A Kedy, A Lady and A Few Fingers

When someone who regulary cooks is out of town eating chips and warming their feet in hotel bath tubs, cursing comes to you like second tongue. Food, on the other hand, doesnt. With past experiences at turning a kitchen into a mess that makes war-torn somalia look like lalbagh in comparison (definitely, in another blog), you hesitate. But hunger tests your perseverance, and like the million times you have done already, you give up in this duel with hunger.

Vendaikkai or Bindi as the hindi speaking junta would call it, is called Okra in these parts. But to name a vegetable ladies finger needs either absolute romanticism in the breath or a severely psychotic brain in the head. Now you know what the lady and a few fingers are in the title. No points for guessing who the Kedy is.

Ladies Finger Curry. When i opened an internet page, this one was with the least complications.
Take kadai. Ha.
Heat Oil. Ho.
Cut LF. He.
Pour Oil. Ha Ho He.
Add Salt, add masala, Fry. Yawn,
Cant someone throw me a real challege was how i reacted.That is how i usually react when life takes a quentin tarantino-ish turn.

Did your overtly cleanliness-conscious mind make you clean the LF with water just before cutting it ?? You going to have LF halwa for dinner. Turns out that you clean them up a day back, and wipe it with a dry towel if you want it to have a semblance of a fry than some sort of solid stew coz LF in itself yields some watery substance.

Did you pour oil, and then think about jothika in the idayam ad and pour even more oil ?? The cut LF would feel like fish after Exxon Valdez.

Did you just spray the chilli powder to make it more "Indian" ?? Congrats, you just invented an eco-friendly solution for rocket fuel.

In an effort to make it more eater-friendly, you got reminded that adding salt helps, but forgot how much ?? Aahh, you are the new moses of our times, you have your own personal red-sea aka hyper-chillied-super-salted-semi-solid.

When the operation was done, it was successful, but the patient was dead as a dodo. I debated donating this to someone. But manslaughter and homicide are serious offences out here. So in went the first piece with a paratha. Standing in the midst of my kitchen, as my own preparation found its way into my throat, i felt it. Cut here. Da Vinci, with paint all over his body and face. Cut back to me in the kitchen with a turmeric stained tee-shirt. Play Wagner's "Ride of the valkyries" here. Cut back to the freshly painted Monalisa. Cut back to my LF fry. let the message sink in with people, wait for a few seconds. Cut back to all those angry people who are chasing me with rocks, stones, pickaxes and a Uzi.

12;15 pm on a saturady might not be a great time, but it dawned on me. It doesnt matter how someone else is going to judge you as long as i eat my food and manage to stay alive. You Hiltons and Meridiens and Oberois, Move over. Move friggin over.

Read on ... (at your own peril, obviously) ...

Ammy In My Tummy

Hunger is a funny thing to have. Mind you, it is not like Intelligence which sticks around for hours together doing nothing and sinks without a trace when you need it the most. Hunger is more cat-like in that it lurks there all the time, makes sure you are defenseless before pouncing upon you mercilessly.

The initial pangs of a massive attack had surfaced when i was surveying the pantry. A few loaves of bread. Good. Blackberry Yoghurt. Better. Mango Smoothie. Even better. Strawberry Smoothie did you say ?? Perfect way to start your weekend morning.

As the yoghurt cans shiver at my menacingly approaching profile, my room-mate interrupts me. There better be a good reason.

"They all have Gelatin."
"Gelatine ? I did not buy dynamite."
"I said they have Gelatin. Ughgh"

By the way, If i forgot to mention already, my room-mate's eating habits are indistinguishable from that of a rhinocerous. Dark Green. So green that the tava used to make egg scrambles is made to lie around locked in a cupboard which is quite some distance away from the rest its bretheren. An ughgh from someone like that could mean a lot of things.

Ah, well. "Gelatin" reads the ingredients chart on the pack. Given the current situation the only thing that could stop me was Cyanide. But since it is a discomforting thought to have stuff that rhymes with explosives in my intestine, i fell back upon the Right Honourable Wikibaba. After a few anxious seconds, he gives some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the one that explodes has an 'e' to it. Thanks. It is reassuring to know that food cannot explode after consumption. The bad news is that the one without the 'e', the one that is present in all those delicious looking yoghurts, is primarily derived from hooves, bones, tendons, ligaments and cartilage of vertiberate animals. I debate the idea for a second. Eggs are okay. In fact eggs are doubly okay. But boiled hooves and cartilage ?? Blech.

Hunger just shook its body. I see it pawing the sand in anticipation. Hmm.

Read on ... (at your own peril, obviously) ...

The Anatomy of an air-travel

Take a BMTC bus, remove the conductor (preferably his age-old leather bag too), fix the windows and weld them tight to prevent ambitious youngsters to try a trick or two, clean up the usual paaam-paaam bulging-honk, drive it into a room which has wallpapers of cloud formations pasted everywhere and make violent shakes . Yeah, that is how your first trans-continental flight feels, and that includes movies much like our buses down here. no wonder airbuses are called airbuses. And when i say a bus, i mean a bus, only a bus, and nothing else but a bus. They only had to screen some rajkiran movie and i would have happily told myself am on my way from madurai to madras.

If you are a travel-phobiac who lives smelling lemon and eating avomine (anti-throwup tablet) when travelling up a hill, you going to have a ball when the flight lands. I had one, and if i hadnt actually controlled the urge to throw up, the guy sitting next to me would have had one too.

As you slowly doze off thinking of all those tv ads with nice seats and feathery pillows, waiting for your pretty looking airhostess to cover you in sheets as you dream about home, you see a passing-by hostess give you a hopeless pillow and sheet. Now what you saw on tv was the business class, and unless you have a singularly impressive relationship with your travel and business managers, you can only cross it with a sigh as you walk your way to economy.


"Sir, would you like pork fried rice or beef stew" is a question that can throw me off even if am on firmer ground. It is a question which would probably make my great-grand father pick up a cannon from his british times and shoot us off the air. Everytime someone says pork, i dont see little white pigs playing happily in a picket-fenced lawn, but big, black, hairy ones rolling in ditches. Cant really think of a better appetite-killer. I gave a feeble "I asked for a vegetarian meal". I think the lady suppressed a laughter out of respect for her job. "Your last name ??". anticipating silence. "Sir, we dont have a vegetarian meal in your name". disappointed silence. "but we seem to have an unused veg meal in someone else's name. would you like to have it". On any other day, or if i was in a restaurant at home, i could've made faces and walked off. But since to walk off i would need a parachute and the south china sea is not exactly my favorite landing spot,i said yes.

She brought me something which she thought was vegetarian. I thought it was stale pongal with spinach and tomatoes. One spoon of it goes in and i thought we entered some turbulence zone. No, this was a turbulence in my own personal universe since if what i ate was vegetarian, then the Earth is a parallelogram. "Err.. is this vegetarian" "Sir, yes sir" "You sure ??" "Sir, yes sir" and that is when it dawned on me that the word vegetarian is such a relative term. For a bengali brahmin, if fish can be a vegetarian, for someone who loves snails and squids, chicken is probably pure vegetarian. Ah, no, i dont pick my menu from discovery channel. thanks.

Read on ... (at your own peril, obviously) ...

To Infinity & Beyond

After the interview with the guy behind a bullet-proof glass, who wanted to just look at my academic record, and thankfully, not my criminal record, my visa got stamped. Yeah, i understand, no major incidents, just go to chennai, meet up with friends, meet up with embassy officials, get visa and come back the very next day. peace. fun always begins later with me.

first things first. packing. all this hype about the world being a smaller place with the internet is nothing. if the world had been so darned smaller, why would i have to buy two oversized suitcases which can actually fit in two-slightly undernourished adults ?? And if you thought buying two suitcases and later buying stuff to fill it up is trouble enough, just wait till you have to stuff it in. It throws up a peculiar problem. First, you find the suitcase is big, so you make a new list of items to carry and then you realise the new list would need few more suitcases. now you cant go and cut down on your items coz you have made the list after careful scrutiny. Eventually you give up coz if you think of taking anything more you will have to be couriered through DHL on cargo.

the second is the travel plan. in my company, the current emphasis is on saving costs. saving people from gruesome death by being crushed by co-passengers comes a distant 23rd. so our travel desk finds this route that no one had ever heard of and route me through it. bangalore-bangkok-tokyo-san francisco. did i hear you sneer ?? more than the trouble of flying this route, its the explanation you have to give people who suddenly develop such an interest in your itinerary and grill you as to why you arent flying through frankfurt or singapore. "daringly different" is a decent enough answer, but hey, i also get to play marco polo doing all this multiple hopping across asia.

The third part is keeping up with your folks. It doesnt help if you are the first in the family (the first circle of blood relatives) to fly across an ocean. The tens of cousins who flew in and out like it was an evening movie are stale news and are not considered for the time being. A barrage of tips as to what to eat, what not to, where to eat, w.n.t, how to eat, h.n.t can cause severe repulses in your already clogged neural system. Universal facts gain unprecedented importance and you are recited them regularly by every family member in turns. "Dont ask for strangers for directions", "get home early", "obey all traffic rules", am so glad they skipped toilet-training me again.

the fourth and final part is the toughest part, to pretend you are all excited about this trip. If you can fake it, yep, you are there. no puli kaachal (tamarind gravy), no paatti (grandma), no mom to fight with, no folks, its actually pretty difficult to look excited you know.

Read on ... (at your own peril, obviously) ...

The Perils of Nomenclature

The stars gave a message on the day I was born. Just that my dad was busy deluding himself that he is now the proud father of some sort of neo-alexander and failed to notice it. No, the stars did not want my parents to give me back to them when i was 16, you read a lot of hindu mythology for your age. They just wanted me to have a name starting with the thamizh alphabet "Na". Dad grinned coz he had already worked out a name for me, star or no star. The stars gave up with an audible sigh. When the odds are stacked against them, they safely quit and become black holes.

One thing my dad didnt realise at that time was there were many other dads who had seen the same movies he had, who had a son born at the same time, who had got hit by falling meteorite and for some unspecified reason decided to name their son with a "unique" and "hip" name. Sadly, the idea of global perspective was lost on them. Result, one just had to call my name and an army would turn up in response. Actually, that wasnt the biggest problem.

I had to sit for half my life in the front bench because a few bone-head professors wanted the class to do a mexican wave when they call out the roll numbers, and Roll No. 03 comes within the spit-zone of most of them when they lecture. They never gave me an umbrella allowance even,

I get the report card first in school which means the teacher is fresh and raring to let me realise the imbalance of wielding authority in the relationship we share. His dotted-cane simply slurps and asks for a quick bite.

Having a name that rhymes with baloon, and looking like one doesnt help much.

Actually, when i sit back and think, maybe it is not __that__ bad.

- Can't really seem to remember an occasion when people had a problem trying to find my name from a list. Now, that could be because an apparent lack of people trying to find me. Can't really blame them. In biblical times, No one really went in search of Lucifer.

- Am so glad my surname is not Babu. Gives me the feeling that i am wearing loin-cloth.

- Often, my nick is the same as my name. It is a real challenge to make a shorter nick than a four-lettered name. (Three letters in my mother tongue).

- North Indians neither chew my name and spit it out like paan nor do they mistrust me like am a ISI agent from the south. I am not Senthamizhchelvan or Muthamizharasu or ShenbagaPandian.

- Non-Indians are happy too since my name is not as orally challenging as Parthasarathy or Vijayaraghavan or Kasthurirangan (Seriously, we need to have them in mind before we name our children).

- In the blind man's world (Read: A world with Mpumelelo Mbangwa, Romesh Kaluwitharana, Sidath Wettimuny and Ryan Sidebottom), the one eyed man (Read: Me) is King.

Man, I love my name.

There, Enough narcissism for the day.

Read on ... (at your own peril, obviously) ...