India update 4
16 - 18 Feb 2007

Let's begin with some more general vegetarian goodness. I was in the mood for spicy stuffed bell peppers (capsicum to Indian folk) and my mom indulged me! Along the way I also learned how to make them. I was planning pictures at each step but the battery on my camera gave way and needed to be recharged. Well here they are anyway , along with matki chi usal - a dry curry of moth bean sprouts, ambat varan - a sour garlicky daal, bharleli kashmiri mirchi - bell peppers stuffed with spiced chick pea flour, shrikhand - a yogurt based dessert and karela - fried bitter gourd.



What happened next was a puja (Satyanarayan puja) at our house. Of course this meant the mandatory fast before the puja - fast of course, being a relative term as you can have your fill of sabudana khichadi!



And after the puja was over there was a veritable feast served in the traditional banana leaf shaped dish (Ideally you serve in a real banana leaf but it's hard to find large clean ones these days!) Traveling clockwise in that plate we see salt, lemon, cucumber roasted peanut salad, green coconut chutney, yogurt, puran - sweetened boiled chickpea mash, fresh cashew curry - these aren't your run-off-the-mill roasted cashews, these are fresh from the fruit, soft and creamy and utterly delicious, and tragically unavailable anywhere in the US, lightly sauteed fresh okra, rice with varan dal, chapaties, and masala dudh - milk flavored with saffron, almonds, pistachios etc. etc.



I'm thinking of having another puja before I leave, just for the food...

Anyway, after that on Sunday, I had my buddies over for lunch and there was more great food. Unfortunately I didn't take any pics of the food, but I can list what was on the menu - chicken curry, dry chick pea curry, jain style potato curry, faras bean curry, an assortment of chutneys and pickles, and for dessert dudhi halva - a halva made of dudhi, an Indian gourd, shira - a halva made of semolina and ice cream!

Later that evening I went for the Roger Waters concert at the MMRDA grounds in the Bandra-Kurla complex. I didn't have any great expectations from this thing so was blown away by how good it was! The lights, the sounds, Dark Side of The Moon! He finished with Comfortably Numb! I'll post some pics later when my friend has a chance to get them off his camera phone.

We ended the night with roomali roti - a soft-as-velvet flat bread that's made by tossing it into the air (roomal is the Hindi word for a silk handkerchief), bheja fry - fried brains, chicken bhuna - roasted chicken curry and seekh kababs at Bademiya's at Colaba! Eating on the street, off the hood of your car that's been propped up by a Coke bottle (sorry Thums Up bottle) has it's own unique charm that cannot be reproduced anywhere else!

So this is going to be a giant mash-up, I'm going to try and use the EXIF information on the pictures to try and figure out what was ravenously pounced upon when... Forget it, let's forget dates, let's just say that I ate this between...

12 Feb - 15 Feb 2007

First up, some unpleasantness. The dreaded potato stir-fry. This bhaji is my mortal nemesis but dad and bro love it, so it gets made anyway. Needless to say I took a picture of it the kadhai, but it never got on my plate. (That's a lie, I did eat some with rice. It tastes nice but it's generally too dry for my palate. I like juicier things!)



Here's a random picture of a street vendor taken from my terrace. Look at the fresh vegetables that we'll never buy! (You don't buy from the vendor in front of your house unless you're lazy. Like a good little Indian you go to the market and bargain with all the vendors there...) The black stuff in the basket on the right is grapes. And there's tea (I think) in the aluminum container.



Here's our carrom board. My dad's a champ but I beat him sometimes...



Here's something I like! It's curried scrambled eggs with green peppers (or capsicums as we call them here!) Along with are some fresh fulka chapaties!



Next up, liver curry! Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! This contains all kinds of offal like liver, heart, kidneys! Very incredibly tasty! And it's being served with jwarichi bhakri - a special flat bread that's exclusive to my state. Nutty, salty, with a texture that's unlike any you've ever had! My mouth exploded when I had this!



And now for something which is exclusive I think only to my village, possibly only to my extended family! The Maharashtrian version of breakfast cereal - chaha-pohe! Chaha is tea and pohe is flattened cooked rice! Dunk pohe into a saucerful of hot tea and scoop up spoonful after delicious spoonful. Caffeine and vitamins in the same dish!!



My mom asked me what she should make for dinner.
I said "Sabudana vada!"
"What? That's just a snack!"
"Not if I have a dozen or two!!!"
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, last night I had two dozen hot off the frying pan sabudana vadas with green chutney and Maggi sauce!
And to the uninitiated, sabudana is well explained in Wikipedia, vada simply means fritter. Sabudana, potatoes, peanuts and chillies! I am going to make this when I get back to Madison!



And finally to finish off on a sweet note, here's pictures of two of my favorite desserts - on the left, malai sandwiches (Imagine two flattened rasgullas with sweet heavy cream in the middle!) and on the right, halvasan (I'll need to research more and find out exactly what this contains, suffice is to say that it's delicious!)

So I've slacked off, so sue me! Big update coming tomorrow morning.

India update day 2 - 11 Feb 2007

I slept for almost 12 hours. That was probably the last of the jet-lag!

After waking and playing zombie for about 10 minutes, the smell of hot dosas drew me to the kitchen. My maid Sujata was making dosas. I pigged out and had 5! And 2 idlis! All accompanied by the special green chutney that accompanies dosas.



And it's just 11 am. I'll update this again at the end of the day. I smell a feast coming on! I'm off to watch the India - Sri Lanka one day match!

And here we are at the end of the day! I had mutton curry for lunch. Delicious! And mutton curry, bheja fry (fried brains) and gaboli for dinner. Followed by rasgullas for dessert! I'm in culinary heaven right now.



And as an added bonus, here's pics of some Narayandas laddus that my mom made.

India update day 1 - 10 Feb 2007

I got home 1:30 am on the 10th and ate kheema-pau after getting home. Kheema is minced goat meat which is usually curried. Pau is simply bread. Here's a pic!



As I hadn't slept at all on the Amsterdam-Mumbai leg (I watched Little Miss Sunshine - awesome!! and Walk The Line - also awesome! and one episode of the Office - always great,) I beat the jet-lag pretty well and got a couple hours sleep in.

Waking up, I had more kheema-pau. Then my mom pop's the surprise on me! She had frozen Alphonso mangoes and Mahabaleshwar strawberries since summer! Whoa! Here's pics of the mangoes and strawberries thawing out. As you can see they lost firmness in the freeze-thaw process, so we decided to convert them to aamras (mango juice) and strawberry milkshake instead.



For lunch we had palak paneer (green spinach curry with cottage cheese) and valacha birda (curried brown bean sprouts) with fulka chapatis fresh of the griddle!! (In my gluttonfest I forgot to take pics.)

Yum yum!

As soon as my jet-lag leaves me, I'll step out. Update for day 2 is next!

It's time for the annual adventure! This Thursday, I fly to the Greatest City in the World - Mumbai!

Here's hoping I can meet up with all the readers and lurkers and hanger's on of this blog. So please email me (address in the top-right corner,) and I'll send you my contact info (and also reveal my secret identity to those who don't know it yet!!!)

I was in West Virginia over the weekend for work. Here's the story...

WV was just so ... boring. The only exciting thing on the whole trip was the first day when I was driving from the Charleston airport to this factory in Sissonville which is about 15 minutes away. So anyway, I had directions from Google Maps and they seemed to be panning out ok, until right in the end where it asked me to take this road called Tolley Hollow Road and claimed that 1 *** Drive would be at the end of it.

So I turn into Tolley Hollow Road and it's this tiny little single lane road which seems to snaking higher and higher into the mountains. All I see along the way are these little trailer homes right out of Blue Collar TV and I think to myself, "Something is wrong here but then again Google Maps seems to be saying I'm on the right track." After about 10 minutes of a road which just kept getting worse, I look ahead and see that it's not paved any more!! I stopped and after maybe 3 tries succeed in turning around. This old Southern gentleman had stepped out of his trailer home and was curiously watching this Indian guy driving a red Mitsubishi Galant struggling to turn around.

So I say to him, "Hi sir, I seem to be lost, I'm looking for the factory of *** corporation."

"*** Corporation, haven't heard of them."

"They make spark plugs"

"Ah! You mean the spark plug factory, yeah, just follow Tolley Hollow Road all the way back to CR21, go past the highway bridge and turn right on River Bend Road."

"Thanks so much, I had directions from a computer but this is where they got me!"

Anyway, it turns out that Google Maps was not just a little bit off but more than a mile off, in the wrong direction! Next time, I plan to use MapQuest. You should too!

The rest of the WV trip was boring. We had some snow/rain on Sunday which made driving a mess. Apparently there were a lot of wrecks but I missed all of them. I spent Sunday and Monday night at the bar of the hotel and explained to a couple of Australian dudes the finer points of American football while watching the Colts comeback and beat the Patriots!

Happy New Year 2007 to everyone who's reading!

After a great time in Las Vegas and a lot of thinking during the long flights (I was just traveling for the whole day, on the 29th and the 1st!) I decided on quite a few things.

Goodbye Internet. It was nice knowing you but I need to get out more in the real world. No more hours spent on Slashdot, Digg, del.icio.us and scans_daily. That time shall be spent in the gym, at bars, and generally out of the house.

I'll still update this blog but it's going to be much fewer and far between. And the updates will be about stuff I did out there!

Well, I finished Epileptic. I had to take a break halfway through as it was just too difficult to digest in one sitting.

In other news, people have been getting engaged and married left, right and center. I'm still single though.

I tried to read Pop Gun War but I'm just not in the mood for such fantastic stuff right now.

And I'm looking forward to New Years in Las Vegas!

Viva Las Vegas baby!

Well, I couldn't really recover any of my data from that hard drive. It's a pretty brick now. I did get a new one a week before Thanksgiving. It's working out just great. I had inadvertent backups of most of my important stuff. Like when I had burnt CDs during trips when I needed a copy of photos my friends had snapped. I lost all my music but that's replaceable.

I didn't go anywhere special for Thanksgiving this year. Did get a great Thanksgiving dinner at my boss's place though. Of course that heavy dinner made me sleep right through the Black Friday sale. I awoke at 11 am after all the really fancy stuff was out of discount. Ah well, there's next year I suppose.

I'm currently reading Epileptic after i-me-moi's recommendation.

Snow is back in Madison after an unseasonably warm week. It's bitterly cold again. I've been traveling like crazy this week. Phoenix on Wednesday and Thursday and Detroit on Saturday. I don't want to travel again for a while.

I just finished watching another brilliant episode of The Shield. This is how a police drama should be. Not like CSI and Law and Order. It's just so much more realistic.

Also, it's been pointed out to me that I pronounce my W's like V's i.e. with my upper teeth touching my lower lips instead of using rounded lips. Which is odd 'cause I learnt 'em right. Heck, I even got the prize for phonetics when I was in kindergarten (or Nursery as we say back in India.) (Also, stupid Firefox underlined learnt as a spelling error. Turns out, it's learned in American English and learnt in British English.)

Catastrophic hard drive failure on my laptop. Everything's gone. Had backups for a lot of stuff. Some little tiny stuff gone. Let this be a lesson to everyone else today - backup, 'cause you never know when hard drives are gonna let you down.

My eyes are covered by the hands of my unborn kids,
but my heart keeps watchin’ through the skin of my eyelids.

- Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles), Funeral, The Arcade Fire

It's so nice to finally listen to a band that not only got excellent sound but also beautiful lyrics. So yeah buy, beg, borrow or steal this record.

Why is the whole world so incredibly stupid? No, really, I mean, for God's sake people, why are you all so stupid?

You know what we need? We need more smart people. How can we get more smart people? Well, one plan would be for smart people everywhere to start making babies. Lots and lots of smart babies. Chop chop you married smart folk! More smart babies right this minute.

And all you stupid people need to stop meeting other stupid people. C'mon, snare a smart person, at least your kids will be halfway smart. Also, while you're at it, could you also stop reading safety labels?

Well, I guess it's another Tuesday rant brought on by reading this crazy post by Jean Valjean. And of course all the news from all over the world.

I wish I was more ambitious, then I'd rule the world with an iron fist. Who wants to vote for me and my iron fist? I swear I'd fix this place up good.

So remember, whenever you get a chance to vote for anything, vote for Hob Gadling!

The Postal Service - We Will Become Silhouettes


No video? Get the DivX Web Player for Windows or Mac.

Another strange song with a strange video.

And more.

India's Censorship Craze

It's stuff like this that makes me want to consider settling in the US.

The New Pornographers - Use It


No video? Get the DivX Web Player for Windows or Mac.

Just experimenting with the DivX Web Player. This is way better quality then YouTube. Double click for fullscreen. And once the video has finished caching you can right click and save it no fuss. Nice song too! I've written about it before. That video is hosted at Stage6 which has seems to have videos by a lot of other indie artists.

Apologies to my Linux-based blog readers. On the other hand the .divx file pointed to seems to be an avi wrapping DivX MPEG4 video so perhaps the MPlayer Mozilla Plugin could be configured to handle the video/divx MIME type.

So Vik book tagged me. And I wuv being tagged! Onward!

1. One book that changed your life?
Got to say The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Yes, it's preachy and long and filled with sociopathic protagonatists. Doesn't matter because the core idea, the one that gets to you once you look past the tedious three page descriptions and the one-dimensional characters is still pretty powerful and it's one we weren't really exposed to as kids growing up in socialist India in the '80s. Capitalism.

2. One book you have read more than once?
Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. Because let's face it, I hate growing old. And everytime I read that book it makes me feel like I'm reading it for the first time like in did in fourth grade.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
I'm going to cheat here and choose the Collected Works of William Shakespeare. That's a fairly large and diverse set of fiction and spans humor (The Taming of the Shrew), tragedy (Othello), and gratuitous sex (Venus and Adonis). What more does a guy need? Besides the language being all funky means it's going to be a bloody struggle to read so I won't be able to finish it in a hurry even if I wanted.

4. One book that made you cry?
It's going to be bad for my tough bastard rep if I let on but what the heck, maybe the ladies will appreciate the fact that I have a sensitive side (Yeah! Right!) It was A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. That last part when Catherine is in the hospital and Henry prays.

5. One book that made you laugh?
Ah! One? Just one? My life revolves around books that make me laugh and asking me to choose one is like asking me to which one of my thirty seven illegitimate children should live. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson (ok, not one book but who cares?), The Farside by Gary Larson (again, who cares?), The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams and I just realized that this list won't stop unless I tell it to. Stop.

6. One book you wish had been written?
A critically acclaimed bestseller in comic book format. Frankly that one breakthrough graphic novel that makes the everyman give this medium more that just a second look. There have been great graphic novels written already but none have yet broken into the mainstream and frankly it's the mainstreams great loss. I guess I look forward to the day when a freshman can enroll for Comics 101 just as he or she can for Art 101 or Literature 101 today.

7. One book you wish had never been written?
Honestly? Any religious literature. Because I'm sick of watching the bastards twist, manipulate and misquote it to fuel their fires of bigotry, hatred and ignorance.

8. One book you are currently reading?
I just finished reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and The Book of Bunny Suicides and Return of the Bunny Suicides by Andy Riley. Scott McCloud's book is a serious examination of the comic book medium as a form of communication. I'd say it's recommended reading for anyone who's in the communications industry (Hint! hint! Vikster!) And the Andy Riley books are sick sick tomes upon reading and enjoying which you get a first class ticket straight to Hell. I have mine and I hope to see lots of you there too. (So far, it looks like Hell will be a lot more fun and interesting place than Heaven seeing as how all the people I know and love already seem to be sinning like there's no tomorrow.)

9. One book you have been meaning to read?
Holy crap! This list is big. An awful lot of crap by James Joyce. People say he's really good. This book of short stories by Ernest Hemingway that's been sitting on my shelf for almost 3 years now. So much non-fiction that I feel almost ashamed: Maximum City by Suketu Mehta, Design Patterns by Erich Gamma et. al., Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (been sitting on my shelf for years too.) In short there's this huge work of glorious human achievement out there that I have been too lazy, bored and ADHDed to read. It'll get better. I hope.

10. Tag five people.
That's easy. I-me-moi, Saket, M. Valjean, Thë Là¢ke¥ and /<0usik. Update: Also tagging DivSu who I caught up with after a long time yesterday!

Your results:
You are Iron Man

Iron Man 85% Spider-Man 80% The Flash 80% Hulk 75% Supergirl 65% Green Lantern 60% Superman 60% Robin 55% Catwoman 50% Wonder Woman 45% Batman 40%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Damn, I feel a post coming on. Now to wait patiently on this Sunday night for the words to coalesce into sentences. Hopefully this one will have more structure and form than my usual balderdash.

So, what bothers me tonight. There are some people I cannot call, cannot talk to, whose Orkut profile I don't visit, whose number has been erased. Sometimes acquaintances who don't know any better will talk about them and I'll stumble awkwardly and explain that I don't talk to them and don't talk about them and don't care what they're up to.

"But why? You guys were really close na?"

Yeah we were but things happen and people change. Heck. I've changed. People who I used to talk to everyday I haven't spoken to in years now. Sometimes it's mutual avoidance. Sometimes just forgetfulness. Sometimes you grow up and don't know what you saw in someone that long ago.

I wish I could say that I'm more mature than I used to be. That I've grown up. To be honest I don't feel that much different from the skinny guy who came here five years ago, from the shy guy from ten years ago.

I was talking to a friend yesterday (one of the old ones who I've stayed close to) about regrets. I have a few. Not too many and not to bad, but I do have them. That's life I guess, a bundle of hopes and regrets. (Damn cliché.) I must say that I learned from my mistakes though. Didn't make the same stupid ones again and again. Heck no, I made brand new ones!

It's so damn fleeting isn't it. Life. And yet I suppose we are the lucky ones. We're watching things change around us at a rate our parents didn't. Our children will be even luckier. I envy them already.

A good deal of you are married or about to be. The rest are dancing that intricate ballet that is Finding Someone. I wish you well. It's a fun dance to be sure but sometimes you fall badly on your butt and people stare. It's fun to stare. It's even fun to fall.

Did you dream when you were little? Do you dream now? Hold on to that dream because in a few years it will seem to fade away. It hasn't gone anywhere. It's just hiding around that corner waiting for you to dream it again.