The bottle of nail polish slipped from my hands and fell over creating a visual imagery of modern art on the snow white bathtub. I was aghast, but I did not despair, for I was armed with the greatest weapon known to womankind – the nail polish remover. Slowly and steadily I cleaned all traces of nail polish with the reliable bottle of acetone. Anybody who has benefitted thus and in many more ways from the nail polish remover will surely agree with me that its inventor deserves an award. Not just any award. Since, we are in the realm of inventions that have conferred the greatest benefit on womankind; I will stop short of nothing but the Nobel Prizes. According to me, the inventor of the nail polish deserves the following Nobel Prizes:

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Whoever thought that acetone could remove polish, clean dusty tape recorders and what not, must be applauded for this great discovery. This is nothing short of miraculous. A dire warning to those people who are still looking for ways to remove turmeric stains from cotton clothes, chocolate stains from the carpet and petrol stains from jeans. Perform or you shall perish!

Nobel Prize in Physics

What a simple application of Newton’s third law. For every action of scrubbing the nails, the polish wears off. How straightforward and sublime. At the same time, acetone is precious – it vanishes into thin air if not given due respect. Cover the bottle and it remains, discover it only to see it vamoose. Perhaps it is time that we went beyond the laws of gravity and relativity and graduated to exploring the laws of respectability.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Imagine the uncle who cleaned his ancient tape recorder, the sour girl friend that changed her nail polish to brighten her mood and you have the elixir to happiness. Forget about the brain cell researches that will never finish, the path to happiness is the joy of applying nail polish remover.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Poets with happy mistresses and novelists with clean bathtubs will be inspired to compose their best when tranquility reigns supreme. And if there is anybody who should get the credit for this, it should be the muse, the great one who invented the nail polish remover.

Nobel Prize in Economics

This should be easy. If I hadn’t been able to remove the stains from my bathtub, I would have to resurface it. And resurfacing hurts my pocket and the environment (don’t ask me how). The nail polish remover will eradicate poverty among the teeming masses of people who will apply nail polish when they do not have food to eat and keep themselves distracted. Water scarcity will no longer affect us. A coat of water proof nail polish over a bucket of water will ensure that the water will never evaporate. The world’s welfare will lie in the hands of the humble nail polish remover

Nobel Prize in Peace

Judging by the high standards of the people who have been winning this prize in recent times, this is going to be a difficult decision for the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Consider this, your wife does not like the colour of her nails, she buys a shade of nail polish. She applies it and does not like this color either. If there was no nail polish what would she do? Hell hath no fury as a woman enraged. The war in Ramayana was fought because Ravana enticed Sita with an exotic shade of nail polish but could not supply her with acetone in Ashokvan when she got tired of the shade. In the light of these startling revelations, we should award the Peace Prize not because nail polish remover has actually prevented any wars, but because it has the potential to prevent wars that may occur in the future.

Amen.

Can anybody help me create a map please?

What I want is a map showing directions from location A to location B. I want the street names close to location A to be clearly visible, but the map should not be zoomed to such an extent that the highways/main roads close to A and B are out of view. I do not want any additional text in the map. The image should be self explanatory.

I am rather poor at drawing maps and pathetic with tools like MS Paint. I do not have Adobe Photo Shop and I cannot use 3D Max. So, is Google Maps the answer?


Apparently not. I tried to draw directions from the bus stop on the main road at location A to location B. I placed a pin icon over location B too. But the map is incomprehensible to a generation that has grown up with clumsy straight line maps drawn by amateurs like me. The main obstacle to understanding the map is the presence of too many unnecessary roads. Nobody wants to know whether these exist. They are a clutter. I only want to see the main roads and the streets leading to B. If this map is printed on paper, it will be visual gibberish to all but myself. Is there any other software that can help me?