Samosas at Sotheby's

"Boys...time to load up on Omega-3's!"

According to the world-renowned exponent of global trends and New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, we inhabit a hot, flat, and crowded world where clean water will be a scarce commodity. And he isn't talking about a Roman bathhouse. In any event, one of the consequences of the flattening of the world is the creation of an environment in which products could be competitively produced in any corner of the world. This should lead to a fiercely competitive market of vendors, thereby pushing prices down of most commodities and benefiting the average Joe (even Joe the Plumber).

But one commodity appears to resist that trend and has become a major bugaboo in the overarching theories of Mr. Friedman. But that commodity also happens to be the might samosa, the staple snack of more than a billion people on this earth. The global disparity in the price of the samosa has flummoxed many Wall Street gurus and continues to be a bete noire of economic theorists who are painstakingly trying to fit the earth into a One World/One Theory paradigm.

At a tea stall in Calcutta, the samosa may cost you Rs. 2 (about 4 U.S. cents), at a posh hotel in Bombay it may set you back Rs. 60 ($1.25) and at the Gaylord's in San Francisco the sumptuous snack is roughly, $2.50 each. But as we all await a globally flat price of, maybe, 4 cents a samosa, a hawker in Sonepur, India, bucked the flattening trend by charging a Dutch couple the princely sum of Rs. 2,500 ($40) per samosa.

According to a BBC report by Amarnath Tewary in Patna, "The young hawker insisted in broken English that the samosas were specially made of Indian herbs and had aphrodisiac qualities, local official Paritosh Kumar Das told the BBC. "

Read the full report here:

Tourists in India in samosa shock

It appears that samosas laced with herbs and aphrodisiacs are worth their weight in gold. There might be rumours that Keith Richards is seeking to trade his Rolex for samosas laced with other uplifting substances.