India, Jan. 16 -- It is a truth universally acknowledged that January is the month when everyone begins to regret their excesses over the Christmas-New Year period. And as surely as night follows day, those periods of extreme feasting are followed by rigorous fasting. Which is just a fancy way of saying that January finds almost everyone following some sort of diet regime to get back into shape (or, at the very least, into the trousers they were happily wearing until November of the previous year!).

So, like everyone else on this planet, these days I find myself surrounded by people who are not only on a diet, but are prone to aggressively announcing their new eating plans, with the unspoken assumption that I am the only Greedy Gretel, w...