Acquiring a taste

You know, I never have understood this 'acquiring a taste' business. I know that these Amazons and Flipkarts seem to be selling anything and, in festive times, selling at a discount so enthusiastically that they deluge you with messages all day long. But can you place on order for, say, 'a taste for Sushi', say? How does one go about acquiring a taste for something which the cognoscenti choose to call 'an acquired taste'?

What was that? I have already written about 'Acquiring Taste' and you are in no mood for my repetitive senile maundering? That's the problem with the world, full of arrogant know-it-alls who will rush in with comments even before they learn the 'A' of a subject. There is a frigging difference between someone wanting to be seen as a 'person of taste' and someone acquiring a taste, say, for ballet dancing or aquavit or some such thing. THAT one was about the former, this is about the latter.

I seem to have got the cart before the horse, really. Like, I started wondering about WHERE to acquire a taste for, say, raw fish before even considering WHY I should acquire one. I mean, you try something, you like it, you do it. You dislike it, you avoid it. Why at all should you dislike something and bother to put in the effort to get to liking it?

And, no, don't give me that guff about 'having to do it'. Yeah, I had to worry myself senseless about 'balancing balance-sheets', finding that elusive Rs. 1347.69/= by which the left hand side exceeded the right hand side, but I did not 'acquire a taste' for balancing balance-sheets. I couldn't care less if they never did balance and became unbalanced sheets, not as long as my job was not at stake. And, when they came in with programs that would do it automatically, I did not bemoan the fact that I could never spend sleepless nights chasing that elusive Rs. 1347.69/= in the morass of ledger entries. THAT is the sort of thing you call 'have to do it' - meaning WORK.

These acquired tastes, they are about things that you choose to call FUN. Now, exactly HOW is it fun to go around doing things that you dislike in the process of acquiring a taste for it? Catch me plowing through the prose of Rushdie, going dizzy wondering what was happening really in the here and now, what was happening in the long gone past and what was happening merely in the mind of the character. There are those who like him, more power to them, but why on Earth should I work my way through his books when I stoutly refused to do the same with my text books even though the promise of a glittering future by getting into IIT was at stake?

So, yeah, forget about WHERE to acquire a taste for, say, roasted bugs. Tell me one good reason WHY I should acquire a taste for anything I do not like.