At the start of Life of Pi, Yann Martel says something like (and here I paraphrase wildly), 'before I went to India I knew very little about it, except that they used words like "bamboozle".'

Reading that statement here in India, my immediate thought was, 'And how!'

We had just returned to our hotel after a whirlwind trip to Varanasi Junction in an auto-ricksha (a small, three-wheeled jeepney contraption) where we had passed such wonders as the city's very own Training Academy for Geniuses.

Soon after, we passed a Clothing Emporium whose boast was that it would Help Renew Your Personality and I began to get in the rhythm of things.

But this afternoon, an ad in the newspaper summed it all up. Spruiking a school, its text read in part:

Here at [School X], your child is instilled with the tensile strength of steel in his spine and the luminosity of iridium in his brain - by a team of meticulously trained, highly motivated and supremely focussed teaching staff - endowed with literally supra-human faculties.

That is why we emphatically claim that our alumni do not pass out as average citizens, but as intellectual TITANS ...

Maybe it's just me, but the level of verbal panache here just leaves me wanting for more ... I have to admit to relishing every scrap of newsprint I can find.

And may you all enjoy the luminosity of iridium in your brains today, and every other day as well.