The green thumb

"What do we do with all this?"

"I don't know.  Just don't make all my efforts go waste."

"Okay, so more thokku?  Or should I just blanche, peel, and make paste to freeze?  And what about this one?  Cut and freeze?  What I'll do is dice this one up and put it in 3 freezer bags, keep one here, keep one in the freezer downstairs, and the last one we can keep…"

"Chumma don't say big big dialogs.  Simply show off…"

"Wait… what?  No… I'm really asking…"

"Leave it, Lalit.  Already that one from last week I went bad.  I had to throw it…"

"Haan…"

"What haan…"

"I mean, yeah… sorry… I meant to cut that one…"

"Your sorry has no meaning… simply show off…"

"Hmm…"

"What hmm…"

"Okay, tell me what to do with all this?"

"You figure it out na?  Why am I responsible for everything in this house?"

"Okay, so cut and freeze?  And what about thokku?"

"Grrrr… I don't know… Just don't make all my efforts go waste."

"Tell na…"

"…"

I have a problem.  Sometimes I keep asking the same question and inciting conflict even when I know the conversation has reached a stalemate.  Especially in situations where I am in denial about not being of much help.  

In any case.  The point I'm trying to make here is that I heretofore haven't adequately appreciated the fact that Pavana has a green thumb.  I have largely failed to recognize her remarkable prowess as a home gardener until now.  I mean, I always appreciated her passion for growing vegetables, but being geoponically challenged, I never comprehended the laudability of Pavana's talent in this area until recently when I realized that every single visitor to our house lately not only admired the viridity of our indoor plants but were also awed when they saw the huge ash gourds (white pumpkins) she grew.  If there were a reality show like MasterChef for home gardeners, say MasterGardener or PlantingPundits or something (ABC/NBC are you listening?), Pavana would certainly be a strong contender.

With that said, 2021 for us has been a year of roma tomatoes, big boy tomatoes, grape tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, green beans, long beans, Chinese eggplants, bitter gourds, snap peas, ash gourds, delicata squashes, drumstick greens, red amaranth greens, green amaranth greens, lettuce, karpuravalli, mint, malabar spinach, green peppers, purple bell peppers, and I feel like I am forgetting some more crop.  And mind you, my contribution of effort toward this bounty is minimal to nada.  Our freezers are brimming with veggie rations ready for winter cooking, some diced, some whole.  I am actually surprised we didn't get a censorious letter from our HOA during the summer, because when someone asked us directions to our house, we literally told them to come to the one with a cladding of trellises of tomato and squash vines near the front door!

Eat your vegetables

"Clementine for snack today, Medha?", I hollered.  "Sure!  Peel pannaadhe, I'll peel it at snack time!", came the reply.  

As part of the customary early morning scene with Medha and Mira sitting at the kitchen island eating their breakfast at their vastly disparate speeds as usual, Pavana yanking Medha's hair trying to comb it as she kept wiggling around contrary to common sense order, and me packing Medha's lunch bag at a frantic pace, a conversation that never hitherto been had germinated out of the blue.

"What do they serve at the cafeteria?", asked Pavana.

"They have two options", replied Medha, "Usually for meat they have something like popcorn chicken and for vegetarians they give pizza or something".

"Both sound great", I said sarcastically.

"Maybe it's OK for her to eat pizza once in a while...", began Pavana.

"Nah", I interjected, "I would rather her have cold lunch from home than eat that junk!"

"I don't even like pizza", lied sweet little Medha in endearing solidarity.

This conversation took me back to a day in December 2010 when President Obama brought Michelle Obama's vision to reality by signing the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act into law.  That day was supposed to go down in history as a step toward combating childhood obesity and helping parents feed their kids better.  The day certainly went down in history, but not because it ushered more fresh produce and whole grains into school cafeterias as was the intent of the bill.  Because it did not.  The fast food lobby obviously couldn't allow that.  I remember listening on the radio how the House GOP had declared that pizza and french fries with ketchup were vegetables!  And this is not something the food lobby doesn't routinely do.  This is no different from the argument presented by a certain gentleman belonging to the National Soft Drink Association to the Senate Agricultural Committee that soft drinks are not harmful because they can provide part of the 2 liter liquid intake as part of a balanced diet!

The story of school lunches in America is quite a saga.   The Great Depression was when it all started with society was bedevilled to an extent that was sufficient to get the Feds involved.  Specifically, the early 1930s saw extreme food price collapses that drove farmers to financial ruin.  Laborers weren't finding work, and hunger and malnutrition ravaged poor communities with children.  That's when President Roosevelt's New Deal came to the rescue by having the federal government buy surplus crops from farmers, employing thousands of women to cook using this surplus, and then serving this food to hungry students.  The system managed keep up this perfect solution through and after WW2, thanks to the National School Lunch Act of 1946.  Remember, this also marked the beginning of the baby boomer era, and keeping a burgeoning population young boomers fed meant that school districts had to ramp up production substantially.  With the post WW2 food industry rapidly growing, private companies began lusting for a slice of the action and started signing contracts with school districts.  However, the food industry was also rapidly transforming at the time, especially with the onslaught of fast food chains like you know who.  School lunches went from food like soups and sandwiches made from surplus farm produce, to rich fare like meatloaf and shortcakes, to pizzas and hamburgers, all within a span of two decades.  Luckily for the food industry, Eisenhower and Nixon increased the budgets for school lunch programs and the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 added more subsidies for school milk and school breakfast programs.  

All of a sudden in 1981, the Raegan administration slashed Federal school lunch spending by $1.46 billion and infamously declared that ketchup was a vegetable so as to meet nutrition standards while keeping the food lobby happy.  The 2010 Obama administration law was an attempt to somewhat reverse this debacle by increasing the School Lunch and School Breakfast per meal reimbursement by six cents for the first time in 15 years.  While it was mandated that the schools had to meet new nutrition standards in order to receive the meal increase, the new nutrition standards themselves were questionable.  Like me, you too might remember the House GOP in 2011 classifying pizza as a vegetable, or more specifically, allowing tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable to 'prevent overly burdensome' regulations!  You might also remember the asinine argument that surfaced at the same time that kids stuffing themselves with ketchup doused french fries were basically 'eating their vegetables'!  As they say, history repeats itself!  In essence, aside from the fact that the feds proved that weren't any better in 2011 than they were back in 1981 at telling the difference between fruits and vegetables (tomato is a fruit, duh), no noticeable change took place nutrition-wise.  And of course, the USDA under the Trump administration in 2020 famously had Michelle Obama get smoked on her achievement by allowing schools to reduce the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them license to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to students.  On her birthday!

I have to feel happy though, because my kid doesn't really like the unhealthy stuff.  Medha doesn't like cakes because they are too sweet and too "frostingy".  She'll eat chocolate once in a while if offered to her, but never ask for it herself.  She'll occasionally ask us to buy her Taco Bell's fiesta potatoes, but without their signature fake cheese sauce.  On occasion though, she flummoxes me by asking why a homemade potato roast curry isn't junk but a bowl of Taco Bell's fiesta potatoes is!

The Perfect Vacation

"The Perfect Vacation" is a construct as phantasmal as the elusive Sasquatch.  I have addressed this idea previously as well, and every vacation we undertake seems to only vindicate this hypothesis.  It is particularly uncanny how minor inconveniences quickly devolve into major impediments when on a vacation.  

Why this kolaveri, you ask?  Lemme tell you...

9:30 PM

We checked into the highway-side hotel in southern West Virginia.  The kids were still wide awake, so we were able to actually walk through the lobby, into the elevator, down the hallway, and into our room like regular humans, as opposed to our usual MO of skedaddling through the concourse like two kidnappers with two napping kids.  We entered our room and turned on the light.  The room was smaller than I had imagined, but it looked alright.  Pavana threw her customary what's-that-smell glance at me and I appeased her with my all-is-well expression.  No complaints there.  We quietly began unpacking for the night while the kids began their usual I-know-this-is-a-bed-but-I-will-pretend-this-is-a-trampoline jumping activity.  All certainly was well.  Up until 9:35 PM...

9:35 PM

It all started with a bathroom visitation.  You know how when you see a ball-type doorknob on the bathroom door, you automatically expect it contain a built-in lockset comprising of a lock button on one side?  Well, this doorknob had no lock button.  It looked exactly the same on both sides.  Not a big deal, I thought to myself, and came out and appraised Pavana of what I considered an insignificant shortcoming.  

That's when I received my first eye-roll.

9:50 PM

After substantial badgering and hounding, Medha finally decided to do us a favor by using the restroom and brushing her teeth.  When she was done, she came out pulled the bathroom door shut behind her.  Two minutes later, Pavana tried to to open the door.  It was locked!

"I need to pee", said Pavana irritably.

"So do I", said Medha.

Pavana and I looked at Medha, then at each other. 

"What did you do in the bathroom two minutes ago?", Pavana began interrogating Medha.

"And how did you lock the door before closing it behind you?", I added.

"Amma...", Medha began in her signature howl, "I was first trying to wash my hands but I couldn't find the soap.  Then I was looking for my toothbrush, but I couldn't find it.  So I came out to look for my toothbrush.  You never gave me the toothbrush and paste..."

"So you didn't brush either?"

"Amma... you..."

This wasn't going well.  Both of them had ignored the real problem.  I interrupted with: "Let me call the front desk".

I received my second eye-roll.

10:05 PM  

The receptionist was in our room inspecting the bathroom doorknob.  "There should be a hole for emergency unlocking...", she mumbled as she felt the doorknob.

"There's none.  I checked", I said, "and the inside didn't even have a lock button".

"That's not possible", she said.

"Lalit", Pavana interjected, "Mira needs to sleep.  It is late".

"Let me see if I can find the maintenance guy", said the receptionist.

"Please do", I said, "and please tell him that the doorknob has no lock".

"That's not possible", she said again as she walked away.

I received my third eye-roll.

10:20 PM

The lights in the room were off now and Pavana was trying to make Mira sleep.  The maintenance guy, the receptionist, Medha, and I were huddled around the doorknob like a bunch of evil scientists watching their guinea pig sprout a third ear or something.  "There should be a hole for emergency unlocking...", said the maintenance guy, feeling the doorknob.

"There's none.  I checked", I repeated and added again, "and the inside didn't have a lock button".

"That's not possible", the maintenance guy and the receptionist chorused.

"Lalit", Pavana called out from the darkness, "I'm trying to make Mira sleep.  Medha needs to sleep too."

"Appa, I need to pee", Medha joined in inaptly.

This disruption seemed to flip some switch in the maintenance guy's head, for he instantly produced a giant flat head screwdriver from somewhere, jammed it between the door and doorframe, and basically just muscled the door open like a barbarian.  I half expected him to start beating his chest and start shrieking in triumph, but instead he returned to his meek self.  "Here you go", he said and began walking away.

"Wait...", I called, "how do we lock the door?  There's no lock button!"

"That's not possible", chorused the maintenance guy and the receptionist again.

I sensed a fourth eye-roll cut through the darkness.

11:00 PM

By this time Medha was asleep, snoring softly like a cat.  Pavana was humming Mira's preferred one-note lullaby song into her half awake ears.  The white noise machine roared in one corner of the room.  The receptionist was long gone.  The maintenance guy however was still in our room, huffing and puffing, trying to install a new doorknob with a conventional lock-set.  It hadn't taken me more than a few seconds to convince him of the absence of any kind of lock mechanism in the original doorknob, but it was taking him forever to install the new doorknob.  By the time he had finished installing the rosette and the latch bolt, I had lost all patience.  The actual knobs on both sides were yet to be installed and for some reason he was sweating and gasping for breath.  The doorknob of Room 226 was clearly taking a toll on him.  Lest the dude should collapse under the intense strain of doorknob installation, I asked him to leave it half installed as is.  The dude cautioned me saying that since the spring loaded latch was installed without the doorknob spindle engaged, it would be impossible to open the door once closed.  DO NOT close the door, he warned.  We'll manage, I said impatiently.  He left.

10:00 AM the next day

"Front desk?", I yelled frantically into the phone, "my wife is locked inside the bathroom!"

Reasonably Foreseeable Misuse

When it comes to the toddler toys in our home, reasonably foreseeable misuse usually happens at the highest possible occurrence rate, causing the manifestation of hazardous situations that are unforeseeable to even the most experienced toy manufacturers.  Somehow, toys too are designed in such a way that our kids invariably misconstrue their intended uses and use environments.  Videlicet, this stroller, which is the most awkwardly sized baby buggy known to mankind.

This stroller belongs to the loot obtained by dint of Pavana's conquests on Facebook Marketplace, the nonpareil of the Marché aux Puces de internet based commodity economics.  The principal purpose of this stroller was ordained to be that of a simple playtime diversion for Mira wherein she would be expected to place members of her collection of stuffed simulations of little animals and humans in the stroller and wheel them around the house.  The amusing thing is that Mira used the stroller according to its intended use literally once.  Since then the stroller has only served purposes necessitated by other unrelated games.  For instance, last Friday she loaded the stroller with a small plastic duck, three magnet-tiles and some rocks from her rock collection (originally from our landscaping, which has been long decimated), and left it on the deck.  The poor stroller endured the weight of all these objects and stood quietly on the deck for two full days, weathering the harshest of suns and heaviest of rains.  On Sunday morning, Mira decided to bring the stroller back into the house, all wet and mucky.  She threw her choicest tantrum to convince us to not only let her ruin her outfit by sitting in the stroller amid all the muck but also have Medha ‘stroll’ her around the house like a politician being driven around on canvassing rounds!

Eight Minutes of Horror

“Are you sure?”, I asked under my breath.

“Dude, shut up…”, he retorted in a harsh whisper, “just follow me.  No one is gonna know!”

“I’m nervous…”

“Shut up!”

The two of us tiptoed up the last flight of stairs leading up to the roof of the school building.  Our eyes darted around anxiously as we climbed onto the roof.  We proceeded one step at time, making sure no one was watching us.  What made our covert operation seem all the more iniquitous was that it was being carried out in broad daylight.  Sweltering sunlight, to be exact.  But we had no option.  It had to be done.

It had all started the previous day.  With the school annual day function just a day away, one of our Std VII classmates had recklessly spilled two fat drops of water directly onto the school tabla dayan, the tonal head, thus bringing the pitch down unevenly.  The prudent thing to do at that juncture would have been to report the incident promptly to one of our teachers.  However, our tabla player, who was my partner and the fearless leader in the above covert operation, had made the executive decision to not report.  “काही तरी करू आपण (we’ll figure out a way)”, he had said.  The three of us had then put our heads together and tried to come up with some idea.  After a few minutes we had hit ourselves up against what we had thought was a brilliant scheme, viz. leaving the dayan under the afternoon sun because the water-spiller, who incidentally was also our harmonium player, had heard from somewhere that ‘उन्हात तबला चढतो (the tabla goes up in pitch under the sun)’.

“What kind of a traitor is he?”, I whispered loudly to my leader as I gingerly closed the stairway door on the roof, “this whole thing was his idea, and he chickens out now!”

“One more word out of you and I will tell Madam that it was your idea… now shut up!”, the fearless leader hissed back at me.

“Okay, okay…”

We found a sunny spot next to the water tank, placed the dayan there, and ran back down the stairs as quickly and quietly as we could.

Later that evening, when everyone was getting ready for the big event, the two of us, all dressed and neat combed etc., went up onto the roof secretly to retrieve the dayan, and lo, there it was!  Disaster staring at us right in our faces!  A gaping hole ran right through the middle of the dayan, bisecting the syahi (the black spot).  It turned out that our double-crossing water-spilling harmoniumist was absolutely right about the sun’s ability to tighten the head of the dayan, for it had tightened it enough to crack under the tension!

Once we returned, the fearless leader intercepted the water-spiller backstage and said certain things that I cannot type here (yes, Std VII kids are old enough!).  I stood about 10 feet away, my heart racing.  20 minutes later, the three of us were on stage.  We were all sweating.  The water-spiller leaned over and asked me the one question he shouldn’t have been asking on stage, especially after having practiced together that whole month: “Which Raag are you singing?”

I gave him a stern look and said in my mind all the things the fearless leader had said 20 minutes ago.

“अरे tension आलंय… समजून घे (Dude, I’m nervous… please understand)!”, he said.

All nerves, I started my alaap in Raag Bihag.  The water-spiller was so nervous that he couldn’t play anything constructive.  Instead he just held down Sa with a trembling finger.  Not the worst situation from a performance standpoint, I solacingly said to myself.  I managed to complete my alaap successfully.

Then, it began.

The moment I started the bandish Kaanhaa Jaa Re Jaa Re in Madhyalaya Teentaal, the fearless leader launched into a totally irrelevant Drut Ektaal on the cracked tabla.  I glared at him in horror.  Our Madam, who was standing in the wings slightly downstage from us started making hieroglyphic gestures toward us.  The severe look on her face sent a shiver down my spine.  There was no doubt that she had noticed the injury the dayan had endured.  The fearless leader, not so fearless anymore, panicked and suddenly changed the theka to an ultra slow Madhyalaya Teentaal.  As I was trying to decipher the weird sounding bols emanating from the cracked tabla to figure out which matra he was on and adjust the bandish line I was singing, I suddenly heard random notes coming from the direction of the water-spiller.  I quickly turned to him and found him frantically searching for the right key to play on the harmonium.  I had no idea what had happened.  Maybe his finger had slipped and he had forgotten where Sa was?   Madam had now gone beet red in her face and looked like she was about to explode.

The performance ended up being a painful 8 minutes of sur searching, bol searching, and soul searching.  The longest 8 minutes of my life without a doubt, not to mention the proper dressing down the three of us received post-performance!

For the next few days, I kept wondering why the water-spiller had played those ridiculously random notes during the performance.  It took me a good couple of weeks to finally learn that the water-spiller had extemporaneously come up with the brilliant idea of matching his Sa with the weird sound of the cracked dayan, and was trying to locate the note while the performance was going on!

Sports and Me

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Have you heard this adage?  The issue with such adages is the lack of measurability.  I mean, how far is the apple allowed to travel before the adage becomes void?  Is this distance a function of the prowess of the tree?

My mother, was quite the sportsperson in her day.  She participated in college cricket, basketball, and competitive rowing.  And from what I hear, she was quite good.  In other words, a tree with hefty prowess.  On the other hand, I, the apple, turned out to be quite the antithesis.

It was summer 1992.  Wimbledon season.  I had just turned 8.  Everyone was sitting in my grandparents' living room watching a nail-biting tiebreaker between Andre Agassi and Goran Ivanišević in the finals.  While everyone was intently discussing Ivanišević's killer serves and Agassi's energetic baseline play, I was busy sketching.  By the time Agassi thrashed Ivanišević in the fifth set, I had sketched the entire match in the form of a comic book.  I basked in my family's praise that entire evening.  Everyone probably thought that the match had ignited a passion for tennis in me and that they could now have me learn and start playing the sport.

But that never happened.  

A couple years later, when my parents realized that I was reluctant to play any sport, they decided to sign me up for badminton classes, which I ended up attending for all of two weeks.  I remember prancing aimlessly on the court with a bunch of wiry kids, much taller and stronger than me, as part of a dreary warm-up routine.  I also vaguely recollect getting yelled at for not being able to grasp (pun intended) the correct racquet gripping technique.  A couple months later when I was strolling nonchalantly down a busy street, my mind badminton-free after having quit the seminary, I unfortunately spotted my badminton tutor in the crowd.  She was buying tomatoes or something from a street vendor.  Having seen only her authoritarian form hitherto, it was weirdly unsettling to see her in the midst of a worldly task like vegetable shopping.  Needless to say, I panicked, turned, and bolted!  I could hear her call after me, "अरे, तू खेळायला का येत नाहीयेस…? (Hey, why are absconding from class…?)".  I did not dare to turn around!

Cricket, I have to admit, was a slightly different story.  Just like any other Indian kid, I was deeply deeply passionate about the sport.  It was pretty much the only sport I actually wanted to play.  Unfortunately I sucked at it.  Our apartment building, just like every other apartment building in India, had a bunch of prodigious cricketing talents; we had a 12 year old Kapil Dev, a 9 year old Steve Waugh, a 10 year old Sachin Tendulkar, and a 13 year old Vinod Kambli.  I, however, was Bhaichung Bhutia.  Because, I would panic when the 12 y.o. Kapil Dev bowled the tennis ball at me, and would end up kicking the ball instead of striking it with the bat!  My cricketing story is so pitiable that while my passion for the sport made me one of the organizers of my high school Std VIII cricket league, I was the worst player of the lot.  I was ignominiously known as a "wide-ball slow medium" bowler in high school cricketing circles.  My run up resembled that of a fast bowler, sort of like Allan Donald's run up, but when I released the ball, all the fielders would brace themselves to catch the ball even before it reached the batsman, because no one, including me, knew which way the ball would travel.  Every time I walked back to the top of my run-up with my head down in disgrace, I would wish I had somehow missed the match like RK Narayan's Swami!

Now that this apple has fallen fairly far away from the tree, one wonders about the fate of the next generation apples.  Thankfully, Pavana played competitive sport when she was younger.  The word on the street is that she was a track and field champion in her day.  I made the mistake of playing table tennis with her while on our honeymoon.  She crushed me.  Absolutely crushed me.  The hope is that Pavana's sporting aptitude somehow rubs off on Medha and Mira!

Bhima and the Clean Kitchen

A radiant youth of immense strength and beauty, possessing the magnificent aura of his father Vayu Deva dwelling in the foothills of Mount Meru and boundless might second only to his older brother Lord Hanuman, approaches King Virata of the Matsya kingdom and stands before him with a cooking ladle in one hand and a chef knife in another, illuminating the ambience by his splendor like the sun illuminating the world.  He is none other than the powerful Pandava prince Bhimasena, disguised as the cook Ballava as decreed by his brother Yudishthira against the backdrop of Agyatavasa, their 13th year of exile to be spent incognito.  King Virata astonished by Bhima's magnificence says, "O mighty gentleman, who art thou?  What doth thee seeketh, pray tell me!"

With the poise befitting a Kshatriya price but with the humility befitting his disguise, Bhima replies: "O righteous king!  I am a cook by name Ballava.  I am artful in preparing delicious dishes and seeketh employment in thy royal kitchen."

The surprised King states: "O Ballava, it does not seem like cooking is thy office.  Thou shineth in my presence like a thousand suns as if it be true thou were a mighty warrior prince!"

Upon hearing this, Bhima responds thusly: "Do not doubteth me, O King of Kings, as the great King Yudishthira himself has relished my food.  Whilst it be true there is no one equal to me in strength, pray be assured that I am thy cook and servant first."

"Very well!", says King Virata, "I appointeth thee as the superintendent of the royal kitchen.  Just be sure to weareth FDA approved latex free vinyl gloves whilst cooking!"

Praveen Kumar Sobti as Ballava the cook in BR Chopra's Mahabharat

Had the Mahabharata happened in the Kali Yuga instead of the Dwapara Yuga, this scene from the Virata Parva might have very well unfolded in this manner.  If you have perused some of the comments under cooking videos on Facebook these days, you wouldn't disagree with me, for there seems to be an unreasonable profusion of the hygiene police trolling the comment space of pretty much every cooking video and declaring that they wouldn't touch the food prepared in the video with a ten foot pole because the chef in question hadn't worn gloves.  To think that there is an entire population of trolls that has made it its vocation to textually articulate its collective abhorrence of gloveless cooks!  I mean, what kind of a preposterous fixation is this?  

Coming back to the Virata Parva, it is said that the ill-tempered Sage Durvasa once paid a surprise visit to the Matsya kingdom when Bhima alias Ballava was employed as a cook there.  Being unable to prepare a grand meal to appease the great Sage on such short notice, Bhima decided to improvise with whatever he had.  He threw together little bits of vegetables and prepared a new dish that became an instant hit.  This new dish was christened Avial.  Now imagine if the dangerous Sage Durvasa, the one who had cursed Goddess Saraswati Herself to become a river and Lord Indra Himself to lose all his powers, had somehow discovered that Bhima had not worn gloves that day while preparing the Avial, we wouldn't be celebrating this dish and serving it at weddings today!

What’s That Smell?

“What’s that smell?”

“Eh?”

“There is some smell!”

“Oh?”

“It’s like socks or something…

“Socks smell!  That reminds me of the computer lab in my college where…”

“Maybe it’s the carpet.  They are quite old!”

“… our shoes had to be… wait… eh… what…?”

“I want to get them changed, what do you think?”

“Eh?  Oh!  I… er…”

“Maybe we should just replace them all with hardwood…”

“Oh?”

This totally two-sided conversation repeats itself in our home approximately once every week.  Usually with no resolution. By the end of the conversation, one of us is generally lost in memories of smelly computer labs from one’s college days and the other is irrationally having a panic attack while forecasting the ruthless seizure of our house by giant mold patches.

Smell is a rummy business.  A human adult nose supposedly has millions of copies of about 400 intact smell receptor subtypes that are spatially distributed in a way that specific areas respond to pleasant and unpleasant odors.  Furthermore, the neuroanatomical link between olfaction and certain parts of the brain is so incredibly strong that odors can easily invoke memories and trigger strong emotions.  What makes these two physiological phenomena fascinating is that an unpleasant odor can sometimes paradoxically trigger a pleasant memory and vice versa.  For instance, the combined unpleasant scent of stale raw onions and rancid vinegary achaar reminds me of dinners with my family at a particularly dimly lit restaurant and on F.C. Road Pune.  Such restaurant visits were rare treats, and happened probably not more than 10 times in my entire childhood.  I remember I would walk excitedly into the dark dining room of the restaurant with my parents as the cold air conditioning would hit our faces along with "that restaurant smell".  I vividly remember eating malai kofta or some similar brown substance and pineapple raita with butter naan.  I also remember always wanting what my mother ordered instead of my own order.  Similarly, a particularly nice smelling perfume can trigger memories of an unpleasant person who would wear it.

I wonder if memories are triggered more readily if you have a particularly powerful olfactory sense.  Medha and I share this unfortunate blessing.  I have a sense of smell keen enough to not only identify what is cooking in the kitchen but also tell the cook of the day whether they over-salted or under-salted the dish.  Medha too has proven time and again that she can accurately guess what's for dinner by simply sniffing the air.  While Medha and I have olfactory sensibilities that are biased toward food smells, Pavana has an olfactory knack for picking out imminent unhygienic circumstances in her vicinity way more proactively than Medha or I could even imagine.  She is often found wandering around in the house with a crinkled nose, usually with a semi-planned home improvement conspiracy cooking in her mind, chanting "What's that smell... what's that smell..."

Curry

If you a member of the brown diaspora and carry a bloodline from forebears that have once roamed or are currently roaming the flavorsome regions east of the Mediterranean, or if you have had the privilege of roaming or growing up in the said regions, you have no doubt been bothered by the usage of the term "curry".  You have no doubt spent some cringeworthy moments of your life perusing the International Foods aisle at your local grocery store, reading the ingredients list on containers of pre-made "curry powder" or "curry paste" and found that they all contain a generic combination of coriander, cumin, turmeric, paprika, sugar, vinegar, along with the customary cocktail of eclectic spices like citric acid and E211 aka sodium benzoate.

While it has been made heard time and again that the concept of "curry" is a lie, we here at the coalition of disgruntled brown people understand why this concept has come to be.  We understand that food in India is so diverse that it changes every 100 km, and that the average non-subcontinent dweller is either too overwhelmed by this or is too lazy to learn the actual names of our dishes.  We understand that once upon a time in 1700s India, there was a prudish European proto-colonizer clansman who was somehow simultaneously enamored by the Tamil word kari (கறி) and the Indian practice of spicing food up, and decided to promptly appropriate the former and learn only certain convenient portions of the latter, giving rise to the novelty trend of "curried" everything back in his home country where even the queen, who incidentally had acquired in the form of a 'gift from India' (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-12670110) two Indian servants, would have dishes like "Currey the Indian Way" (https://www.secondshistory.com/home/victorian-curry-history) (yes, with the 'e') whipped up for her not infrequently.  We get it.  We also understand why some folks are surprised when we tell them that the "curry dish" they prepared by sprinkling the aforementioned "curry powder" onto a saucy canned tomato based stew like substance, delicious as it may have tasted, was not true Indian fare.  We are even almost ready to forgive this whole exercise of appropriation, just as we are almost ready to forgive the glorification of the very institution of colonialism.  And don't worry, we find racial slurs involving the word "curry" only mildly offensive; after all, "curry" isn't even a real thing!  

"Curry" doesn't scandalize us.  Does it bother us some?  Sure.  But would we wage a war just to cancel "curry"?  Probably not.  What truly is an outrage to us is the fact that this need to dumb down the names of multicultural dishes seems to apply more to Indian food than to other cuisines.  For instance, a modak becomes a "sweet dumpling" and a momo becomes a "savory dumpling", while ravioli is still ravioli and empanadas are still empanadas even though they are basically dumplings too.  The waiter in an Italian restaurant just asks you if you would like to order bruschetta, but the waitress in an Indian restaurant feels the need to ask if you would like an order of naan-"bread".  Let us make it very clear that phulkas are phuklas, not "balloon bread"; that chapatis are chapatis, not "whole wheat tortillas"; and that puris are puris, not "fried puffy Indian bread".  While we are at it, let us also make it clear that paneer is not "Indian cottage cheese".  Sambar isn't such a hard word to pronounce, try saying it instead of "Indian lentil stew".  Also, try saying chana masala or chhole; trust us, it's way simpler than "curried chickpeas in gravy".  And while we usually aren't that offended when Guru Dutt is called the "Orson Welles of India" or Aamir Khan is called the "Tom Hanks of India", we do sincerely ask you to stop calling vada pav the "Indian burger".  This kind of dumbing down becomes especially problematic when someone appropriates an Indian recipe in its entirety, and uses its dumbed down name as a means for absolution.  It's paratha, Ms. Tosi, not "flaky bread"!

(https://www.instagram.com/tv/CAGcL_bpuwN/)

Come to think of it, maybe "curry" must be cancelled.  Someday, maybe.  Meanwhile, the next time someone tells you curry smells, tell them they are right.  Curry does smell…

 of colonialism.

1.3 kilograms of Sugar

I consumed exactly 1.3 kilograms of sugar in my first week in the US as a tenderfoot international student from India.  That is 184 grams or 46 teaspoons each day!  Over 5 times the recommended maximum daily intake!  Why?  Because I subsisted on exactly two large McDonald's vanilla milkshakes per day for the entire week.  Why?  Because I didn't know how to cook and I didn't know how to order food.  Here's how this dreadful week happened.  

It was 11am on a hot August morning.  I had landed in the US the evening before and had slept for almost 12 hours in another Indian student's apartment.  The dude had fed me a remarkably spicy mushroom curry before I had crashed, and had given me a sermon on how he was known to be kind to new students but his roommate was an unfavorable soul.  As such, he had said it was imperative that I find my own accommodation and start making my own food at the earliest.  Like I said, I knew nothing about cooking back then.  So, I walked into a McDonald's, lunch on my mind.  Having witnessed the McDonald's revolution in 90s India, the only picture I had of this eatery in my mind was that of a swanky restaurant de choix of the well cologned haute monde among the youth, clothed in their newest attires purchased at mall or obtained from an affluent aunt 'from foreign', commemorating a birthday or a newly forged committed relationship of a flirtatious duo in the gang by compelling the implicated to treat them to McAloo Tikki burgers and milkshakes.  I couldn't go wrong with McD's, I told myself naively, and walked in.  

Imagine my immediate disillusionment when I was engulfed by a totally anticlimactic sensory panorama!  First, a strong untellable odor hit me in the face.  As I treaded over grimy floor, I could feel my shoes stick, presumably to the remnants of spilled soda.  The trash can next to the door was overflowing.  An elderly chap in tattered clothes suddenly emerged, seemingly out of thin air, and walked past me.  As the chap departed from my frame of vision, I could see him grin at me through half a dozen decayed teeth.  I surveyed the sitting area.  I spotted exactly one customer, a fellow with more hair on his cheeks than his head, huddled over the sports page of the Akron Beacon Journal.  The bearded sports enthusiast half glanced at me and returned to his newspaper.  

Not what I had envisioned.

Upon recovering from the initial shock, I walked up to the counter and ordered, almost by reflex,

"One veggie burger, please!"

The response:

"One whaaa....t?"

"Veggie.... burger...?"

"What's a wedgie bugger?"

A chuckle travelled from the direction of the bearded sports enthusiast.  I realized my folly.  I had used the 'w' sound in place of the 'v' sound, like many Indians do.  I quickly rectified the erroneous diction,

"Sorry, I meant, VEJJEE burger!"

"Oh veggies!  So you want a salad?"

"No no, I want a burger!"

"Bugger?"

I heard the bearded sport enthusiast's newspaper rustle.  He might have chuckled again, but had covered it up with a cough.  Again, I realized my folly.  I had dropped the R sound like a true protégé of my motherland's past colonial master, who for some reason had had no impact on this NE Ohio McD's cashier.  At any rate, I mended my order,

"Sorry, I meant VEJJEE BURRGERR!"

I'm pretty sure I sounded like a Brazilian or Chilean imposter this time, because at this juncture the bearded sport enthusiast began peering over his paper and at me unabashedly.  However, the cashier thankfully deciphered my words accurately this time.

"Oh burger!  So you want burger and a salad?"

"No salad.  Only burger.  Veggie."

"Sorry, I don't understand.  You want a burger.  And what about the veggies?"

"I want a veggie burger!"

"So a salad and a burger?"

I probably looked like I was about to scream.  The bearded sports enthusiast had now put down his paper completely and was watching the whole scene unfold as if he were watching some movie.  I avoided his gaze.

"I want a veggie burger.  A burger that is veggie!"

The look on the cashier's face told me she had never heard word 'veggie' being used as an adjective.  With a confused look, she asked,

"So you want just lettuce and tomatoes inside a bun?"

"I want burger also.  Vegetarian!"

Both the cashier and I realized that the word 'vegetarian' had been uttered for the first time in the last 5 minutes.  We stared at each other wide-eyed for almost 10 seconds.  Even the bearded sports enthusiast looked intrigued.  I began mentally kicking myself for not having ordered a vegetarian burger when I opened my mouth the first time, but I had high hopes that the cashier now knew exactly what I wanted, and would swiftly forge ahead with the order.  However, that wasn't to be.  This is what she said instead,

"I don't know what that means.  Sorry."

I probably again looked like I was about to scream.

"Vegetarian means no meat.  Please don't put meat in my burger.  I want a burger with no meat."

"I'm sorry I don't understand.  You want the burger but no bun with lettuce and tomato?  Is that a separate order?"

I took a deep breath and decided to snap out of this chakravyuha.

"Can I please have a large vanilla milkshake?"

And that is how my sugary week began!

Orthoepy

I am somewhat of a connoisseur of the imprecision of orthoepy.  The romance intrinsic to imperfect pronunciation is what adds spice to the spoken word.  Perfect elocution mein wo baat kahaan!  In my opinion, listening to flawless pronunciation and articulation is as boring as watching paint dry.  A quirky mutation to a word every so often not only puts some spirit into the discourse, but also provides individuality to the speaker, enabling them to leave a lasting impression.  This is true especially if the said speaker a community leader or teacher or someone in a position with leverage to mold the minds of the intellectual proletariat.  For instance, I have had a number of teachers, lecturers, and professors throughout my formative years, and while our current education system doesn’t foster Guru-shishya relationships like in the older days, let alone facilitate the neurons in the student’s brain to fire synapses to form specific memories of individual teachers, lecturers, or professors, the ones I remember the best are the ones that bombarded my ears with unorthodox pronunciations.  These educators had such an impact that the only way I could study the subjects they taught was to loudly read their class notes out to myself in the same accent and the same pronunciations used by them.  There was no other way.  In the days leading up to a semester exam, you could be sure to find me sitting huddled over at my table reciting stuff like,

"The firsht ilayment in the payriodic table of ilayments is hydrozan...", 

"Newton's equation of vhiscosity is based on shearing strayss ijhequal to phorce divhided by area...", 

"The 8085 is a microprocessor cheep manufactured by Intale company in 19sheywunty6 (1976) with a 8 beet daataa bus...", etc.  

Regional influences on pronunciation are often so pronounced, pun intended, that any resultant orthoepic transgressions get assimilated into the local vernacular with minimal resistance and with such overwhelming pervasiveness that the mispronunciation becomes the norm.  For instance, I still say phurnaas for furnace and shroobery for shrubbery, thanks to my college professor who taught Elements of Mechanical Engineering and my school English teacher respectively, both of whom were incidentally among the best teachers I have had!

Orthoepy is subjective.  I find it very pretentious when someone corrects someone's diction or someone feigns being unable to comprehend what someone said just because they pronounced a word differently.  I find it ironic that someone would berate someone because they say comfortayble when they themselves say cumfterble!  Whether you call it an aalmund, an aahmund, or an awwmund, an almond is an almond.  Whether you call it an egg, an ayg, or a yegg, the predicament faced by a vegetarian when it is served to them doesn't diminish.  Whether you call it a coopun, a cuepawn, or a khoopahn, you can still save some $$ if it hasn't expired.  And finally, whether you call it Mahaabhaarat or Magaabaaradham (thanks to the Kogul phenomenon, read about it here), the Pandavas still won the war against the Kauravas!

Patriarchy

Leo Coffee Ad - AR Rahman

If you are an ARR fan, you are probably aware of his pre-Roja ad jingle work and probably know this 1991 Leo coffee advertisement too well.  If you are like me, you probably have the avant garde bass line (avant garde even for the time when Ilayaraja's eclectic bass riffs reigned supreme) committed to memory and have tried to notate that psychedelic sounding key flute bit that provides beautiful contrast to the crisp tone of Veena Pacha's veena lead.  If you are at sea reading this, do yourself a huge favor and watch this ad.  You will see ARR's genius shine through so clearly that you will almost ignore the blatant sexism in the story depicted in the ad.  If you are saying, "what sexism?", and I don't blame you for it if you are, do go back and watch the ad again!  In case you are still missing out on the nuances, let me break it down for you.  Here's how it all goes down.

The lady of the house is the first to wake up.  She hurries down the stairs while tucking in the end of her pallu, indicating that she is ready to commence executing her long list of responsibilities for the day.  Clearly, she has already showered and is exuding an air of madi and aachaaram.  First, she lights the lamp.  She is then seen drawing a pretty complex, almost Van Gogh level kolam (rangoli) next to the front doorstep.  Suddenly she remembers the coffee filter in the kitchen and rushes to it.  Now here the camerawork is meticulous as it shows her extract the bag of Leo coffee from the shelf, place it on the counter, scoop up some kapi podi in a spoon, transfer it to the coffee filter, pour hot water, and secure the lid of the coffee filter.  Ironically, this task probably took the least amount of time compared to most of the lady's other morning responsibilities; which at this point are far from being completed because she is immediately seen rushing back out the front door and performing a short puja for the tulsi in the courtyard.  Next, she is seen walking back into the house with a big bowl of jasmine flowers, likely plucked individually and carefully from the flower garden.  She then sits and makes mini jasmine garlands, presumably for all the ladies of the house and last for herself.  Finally she gets a few minutes to dry her hair, but even that she has do while walking back hurriedly to the kitchen.  The meticulous camerawork resumes as she retrieves the first degree decoction from the coffee filter and transfers it to a tiny little designer coffee pitcher; an unnecessary step but no doubt performed under instructions by her mother-in-law or whoever, as it is a family custom aka "namma aatthula idhu thaan sampradayam" or some such drivel.  The pitcher is so tiny that she has to probably repeat this step for every family member that drinks coffee.  She then proceeds to pour the decoction from the pitcher to a tumbler and mix it with hot milk.  At this point, the dude, her husband, finally comes out of the bedroom holding a newspaper.  All he does at this point is take in a whiff of the coffee aroma and eke out an obnoxious "hmmm", approving his wife's coffee making skills.  In the next scene, the dude is seen sitting at the table engrossed in his newspaper, completely oblivious to all the elbow grease put in by his wife around the house before he manifested like royalty.  His wife, now decked up with a couple of the jasmine garlands she had made earlier, likely in order to look presentable in front of her husband lest he cared enough to glance at her, comes and serves him the coffee with the requisite amount of respect, bhavyam, meekness, admiration, and what not.

Patriarchy and misogyny are so ingrained in our social fabric that we don't even see it.  Here's a meme based on a scene from the show F.R.I.E.N.D.S. I recently came across.  This meme basically illustrates our inability as a society to understand the difference between patriarchy and kalacharam or culture, however granularly broken down and explained to us.  Many, for example, still don't find anything wrong with the below tagline.

Now, I hear you saying, "but that Leo Coffee ad was 30 years ago!".  Yes, agreed.  But honestly, how much do you think has changed in the last 30 years?  Granted, Prestige did eventually get on the wokeness bandwagon and change biwi to apnon, but I guarantee you, if you took a survey and asked people if they truly understood why this change was necessary, you will get mostly second-rate responses.  Here’s another example.  Remember Seagram's Imperial Blue's series of problematic "Men Will Be Men" ads?  If you have forgotten, here's a cherry-picked 'gem'.

Seagram's Imperial Blueu Ad

See the trouble with this ad?  The dude tries to grab a conventionally attractive woman's attention by pretending to help an old woman cross the street.  Once he finds this to be an effective tactic, he takes the old woman in the opposite direction to impress the next conventionally attractive woman, effectively making the old woman slog for him so that he could satisfy his ego and lust.  And when was this ad made, you ask?  As late as 2020!

We as a society have a long way to go.  And the problem isn’t confined to just Indian society.  It isn’t even confined to just adult society.  This problem is prevalent everywhere in some shape or form.  Even in children’s books!  For example, if you read the popular book series The Beranstein Bears, you will see that while the stories educate kids about sharing, manners, kindness etc. through the various conflicts and their resolutions between brother and sister bears, they almost always show mama bear busy cooking or cleaning while papa bear is relaxing and watching TV or something.  What is needed, at a minimum, is conversation.  Unfortunately there are still things that are deemed inappropriate and, in some cases, downright hazardous in public discourse.  Meaningful exceptions like the Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen (check it out here - https://m.imdb.com/title/tt13299890/) are few and far between!

The green suitcase

इतिहास गवाह है that I am not one to shirk responsibility for the mishaps the family encounters every so often in the course of sojourns undertaken by road or otherwise.  As I commence the dreadful exercise of making public some of the choicest of these mishaps, let me first allay any fears the reader perusing this post may have developed on happening upon the word “mishap”.  Rest assured, none of these mishaps have been safety related, so the reader may breathe easy.  That is of course unless the reader considers hypertension unleashed as a result of inter-spousal squabbling a safety hazard!

A 10 year old contretemps that falls in this category comes to mind.  The event occurred in the wee hours of a 2011 summer morning that followed a night of plotting and scheming an excursion at Put-in-Bay.  Well, may be not the wee hours, but the hours that failed to exhibit the weeness of the hours that preceded them and became the very reason for the contretemps by virtue of not exhibiting the said weeness.  In other words, both Pavana and I woke up late enough to ruin one of the first trips we had planned as a newly married couple.  Assuredly, I took sole responsibility for not ensuring that the alarm was set to the proper time!

A slightly more recent event involved a trip to Chicago, effectuated primarily to assist Pallavi and Prakash move apartments.  This jaunt included some common friends, and contained some glamorous moments like driving a 26 foot U-Haul truck through narrow alleyways and the traffic infested streets of Chicago downtown, and some slightly unglamorous ones like almost dropping heavy furniture down the duct next to the stairway while trying to “pivot” per the advice provided by a certain fictional paleontologist named Ross in a popular TV sitcom.  While the moving drill ended up having more or less a favorable outcome, evidenced by a satiating post-move dinner consisting of Lou Malnati’s Chicago style deep dish pizza, the trip consisted of two events that can be ranked as being mishaps.  I found the first one rather easy to take complete responsibility for, for all it was was a dent between the hood and the driver’s side longitudinal beam of our Honda Odyssey minivan caused by careless parking and my inability to spot a rather large trash can while backing the van out of the SpotHero parking spot.  The second one however was a little harder to take sole responsibility for.  After all there were multiple individuals involved in the decision to pick that particular SpotHero parking spot for our friend’s minivan, so how could I solely merit condemnation as culpable negligence when the minivan was towed under the citation of unlawful parking causing financial damage of $250 and extending our trip by half a day due to the time lost as a result?

The most recent of these mishaps is one that we are currently ploughing through.  It started with a Friday of packing for a week long Chicago trip.  3 suitcases.  The green one with all our clothes and toiletries, the pink one with Medha’s violins and music notes, and the blue one with blankets and comforters.  Everything was hunky-dory until there were just 5 minutes before we had to leave.  The minivan’s trunk was chock-full with laptop bags, Medha’s school bag, Mira’s toys, Mira’s stroller, a bag with our lemon rice dinner, another bag filled with snacks, and 2 out of 3 suitcases because the green one was waiting to be filled by Pavana with her clothes.  The kids, all dressed and ready, were playing in the driveway, and I sat in van and adjusted the phone GPS as we waited for Pavana to get ready.  Suddenly, Pavana’s head peeped out of the garage door.

“You didn’t leave any space for me in the green suitcase!”, she yelled between shallow breaths.

“Don’t come here, if Mira sees you she won’t allow me to carry her!”, I retorted, rather insensitively, now that I look back on my response.

“Why would you stuff the suitcase like this?”, she continued.

“Go away! Don’t show your face here.... look, Mira is already crying...”, I too continued.

Pavana’s head disappeared.

“Can’t do one thing properly....”, her voice trailed off as she went back into the house.

The stage for flaring tempers had been set perfectly.

“What thing?!  One thing?  What do you mean I can’t do one thing?  I did many things.  I do so many things...”, I bounded back into the house carrying a crying Mira in my arms, “...and I need to pee before we leave, so you have to take Mira from me!”

“Keep her there na!”

“Where?”

“What where?  Why can’t you see the context and figure out what I’m saying?”

“What??”

“Ayyooo, keep her in the car seat na!!”

“”Then say it clearly na!!”

“Lalit, I give up!!”

A few minutes later, the minivan was on the highway.  Tempers had either subsided or had been diffused due to Pavana and I getting on the same team against Medha’s constant whining to play her favorite songs.  Six hours later, we were parked in Pallavi and Prakash’s driveway.  Medha, Mira, and Pavana were all upstairs, mostly asleep.  Pallavi and I were almost done unloading the car.

“All suitcases done?”, I asked.

“Yes.  Both suitcases done”, Pallavi replied.

“No no, there should be 3 suitcases.  Which ones went inside?”

“Pink and blue...”

“What about the green one?”

“What green one?”

“Wait, where’s the green suitcase?”

“I didn’t see any green suitcase!”

Suddenly it dawned on me!  The squabble Pavana and I had had before leaving thad cost us exactly one suitcase full of a week’s worth of clothes, which was now sitting neatly packed in our bedroom back in Cleveland!

Double-Edged Deliberations

I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink for the 27th time that month.  There it was.  Not many had noticed it.  Yet, it was unmistakable.  My heart stupidly pounded with needless elation.  'Shave it off', said the devil on my left shoulder, 'you can use your dad's razor, you is a big boy now'.  'Don't', said the angel on my right, 'that would be wrong, and besides, if you shave it off, how would you flaunt your new upper-lipholstery to your friends?'  I sighed and reached for my father's Wilkinson Sword double blade cartridge razor.  My peripheral vision confirmed that I was alone.  With a trembling grip, I touched the cool blade to the skin below my nose.  I had seen my father do it twice a day for as long as I could remember, so I was pretty sure I knew the technique.  I closed my eyes.  With the feeling that I was about to commit a major familial misdemeanor, I applied the first shaving stroke of my life.  

That evening in the winter of 1996, I got a proper dressing-down from my father for using his razor; everyone had noticed the fresh laceration on my suddenly light-toned upper lip.  That same evening in the winter of 1996, I was also sent to the neighborhood provision store with ₹12 to buy my own Wilkinson Sword double blade cartridge razor.  It was a double rite of passage for me entering the coveted state of adulthood, although I had pretty much forced my way into it by committing the above crime.

For all the exhilaration and head rush I had experienced at the time of my first shave, my facial hair pruning journey so far has ended up being a bromidic story, one of retrogradation of sorts, with the exception of some embarrassing periods of my life when I was inexplicably convinced that a mustache or a goatee was appropriate.  On the whole I can confidently say that my adult life hitherto has seen a greater percentage of days spent with an unshaven Neanderthal visage than those with a clean shaven well-bred look.  This percentage has ballooned specifically in the last year or so due to the lockdown/work-from-home situation, the only justifiable reasons for shaving being the occasional visits to the office and Facebook Live concerts every once in a while.  

And the reason I say that my shaving journey has been a story of retrogradation is that while the rest of the shaving world has been busy upgrading their equipment to include fancy shaving foams, gels, and cartridges with more and more blades (cartridges with up to 6 blades are available these days), I have downgraded myself to using shaving soap in a mug, a faux badger shaving brush, and an old fashioned single blade safety razor; you know the heavy kind made entirely out of metal, the kind that you have probably seen your grandfather shave his whiskers with, the kind that you could salvage blades from to sharpen your pencils.  I do have an economical case for this choice though.  A lifestyle relying on old fashioned blades is certainly a lot cheaper than the conventional multi-blade cartridge based way of life.  For example, a 100 pack of Astra blades cost me a mere $8 on Amazon and will last me all of 4 years (@ 2 blade changes per month) as opposed to $30 for 15 pack of Gillette Mach 3 cartridges that usually last a mere 15 months (@1 cartridge change per month); yielding a staggering 91.667% savings rate!  

Based on this technologically devolving trend, don't be surprised if by the time I am ready to dip into my 401k for retirement, I downgrade myself to the super old-fashioned straight blade razor; you know the kind an Indian barber would apply to your neck as Altaf Raja unapologetically sang on Vividh Bharati's FM station on the transistor radio behind you.  After all, this humble उस्तरा uses only one half of a blade at a time, the economics of which would allow me to save at an astonishing rate of 95.833% relative to conventional cartridges!  Unless of course I fall prey to social pressure to develop some sort of midlife crisis, begin donning leather pants, and start riding a Harley cross-country while sporting a long grey beard.  

Book Reviews - Sapiens and Fast Food Nation

Although I used to read a lot as a teenager, I grew up a persnickety reader.  I would almost exclusively read only fiction, and I stuck to the typical mystery books symptomatic of my adolescence.  Sure, I read some Wodehouse here and R.K. Narayan there, but my brain essentially binged on the Hardy Boyses and Hercule Piorots.  I am not talking these books down, mind you.  These are some of the greatest novels written.  Even in adulthood, my go to books have all been fiction; Wodehouse, Ayn Rand, Robin Cook, John Grisham etc.  It has taken me a lot of time and effort to branch out to non-fiction.  I have been spending the last few weeks trying to find my niche in the non-fiction macrocosm.  After suffering through some agonizingly dry financial guidance and self help type of books, I finally found two non-fiction books that hit the spot for me - 

The first book, "Sapiens" (ISBN 9780062316097), written in 2011, is an incredible account of the egregiousness of our species, Homo Sapiens, or the member species 'Sapiens' of the genus 'Homo'.  Author Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, strikes a chord right off the bat by impressing upon the reader that various species belonging to the genus 'Homo' (which Harari collectively calls 'Humans' ) have existed for about 2.4 million years and that our current species 'Sapiens' have existed for only 150,000 years, a mere 6% of the total historical timeline of humankind.  The book compartmentalizes this timeline into a series 'Revolutions', namely, the 'Cognitive Revolution' that began 70,000 years ago marking the beginnings of ingenuity of thought we associate with humans today, the 'Agricultural Revolution' that began 11,000 years ago when humans started moving away from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming, the 'Scientific Revolution' that began 500 years ago, the 'Industrial Revolution' that began 250 years ago, the 'Information Revolution' that began 50 years ago, and the current 'Biotechnological Revolution'.  Although Harari sounds a bit presumptuous when he says the current revolution will lead to the annihilation of humans by bioengineered 'post-humans', he does embed a wealth of thought provoking narrative as part of the discussion of each revolution.  For instance, how the 'imagined order' of religion, money, laws, human rights, government etc. invented by sapiens enables us to live in harmony and how the same 'imagined order' acts as the impediment to this very harmony, how this order organizing our lives exists only in our imagination by living only in the material world and is yet inter-subjective and shapes our desires, how agriculture was essentially a 'Faustian bargain between humans and grains' meaning that 'we did not domesticate wheat, it domesticated us', and how the fundamental structure of our emotions and desires has remained the same over billions of years; '...today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah...', leading to the significant proportion of the world's population constantly crave sugar and fat, the sine qua non for today's obesity epidemic.  As part of the timeline, Harari also addresses pivotal aspects like the development of language, the evolution of polytheistic and monotheistic religions (although I felt he could have addressed Hinduism a little better), the evolution of money, the proliferation of empires, the maturation of trade and capitalism, etc.  An arresting read for sure.

The second book "Fast Food Nation" (ISBN 9780060838584), written by American investigative journalist Eric Schlosser is a polemic against the American (and now global) fast food industry.  Extremely compelling and at times disturbing, the book is an attempt at addressing the different pieces of the surprisingly complex puzzle that produces a typical fast food meal.  As I understand it, this book was the first of its kind, so while it is by no means a comprehensive look at the fast food industry, it is a great start.  The book starts off with almost biographical accounts of some of the pioneers of this industry viz. Carl N. Karcher of Carl's Jr, Richard and Maurice McDonald and Ray Kroc of McDonald's.  Schlosser also discusses the complicated relationship between Ray Kroc and Walt Disney, and the role Disney played in developing the ominous marketing strategy of advertising to kids to maximize profits, a method that ultimately became the name of the game in the fast food industry.  Schlosser estimated that Americans would have spent shockingly more than $110 billion in 2000 as against $6 billion in 1970 (I have not researched on what the actual figure was in 2000 or what the figure is in the current year), the economics of which have lead to scarcity of fresh food but an overabundance of chemical-laden unhealthy food.  Schlosser calls this the 'McDonaldization' of the planet.  The book addresses topics like the economics of franchising, meatpacking and manufacturing practices, and the pyramidal structure of the business behind fast food (containing a very interesting account of J. R. Simplot, the potato baron).  Schlosser talks about why a McDonald's fry tastes so good and how chemical components contribute to this.  In a true documentary style, Schlosser chronicles some heart wrenching accounts of the lives of ranchers, workers in the meatpacking industry, and the animals that are slaughtered.  A lot of pages are spent critiquing the meatpacking and slaughtering practices.  A particularly gut wrenching section is where the author describes a visit to a slaughter house.  Beyond all the blood and gore he describes, what really impacted me was the way he portrays how cattle are ushered into the facility in a single file line, each animal wondering where it is being transported to next, only to get zapped by a stunbolt gun prior to getting slaughtered.  Schlosser also addresses the rise of E coli and ties it to the centralization of the meatpacking and slaughtering industry.  Since the book was written back in 2001, and was essentially an enlargement of a Rolling Stone article by Schlosser in 1999, one wouldn't be imprudent to assume that the information contained might be a bit dated.  Surely things aren't so bad anymore, right?  Or have they become worse?

Pi Day

You could wrap a string around the edge of your favorite coffee mug, measure the length of the string (C), measure the diameter of your coffee mug (d), and use the equation π = C/d.  Alternately, you could use Ramanujan's equation 1/π = {(√8)/9801} Σ_(n=0)^(∞) [{(4n)!/(n!)^4}{(26390n + 1103)/396^4n}].  Your neighborhood pizza joint couldn't care less.  Come the fourteenth of March, they do however strangely want their clientele to feign solidarity with Archimedes of Syracuse for exactly one day and use that as an excuse to pad their arteries with grease from cheesy pies at discounted rates.  After all, it is Pi Day!  It's a harmless seasonal business strategy, they say, notwithstanding the part sophistry played to the ego of their patrons to make them feel like intellectual blue blood.  And once the cortisol juices start flowing, the customer loses the ability to reason rationally.  He falls for the glossy ads that manifest in his mailbox exactly one day earlier, replete with photographs of a cheesy slice breaking away from a pie with an ample cheese pull, conveniently letting slip from memory another Pie Day (note the e after the i, National Pie Day is Jan 23 started by Charlie Papazian) just a couple months ago when he had fallen a similar glossy ad depicting a sweeter cousin from the pie family.  After all, in today's climate of dietary indiscretion, a "just because" indulgence (as the American Pie Council puts it) is simply a click away.  As easy as pie!

If you would like to truly experience Pi Day, visit https://www.piday.org/.  It is a pretty fun website and seems to have been built primarily for school kids.  Check out the "What is Pi" and "Celebrate Pi" tabs.  Also check out the "Calculators" tab, which not only has pi related calculators but also an annuity calculator and compound interest calculator.  Those who find more joy in edible pies may visit http://www.piecouncil.org/.

A knife that doesn’t cut it

It's a Friday afternoon.  A subliminal hankering to binge indiscriminately on chaat lies in wait of sundown.  The Friday sundown.  The sundown that is indicative of the culmination of an entire week of dietary policing.  The monomaniacal mind rapidly checks off the items needed for the assuagement of this idée fixe.  Puris - check.  Soaked and frozen white peas - check.  Tamarind-date chutney - check.  Mint chutney - check.  Onions, cilantro, barik sev - check, check, and check.  As much as the mind prognosticates the ambrosial explosion of different flavors and textures in the mouth, it also looks forward to the assembly process with equal, or possibly more, eagerness.  It can almost see the chef's knife effortlessly slicing through a crisp onion revealing perfectly concentric layers of successive pink gradations, hear the 400 bpm cadence effected by the swift chopping action breaking down the onion to a fine brunoise, smell the fresh and citrusy aroma of the cilantro as the knife slices through the stems, imagine the almost silent sizzle arising from the succulent ingredients perfectly soaking only the uppermost layer of crunchy half broken puris while keeping everything below still crunchy, and visualize the Euclidean space that is the final dish with delicious fractals of all taste groups that would ultimately manifest with an equal balance in every spoonful.  The said mind can almost hear a 100 piece symphony orchestra playing Strauss’ Blue Danube, or Voleti garu's Surutti raga alapana with MS Gopalakrishnan on the violin, depending on taste.  However, there is one little thing that is holds back the the proprietor of the said mind from forging ahead with the above plan de action.

A ridiculously blunt chef's knife!

Over the course of one's life, one picks up sundry skills from a random miscellany of vocations.  These seemingly unrelated skills then uncannily come in handy at indiscriminate times, sometimes in isolation and sometimes in combinations, to not only serve to fulfil micro goals of life, but also provide some sort of gratification to one's mind.  One such curious skill I picked up during my days of employment at a sandwich joint was vegetable cutting.  Although not really needed on the job, the kindly African American cook in the back kitchen schooled me in many knife cuts for vegetables.  In a matter of weeks, she ensured that I had gained considerable mastery over the julienne, allumette, brunoise, dice, slice, and mince cuts, albeit without knowing the names!  She also did not fail to emphasize the prerequisite of having a well sharpened chef’s knife that could deliver these cuts with finesse and with minimal pressure.  The knife’s weight, not the cutter’s strength, must make the cut, she would say.

Fifteen years later, cutting vegetables remains one of my chief de-stressers.  There is something about the exhilaration derived from a perfect cut through a crisp bell pepper, when coupled with the knowledge that vegetable cutting has a greater contribution quotient toward running a household than other mainstream de-stressers such as watching television or scrolling down aimlessly on your Facebook feed, that greatly helps decompress guilt-free.  However, I have to sheepishly admit that I never spent any time understanding the art of sharpening knives.  Cutting vegetables with a blunt knife is akin to whittling on a stick with a paring knife and can ironically deliver more cuts to your finger than to the vegetable.

It’s that Friday afternoon again.  As the mind vacillates between abandoning the chaat plan and subjecting my fingers to a life on the (blunt) edge, the bell rings.  An Amazon package has been delivered.  And lo and behold, there lies nestled inside a mantle of styrofoam - a knife sharpener!

Bhai jaise Muscles

The word bhai carries numerous connotations.  The most overbearing one among these is relative to a certain shirtless, jean-panted, guitar wielding individual gamboling around in the midst of a dozen men clad in coral pink tunics to a callow vocalization of O... O... Jaane Jaanaa.  In the late 90s, i.e. the era when this song was somewhat of a rage, the said bhai had not only established a strong foothold for himself within the elite clan of Bollywood Khans, but had also demonstrated that bulging biceps and firm pecs, carefully waxed for effect, were often more important a factor than skillful acting to be a successful "hero".  The bhai had such a persuasive impact over the psychology of the male populace that city gyms were thronged with hoards of amorphic males desirous of getting their anatomies chiseled into more respectable forms.  The bhai fever hadn't spared me and my best friend Amit either.  We would both bike to our neighborhood gym, me on my Atlas city bike and Amit on his BSA SLR, discussing the acting skills of a different Khan in the film Kuchh Kuchh Hota Hai, which was another late 90s phenomenon.  The Bollywood craze and gym goals of the male community were so intertwined that even our instructor Rajesh Sir would motivate us through our weight lifting reps with references to the bhai and occasionally to a popular Bollywood paaji known for his ढाई किलो के हाथ and the fact that त्याने त्याची बॉडी powder खाऊन नाही बनवली ("powder" being the vernacular for steroids).

My stint at Rajesh Sir's gym lasted exactly one summer.  That was the beginning of my noncommittal love affair with gyms.  Two years later, I joined a certain Shetty Sir's gym with a different group of friends.  Shetty Sir was an affable, compassionate, uncle-type instructor with amply pudginess around the waist but with brawny arms as strong as iron bands, demonstrative of his commitment to both fitness and his family business of Udupi restaurants.  Bollywood by this time had seen in the film Kaho Na Pyar Hai the arrival of a tall "hero" who not only had the biceps the bhai had blazoned a few years ago, but also had the features of a Greek God and could dance like the original master of dance did in Mukkala Muqabla.  While the boys found in this "hero" their new motivation for muscle building and indulged in frivolous discussions regarding the possibility that this new "hero" had taken bodybuilding lessons from the bhai and dancing lessons from the said dance master, Shetty Sir, the gentleman that he was, would motivate us by comparing weight lifting to physical labor and reminding us of how appropriately and aesthetically built many physical laborers were, and at the same time illustrating to us how privileged we were to be able to afford a safe environment in his gym to work on fitness as opposed to the average physical laborer who was exposed to hazardous situations every moment on the job.  He was also a staunch proponent of Yoga and taught us large number of asanas.  Eat healthy and exercise hard, Shetty Sir would say.

My stint at Shetty Sir's gym too lasted exactly one summer.  It was more than half a decade later when I entered a gym again, this time at UAkron, although I took advantage of the gym more for badminton and racquetball than for lifting weights.  Since then I have sporadically held gym memberships with American gym chains, but never engaged with any instructors or paid the gyms enough visits to say that I am a regular gymmer.  I have found that the first part of Shetty Sir's advice regarding eating healthy is relatively easy to implement with vegetarian diet and controlled eating, but the following the second part of his advice regarding exercising hard has been particularly challenging over the years.  Pavana and I even purchased an elliptical as part of an attempt to make exercise part of our daily routine, but the only exercise derived from the elliptical was when assembling it at the time of purchase, carrying it when we moved from the apartment to our home, and disassembling it when we sold it last year.  I do try to exercise every once in a while by going for a walk or executing a Suryanamaskar here and a Chakrasana there.  While I recognize that all all this amounts to an unsatisfactory amount of exercise, life has thankfully not been reduced to the point where I would tighten my glutes once a day while sitting on a chair and claim that exercise for the day is done.  Not yet, at least.

Swashbuckling Gastronomy

My first experiment with cooking was when I was eleven or twelve.  "Raita".  I even wrote down the recipe and all.  If I remember it correctly, it had yogurt, salt, raw oil, and raw mustard seeds (because somehow salt in yogurt would cause an exothermic reaction and heat the oil to chemically produce tadka?  I don't know).  My parents must have felt really sorry for me, as they decided to buy me a book titled "Cooking for Children" immediately after this.  Roughly a decade later when I moved to the US for college, cooking became more of a necessity and less of a देखो मेरा बेटा खाना बना लेता है.  That is when I made my very first serious dish - aloo curry.  Although it involved nothing upward of nuking some frozen French Fries in the microwave with garam masala, I felt proud that I could make something to fill my stomach.  That was in the fall of 2006.  By the time winter came, I had become savvy enough to celebrate Pongal with a bowlful of sakkarai pongal.

Apart from guidance from my mother every now and then, my current culinary competence is a result of copious empirical trials with my roommates in the bachelor’s kitchen during my Akron days.  From adding biryani masala and cheese to ramen, to sprinkling grated raw potatoes on frozen paratha to make a paratha-hashbrown, to making kadhi with wheat flour because besan was costly, to sautéing a store bought garden salad with random masalas to make some sort of jalfrezi (and learning in the process that lettuce turns nasty when heated), to smearing rava kesari onto a nonstick pan and slow-roasting it for 2 hours to create a sweet rava papad, to converting overcooked kanda pohe into a dal like substance, to reducing tomato sauce to a thick paste to roll into tomato laddoos, my roommates and I have seen and done everything would give Gordon Ramsey a stroke.  I strongly believe that it is because of living through all this irrationality that I have acquired the discerning wisdom needed to appreciate a good recipe.

While today I can whip up dishes that taste at least semi-authentic, I sometimes feel like going back to basics and making a ketchup sandwich I learned to make from the "Cooking for Children" book; ketchup smeared between two buttered slices of bread.  I have specific memories of making myself this sandwich and eating it while reading a Garfield comic book.  As kooky as it might sound (the sandwich I mean), it's a decent snack.  If you would like to try it, here's a valuable piece of advice from the book: The butter prevents the bread from soaking in ketchup and becoming soggy, so don’t skimp on the butter!

Valentine's Day 2021

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day.  A day spent walking around the house and picking up heart shaped scraps of paper, some fully and some incompletely colored in pink, some with and some without note "Happy Valentine's Day", "I love you Amma", or "I love you Appa", and one with a cryptic message: "I love Shrew" accompanied by a pink marker sketch of a weird tadpole-like creature.  Valentine's Day is a big deal for Medha, mostly because it has been made a big deal by her school teachers, classmates, and other friends.  Contrastively however, Valentine's Day meant nothing to me growing up.  There was a brief period during college days when it turned into an occasion of a somewhat lukewarm significance, but even then, Days like Rose Day and Tie & Saree Day asserted more gravity among college goers seeking indulgence in kittenish flirtation and coquetry than Valentine’s Day did.  Besides, Valentine’s Day shindigs in India were generally coincident with combatant remonstration by the moral police, so participating in said shindigs came with an inherent sense of shame.  

My view of Valentine's Day has remained largely apathetical.  I didn't have much of an opinion relative to it while in India, and I don't maintain any position on it now after moving to the US either.  One thing that does strike me is the ubiquity of its celebrations in the US and the equitable emphasis given to connotations beyond the romantic, essentially confuting the very basis of the anger nurtured by the aforesaid moral police in India.  That being said, there is one custom that neither Pavana nor I have been able to get on board with.  A custom that is central to Valentine’s Day, and any other day of celebration of love for that matter.  And that is gifting each other worldly paraphernalia like roses, chocolates, and the like.

Speaking of gifting, a wise memester (or is it memesmith?) characterizes the journey of love as the evolution over time of botanic purchases for your partner in love.  Quite accurate, in my opinion.  Couples do evolve over time.  For instance, fifteen years ago, as juvenile daters who were in decent amount of love but only vaguely aware of each other’s likes and dislikes, Pavana and I would buy each other the objects that would fall into the category of worldly paraphernalia referred to above.  With time however, this disposition was rectified, owing to some caustic reactions to the gifts, such as these:

"Why bouquet?  You could have bought a flower pot instead, at least I would have planted it!"

"Card-a?  Chumma waste.  Also.. OMG, it's $4.99?"

"Why this chocolate?  I don't like Hershey's.  You could have bought me Lindt na."

And so on.

So, what did we do this year for Valentine's, you ask?  I stayed true to the above memester's law, went to Aldi, and bought cilantro and ginger.  Pavana made some excellent Mangalore buns with shunti chutney for lunch, and delicious raw mango rice for dinner (this included a customary argument relating to rice steaming skills and efficient use of kitchen vessels and utensils).  Valentine's Day special.  To make it even more special, Medha was served heart shaped buns on an amateurishly decorated plate, and we both yelled "Surprise!" when she entered the kitchen.

I guess we have evolved.