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.

Reuse Repurpose

This picture is of our spice closet.  Dhaniya powder, jeera powder, goda masala, garam masala, amchur, bisibelebath masala, what have you.  If you look beyond (or technically, not as far as) the pulverized seasoners and aromatics, you will notice the uniformity, for the most part, exhibited by the containers of the said triturates.  The uninitiated will no doubt presume that Pavana and I jointly share a passion for standardization of storage vessels and concomitantly other similar matters pertaining to domestic interiors, and therefore must arrive interior decoration choices such as these after much deliberation and purchase materials to suit the said choices.  Right?

Wrong!

These containers look the same merely because they all came from the Indian store at different points in time in history, and were once brimming with tamarind-date chutney, which was then inhaled by us via bhel puri, dahi puri, ragada patties, etc., leaving the containers to fulfill their life destiny by getting washed, dried, and filled with masala powders.

Pavana and I both grew up in middle class homes in India.  What this means is that the terms “reuse” and “repurpose” have come to be the enduring lexis in our lives, and the term “disposable” has essentially gotten filed down to a nullity.  You ask why?  Here’s why. When you grow up seeing empty plastic milk bags hanging to dry everyday, ‘hole-ey’ baniyans being used as a dusting cloth, old petticoats getting stitched into TV covers, and expired calendars being used to cover books or getting repurposed as “rough notebooks” to aid scoring a ‘centum’ in your maths exam, do you think it is a wonder that after so many years, we still think that using a paper clip on a toothpaste tube to help extract that last bit of paste is the answer to burgeoning monthly expenses?  On the same token, you will perpetually find a few Bounty kitchen towels hanging to dry in our kitchen, the rule being that any given paper towel may be reused until the muck on the towel is visibly greater than or equal to the muck on the kitchen counter.  You will also find in our kitchen, disposable food boxes and aluminum baking trays carefully washed and stashed away, ziploc bags that say frozen coconut or frozen methi but contain some mysterious frozen masala paste, a box that says desi jaggery but contains rice, etc.  The list goes on.

And here’s the kicker.  We haven’t bought those fancy Hefty trash can liners since 2008.  Why invest in expensive and thick polyethylene when you can line the trash can with two free and thin polyethylene grocery bags?  Interestingly, we still have some of the 2008 trash can liners left, and we use them only when we have large gatherings in our home.  The fact that we continue to find more liners in that old box either means we are miserly hosts or that I chanced upon a magic box of trash can liners that never empties.

And lastly, how can forget soap!  Walk into our bathroom, and you will see in the soap dish, a soap bar of nondescript hue that has resulted from chronic affixation of dissolving soap bars of assorted brands, colors, and fragrances.  Moti, Dove, Dettol, all-in-one.  What other brands will next make it to the club is an intriguing subject.  Medha says she is waiting for it to become a “million soaps monster” that will somehow still smell “yummy”.