Tag: India

The Landing Lights of Deepavali

picture of two Deepavali oil lamps, with modern electric lights in the background
So a few thousand years ago a guy and his wife set out for home after fourteen years of exile in the spiffy jungles of peninsular India, and having just rescued his missus from the clutches of a very bad guy with ten heads, he decided that he was totally entitled to the guy’s flying car for the journey home — spoils of war and all that. This being the days before the IATA and GPS, the folks back home tried to make things easier for their returning king (whose slippers were doing a fine job of running the kingdom in his stead, apparently) and lit up the entire city so he could spot them from the air.

Hang on — did Laxman have to walk home?

This is all largely conjecture on my part, of course, but it seems that interpreting Deepavali is the birthright of every Indian, just like Swarajya (or at least that’s what Lokmanya Tilak said. I wish he would have added, ‘…and ice lollies’). Just today I’ve heard that Diwali/Deepavali is apparently about the triumph of good over evil; that the lamps were lit in order to banish roaches and other post-monsoon insects; that Narakasur was killed by either Krishna or Kali depending on who you ask, and that this all actually about communal harmony and free trade.

Funny, I don’t think anybody noticed while they were gorging on their own weight in sweets. A Doordarshan News report on the consummate consumption of sweets enthusiastically begins, “You may be familiar with the feeling of throwing up after gorging on Diwali sweets…”

Ah, DDNews. Crap, but pithy.

I for one am happy with this mega economic downturn. It means that there aren’t as many crackers in the air because nobody has money to burn, and so the air is not full of smoke, and I am not dying of an allergic reaction to it. Yup, I don’t like firecrackers either. Tradition they may be, but wasn’t gunpowder invented by the Chinese?

Oh but that doesn’t matter. Communal Harmony, Good over Evil, Puking sweets etc.

In all of this, the asuras and rakshasas get a bad rap, as far as I’m concerned, their name becoming synonymous with simplistic demons, monsters and bogeymen. Sure, so Ravana enjoyed a bit of a kidnap and hostage taking, but it’s not like he was unprovoked. I mean, they did lop off his sister’s ears and nose, you know. And very little is said of Ravana before his path crossed with Ram. Nobody talks about how Lanka was a perfect city built by the devas — a veritable Atlantis — and that he merrily defeated them and took it over. Nobody talks about his ten-headed super-intelligence — face it, that whole golden deer ruse was, well, gold (but then, in the end he did get done in by a single arrow straight to the chest, so…).

Maybe I’m just an irate South Indian unhappy with these pesky northerners trooping down to our virgin forests, stealing our women (or lopping their ears and noses off) and enfranchising our vanaras and bears. Mostly I’m just sore that Rama, the purshottam, made off with the fancy-pants pushpak-viman and it was never ever heard from again. Maybe when he got back he just left the rule of Ayodhya to the slippers and went off questioning his wife’s purity (what to do — log kya keh rahe hai…).

Because if he had heeded the words of our illustrious politicians on this day he would know that Deepavali is about communal harmony and freedom, and that means only one thing: mass production! Why, by the time the Mahabharata came around the place should have been full of shiny flying vehicles.

Baby Krishna should have been holding up that mountain on his little finger whilst on his My First Pushpak Viman™.

Bheeshma should have been impaled on a bed of arrows on the side of his flying yacht.

I can see it now: Draupadi! Dushasan! In the air! Infinite chiffon saree unravelling as that crafty Kaurava orbits her on his personal Pushpy GT-R, cackling maniacally.

Of course, there is no evidence that Rama didn’t try to turn the pushpak viman into a mass transport means for the people.

They must have just built the factory in Singur.

Vogue India and the Offensiveness of Poverty

Allow me to rant.

Vogue India ran a photo-spread in their August issue featuring high-price luxury fashion accessories as modeled by people who — oh, what’s the word — are poor. This apparently caused some controversy. Mind you, these models were not just poor, but barefoot and missing-their-teeth poor. So poor that photographers from around the world come to India to take gripping, black-and-white shots of them in their state of bare-footed no-teethedness (sans Fendi clutch bag, of course), to highlight their, um, pooritude.

Now, frankly, I’m appalled… but not for the reason you think.

You see, I have no problem whatsoever with Vogue India’s photoshoot. I don’t care that they put 10,000 dollar accessories in the hands of people who make less than $1.25 a day (Who! Have! No! Teeth!). I don’t have a problem with these people being shown as poor as they usually are, except flashing a pair of designer sunglasses.

I do have a problem with people thinking that this is somehow offensive to the poor people. Oh, it’s offensive alright — it’s just offensive to people like you and me who buy and read Vogue (I have, and the Indian edition is quite nice). It’s people like us who actually know what a Fendi bag is, know that it costs 10,000 bucks and know that we’ll probably only ever buy a knock-off. It’s people like us who think poor people should only be seen in gripping, black-and-white documentary pictures in National Geographic or some exhibition.

Because — tell the truth now — you wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a young, skinny, urban person with a 10K bag in a magazine spread. Do you ask yourself, “Gee, I wonder if that model can actually afford that bag she’s modeling?” No, of course you don’t, because she looks like she can. She’s looks like a perfectly normal, upper-middle-class person who can afford a bag like that, or at least a knock-off. Heck, she can at least afford to eat badly all her life and then have her teeth fixed by a dentist, and isn’t that what’s really important? That she has great teeth?

How is a barefoot Rajashthani farmer any less of a viable fashion model than a size zero caramel-skinned Mumbai model who scrapes together her monthly rent? Because the latter fits in with your cushy world-view of how things should work?

I’m sorry, but a photoshoot in Vogue is neither going to solve nor exacerbate the problem of farmer suicides in rural India, so please don’t demean them (the farmers) by waving that flag around. And luxury brands are not tossing and turning at night in a moral quandary over how they’re going to sell their gold-dusted open-toed shoes in a market where poor people who can’t afford their brand exist. Last time I checked, there are people in the US and Europe who can’t afford it, and luxury goods are still for sale there.

Have you heard of this crazy new invention? It’s called Money. Works a little strange, but you’ll get the hang of it.

(see, told you this was a rant)

Of course, it’s not like Vogue is completely blameless. Firstly, they’ve dropped the ball by not crediting any of the models in their shoot (a courtesy they would show to most professional fashion models no matter how big or small). And when pressed for a response, the editor launches into some kind of biz-speak prattle about the ‘power of fashion’ and how they aren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world. Well, yeah, you’re bloody Vogue, we got that. But like it or not, a statement you have made, and it would help if you could have at least kept a well-prepared, intelligent retort ready for when this thing came up.

So, in summary:

– Fashion mag takes pictures of poor people with silly bags they could never afford.

– Everyone in a city gets upset that they’re seeing people they’re used to ignoring (except in gritty black-and-white shots) holding bags they secretly wish they could afford.

– People who can actually afford said bags are wondering where they can get that sexy ethnic turban the guy is wearing (HINT: Not at Louis Vuitton, baby).

– Creative types are wondering if the poor people are dirt cheap and where they can round up some for their latest campaign.

– Business people decide to comment on the issue by regurgitating every cliche in that last paperback on modern India they half-read on a plane once.

– All people born to be offended, are, and proceed to tack on their pet hot-button issue to things and generally tut and frown.

– As for the actual poor people, well, I have no idea what they think of the whole thing. Most of the people in the pictures are either smiling or bemused — bored, even.

I’m an outsider. I’m not one of them in the only way that actually separates us (financially), and on a cultural level I don’t think they give two hoots. I don’t care when some other middle-class Indian (as most models actually are) totes a Fendi bag in a photoshoot, so do they care when somebody (hopefully) pays them to do the same?

I’m not offended that someone did this. If anything, I applaud it (the photos are beautiful). I’m not offended that there are still poor people in the world while others can afford 10,000 dollar bags. Hey, I can afford tons of crap that other people can’t, and I still can’t afford a bag like that, so where on the levels of entitlement to being offended do I fall? I find all of this amusing and baffling and just a little bit sad.

Mostly, I’m just offended that you’re all still a bunch of idiots.

Independence Day

I grew up in Muscat, Oman, and went to an Indian School there. Legend had it that the school had started as a simple gathering under a tree, but by the time I got there in the late 1980s and until I left around ten years later, the school was a gargantuan, organically grown complex of grey buildings, and contained (or tried to) upwards of six thousand children from kindergarten to grade 12. Recess out in the dusty school field was like entering a medieval battleground.

Having so many people from so many different parts of India in one place was a unique experience. Places like Mumbai are highly cosmopolitan, but even though your classmates might be Bengali or South Indian they tend to identify as Mumbaikars first. Not so as expatriates in a foreign country, where many kids’ families had come directly from non-metropolitan towns or villages, places I’d never even heard of. We were aware of the differences — it was often the source of much mirth — but our collective identity was forged as Indians. Being an Indian school we’d sing Jana Gana Mana every day, celebrate all the Indian versions of things like Children’s Day (November 14th, Nehru’s birthday), and get holidays for Diwali, Eid and Christmas (not to mention Holi, Dussera and a host of others — it’s fun being Indian, the next festival is never more than a month away).

Independence Day, that is the day in 1947 when the British officially handed over power (August 15th, today), was always celebrated. Classes were canceled but middle and high school students were obliged to come to school that morning. It was just a half hour or so, nothing fancy; a flag-raising ceremony and a speech by the principal, maybe a song or two by the school choir, and then we’d roam around the field, maybe stalk the eerily empty corridors of the school, play impromptu games of football with pepsi cans (a teacher or two might join in), and then leave.

I was always surprised at the turnout at these events. Not just students, but their parents too would come along. Some of the school buses would ply their routes, and being one of the only Indian Schools in the country some kids lived hundreds of kilometres away, but they’d still be there. Maybe it was because we were Indians in a foreign land. Maybe it was even national pride. But maybe, just maybe, it was the spirit of independence itself.

I don’t like to think of India like most people do, as a nation now only sixty-one years old. India as an idea been around forever, India the place and the people and the intangible spirit has always been there even when it was a hundred disparate kingdoms and villages and hermits’ huts, even before it had a name. For me India is synonymous with independence, with freedom and liberty and fun, yes, fun! I don’t equate it with a flag and an anthem and a political party, and certainly not with a parade of military power.

For me Independence Day is about standing around a place where discipline and order are the norms, and just kicking a can around with your friends.

Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Comic Konga 2 #2: A Dilemma


Here’s the second strip of the second Comic Konga!. Click on the image to see the full strip.

This was actually the first strip drawn but I wanted to post it after the single panel from yesterday. Tomorrow’s strip has been penciled; I only have to ink and scan it, perhaps shade it in like this one. Like I said yesterday I think I’m not going to do full colour versions (Today’s strip is done in shades of desaturated blue). For no other reason than, like most Indians, I have a bit of a lenient hand with colour and it always ends up gaudier than I would like (strangely this is only a problem with my illustration work; my colour sense works fine when I’m doing design).

V

Earth Vs The Legion of Lightbulbs

Yesterday was Earth Hour in several places around the world, including here in Dubai. Not much happened, though a few buildings did turn their external lights off. One lovely radio jockey suggested that the best way to spend the hour was to turn off all the lights, fire up some candles, snuggle up with your significant other on the sofa… and watch a romantic movie on DVD (preferably on your big screen HDTV).

Take that, energy conservation!

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Elsewhere people in India were complaining that cities like Mumbai were not on the bandwagon, and shame on them for not participating in this noble effort. Um, yeah, except that cities in India go through almost daily scheduled power cuts, most of which last for longer than an hour. There is a prevailing view from what I can gather, that by shutting off our light bulbs for an hour every year, we will all be directly saving the earth.

This, as far as I know, is not strictly true. Most power stations around the world run on fossil fuels; in them power is generated and thrown out onto the grid. If we aren’t using it, they do not actually store any unused energy in large batteries somewhere. If the power companies got together and said, “okay, in order to save the earth we’re going to shut down our power supply for a few hours,” everybody would be up in arms. But that’s really the only way the current electricity supply model is going to help.

Then there’s all the energy that went into publicising the Earth Hour event itself; multi-storey billboards, the energy to light them for days leading up to yesterday, t-shirts and caps, concerts and karaoke and whatnot. The Earth Hour site itself declares it a ‘carbon-neutral’ event in its faq (and also addresses the power issue with what amounts to an “Um, yeah, we know.”) but doesn’t say much else about it. Are they policing every floodlit billboard around the world?

I applaud the idea as a PR exercise, certainly, but I do feel that the execution is little more than a token gesture, and everyone around the world has just jumped on because it’s a lazy, easy way to think we’re making a difference. It’s like every Indian I’ve met who expects the government to solve all their problems personally, in the same way a 5 star hotel might, because, “they voted. (harrumph!)”

Conservation and reduction of our energy usage is a vital thing, but we can’t pat ourselves on the back and get back to our wasteful lives just because we shut off the garden light for an hour.

V

Race – Movie Review

Director Duo Abbas-Mustan (not otherwise known as ‘The Brothers Burmawalla’) have been steadily putting out pulp thrillers since their early 90s hit, Khiladi. The brothers’ latest offering, Race, hit theatres a couple of weeks ago, and since then has gone on to do unexpectedly good business. Some of this success can be attributed to the fact that it’s the first truly ‘Bollywood’ movie to come out for months; whether we admit to it or not, posh city folk like nothing better than an indulgent entertainer now and then. The last one that fit the bill — Om Shanti Om — was released last October. If only someone would tell our filmmakers, who are increasingly shifting their attention towards an output of macho noir violence-fests, epic historical snore-a-thons, Oscar bait (and always failing that, Filmfare Critics award bait) and trendy urban train wrecks distinguished by their characters calling each other ‘Guys’ a lot and knowing what ribbed condoms are.

In this age where the term ‘Pulp Fiction’ is more synonymous with an overrated art movie than the vibrant genre that supposedly inspired it, it’s nice to see that someone, somewhere at least isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or make a genre of pure entertainment ‘relevant to this post 9/11 world.’ Wielding the twin cannons of amoral pulp and bollywood exuberance (with both genres’ devil-may-care attitude to realism as their car’s engine) the brothers have came out with a winner.

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To summarise the plot of Race would be foolhardy. It’s ostensibly about two rich step-brothers who stand to inherit tons of cash in insurance payouts should either of them die in an accident. Obviously, this being pulp, one of the brothers is rotten and wants to bump the other off, and the story goes from there. How it does so is nothing short of marvellous: over the course of its two and a half-hour running time, Race manages to squeeze in more plot twists and sudden reversals than a whole DVD box set of thrillers. The twists themselves are all the old ones, but the makers are obviously aware that the viewers will be actively trying to guess which one comes next, and almost always the twist that they do deploy is not quite the one you were expecting. Is there one twist too many? That’s an irrelevant question in this case. It’s a tightrope walk, for sure, but it manages to be consistently entertaining.

The characters are sketched very broadly. You have the work-hard-play-hard businessman, his alcoholic schemer of a brother, the dame with a dark past, the pining secretary, the corrupt cop and his bimbo assistant, all of which is laid out within ten seconds of their onsceen appearance. It’s more archetype than character, and in any other movie this would not be enough, but Race is a film where your focus is always on the increasingly knotty plot; any attempts at making whole characters out of this bunch would distract from it.

Also, if you made these people more realistic they would throw the ludicrousness of the world they inhabit into sharp relief. Here people are blown up in broad daylight, men survive treacherous falls and deadly car accidents, and insurance companies have no problem parting with 50 million in cash once a little paperwork is done. Race is unrealistic to the core, and it knows it; it’s a sexy pre-code comic book where there are no good guys, but everybody isn’t a dour Frank Miller creation either.

To their credit, the actors do a fine job with what little they have. Saif Ali Khan and Akshaye Khanna are wonderful when they’re playing bad guys, and it only dawned on me a few days later that they were both in Dil Chahta Hai together (playing very different characters). Anil Kapoor’s fruit-munching cop is loud, over-the-top and has more bad jokes in him than there are pips in his orange, but even this manages to fit snugly into the proceedings. The women have less to do and don’t quite distinguish themselves beyond eye candy and comic relief.

What really impressed me about Race to begin with is the great pacing. Usually in films there’s an energetic first fifteen minutes, and then the filmmakers decide they’ve had enough quick stuff, and according to that ‘How to Make a Movie’ book they read, it’s about time to slow down and add in some character and texture to it. Not so in Race, whose first half maintains its breakneck speed from start to finish. Even post-interval they keep it up, and it only ever really slackens for a few minutes here and there. To anybody who says it can’t be done, this should be Exhibit A.

If anything lets Race down, it is often its technical side. There’s terrible sound mixing in the songs; Bollywood movies are loud and hissy anyway, but the songs here are really pushing it (and I saw it in a good theatre with excellent sound). The soundtrack itself is the by-now standard action movie staple of Pritam-composed songs and a revolting Salim-Sulaiman background score (they should stick to film songs; they’re much better at it). Lots of jarring hip-hop and crashing guitars. Some of it is hummable but most is not, and one wonders how much better the film would be if the score wasn’t trying to hit you over the head every two seconds. Oh, and the songs literally come out of nowhere (incuding one which happens just after a major twist in the second half), but like every excess in this film, I went with it.

Also, the film could have used a few more weeks of post-production, especially digital grading. There’s some wonderful physical camerawork to see, but since a lot of the film is shot during stark daylight it doesn’t quite have the same impact. Towards the interval there’s a fantastic day-for-night sequence on a high-rise terrace; it’s coloured to look surreal and weird, and I wish the rest of the film’s sequences could have had that much attention paid to them (but they probably ran out of time/money).

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here with dreams of logic and social relevance. This is the land of surreal entertainment that Bollywood should never really forget, and as long as Abbas-Mustan in their matching white clothes are around, it never will. Race is pulp without parody, Bollywood madness without apology. It’s loud and loopy and I loved it.

The Ten Rupee Book Club 001

Stack of Ten Rupee Books 001
Over the past five years I’ve been amassing an eclectic collection of cheap used books on my trips to Bombay. At Rs.10 apiece (around $0.25 US) they aren’t expensive or significant (most of them are, in fact, the very opposite), but they are valuable to me, insomuch as they are weird — and I love weird. I have read very few of them; Of the hundreds (and by now, thousands), I have only finished a handful. There have been plans ever since I started blogging to talk about them, to read and review them, but this has so far not happened.

I was reminded of this recently when Dan blogged about his bookshelf, and in the comments I lamented that most of my books were in boxes (he suggested I just take a picture of the box). “That’s it,” I said to myself, “enough dawdling!” I looked through a small box of them and chose seven — none of which I have read — but which I think are interesting. Maybe this will give me the impetus to actually read some, but for now I will talk of their weird and wonderful subjects, their pretty and often breathtaking covers, and their all-round coolness. I hope you find them as fun as I do.

A Bit of Background

Used Booksellers 01Used Booksellers 02
India has a huge English-speaking population, especially in the cities. In a culture that values education and knowledge as much as we do, it stands to reason that books and reading are still a significant part of life (at least among the urban middle class). So nothing is thrown away, old books move from private collections into small neighbourhood libraries where they get read by thousands of people over dozens of years, and eventually when they’re tattered and worn, or riddled with worm holes, they end up in raddi.

‘Raddi’ literally means ‘scrap’ and raddi merchants deal in paper and other valuable things like copper and metals. They buy in bulk by weight, and pick and sort things by hand into various piles in their usually hole-in-the-wall shops. The loose paper ends up in things like newsprint, and single-side printed matter is cut and bound into cheap notepads, while some of it even ends up as sandwich wrapping from roadside vendors. It’s a fun game to read the scrap on which you get your sandwich; usually it’s some kind of internal documents from companies — memos and letters and photocopied invoices — and sometimes it’s even old school textbooks (which are crap anyway, so no big loss).

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The books, however, are kept aside and resold. In raddi shops the price is not fixed and is negotiable; you choose a book, ask the vendor how much he wants for it; he inspects it and quotes something ridiculous (5-10 times what it’s worth) and then you haggle. In South Bombay where time is money and people just want to get from their office to the train station and vice-versa, things are a little more advanced, and in addition to the stack of negotiable old tomes, there will usually be a display of fixed price 10 Rupee books.

Remember, these people buy by weight, not title (and most of the hawkers don’t know English, but can read the words), so it’s quite common to find something you might pay a hundred rupees for just sitting in that pile because it’s too worn or the cover/author’s name is uninteresting. Many bargains are to be found. And below are just seven:

(Oh, and you can click on the front covers for larger versions)

1. Envoy to New Worlds/Flight From Yesterday

Envoy to New Worlds by Keith Laumer - Click to EmbiggenFlight From Yesterday by Robert Moore Williams - Click to Embiggen
Our first book is even greater value for money than the others, because it’s actually two books. Published by Ace Books’ ‘Ace Double’ imprint, this is two novels for the price of one. When you get to the end of one, just flip it over and continue reading! It’s a gorgeous format from a design point of view alone, and there were hundreds of these, including this which was published in 1963.

Of the two tales, Keith Laumer’s Envoy to New Worlds is significant because it marks the first appearance (in a novel) of Jame Retief, ‘The Machiavelli of Cosmic Diplomacy’ as it states on the cover. He’s apparently an intergalactic diplomat, a role modeled somewhat after the experiences of his author in the United States Foreign Service. Retief would go on to star in upwards of sixteen books. The absence of a back cover summary prevents me from making any guesses as to the plot of this first adventure (I’m guessing there will be diplomacy), but any cover that depicts a man who has descended from a ladder with a cape, a gun, and a cummerbund, has piqued my interest.

Not your average flip-bookOn the flip side (haw haw), the slightly less well-known Robert Moore Williams (his name is so plain he couldn’t have made it up) gives us Flight From Yesterday. ‘Yesterday in America, tomorrow in Atlantis’ the cover blurb reads. Surely, hey must be talking about lost airport luggage. No? Oh well. Keith Ard (‘es well ‘ard, I hope) is an unemployed test pilot who answers a mysterious classified ad and apparently meets up with vanishing men in togas (or is it vanishing togas?) and girls with literally flaming hair. If this is any kind of good SF, the man with the vanishing toga teaches him stuff, and he gets off with the truly hot hottie. If this is progressive SF, then the roles of the man and the girl are switched. Either way, Keith Ard!

The cover reminds me of The Phantom Tollbooth movie, which is one of the reasons this book caught my eye. Sadly, no artists are credited on either of the covers. The books themselves are slim (Flight From Yesterday is 120 small pages, 11 pages longer than its ‘book-mate’) and both have a certain charming brevity to the narrative. For instance:

“How’d you get this, Keith?” he asked.
“I was struck in the back by something that felt like a hot wind made in part of living electricity,” Keith said.
Dr. Riker made no comment.

I love old SF.

2. Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles

Mushrooms, Molds and Miracles, by Lucy Kavaler - Click to EmbiggenMushrooms, Molds and Miracles, by Lucy Kavaler - Back Cover
To say that author Lucy Kavaler’s work is eclectic would be an understatement. Anybody who writes books called The Private World of High Society, The Artificial World Around Us and The Wonders of Algae deserves to be taken seriously, and by all accounts, Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles is a very well received and regarded book. It covers everything from fungi as miracle foods and medicines to yes, even hallucinogens and extra terrestrial speculations. The writing style is a perfect mix of conversational and academic; not shying away from big words when it needs to, but eschewing them when something simpler will suffice.

Mushroom book interiorIf it still aren’t convinced, here’s the first section of the back cover copy:

Martinis and the secret of heredity, Penicillin and The Angel of Death, Truffles and L.S.D., the Irish Potato Famine and the Fall of the Roman Empire, Astronauts, Gourmets, Scientists, and Indian Medicine Men…
What does this wildly assorted list have in common? The answer is Fungi.

How could I not pick this book up?

3. A Dictionary of Geography

A Dictionary of Geography by W.G. Moore - Front Cover - Click to EmbiggenA Dictionary of Geography by W.G. Moore - Back Cover
All this talk of mushrooms should get you in the mood for the great outdoors, yearning to fulfill that romantic ideal of going out into the nearest wood and poking around under a rotting tree bark. It might help, therefore, to have a handy guide to tell you the difference between a gryke and a gulch; to be able to properly interpret the hachures on your map and to watch out for precarious talus.

Geography book interiorAll these and more things can be found in the Revised an Enlarged edition of Penguin’s A Dictionary of Geography by W.H. Moore. This surprisingly weighty paperback does exactly what it says on the cover, and even has a bunch of pretty black and white pictures in the middle. It’s fun enough if you are a closet geography nerd like me, but is also useful as an idea mine (there are several terms I’m going to steal for story titles already). We’ve all been at a dinner party where we’ve needed to know the difference between a Mercator’s Projection and a Sanson-Flamsteed Sinusoidal one, haven’t we? Well now we can be ignorant no longer.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the top of that there drumlin to see if I can spot that dingle I’ve been trying to find all day.

4. Our Language

Our Language by Simeon Potter - Front Cover - Click to EmbiggenOur Language by Simeon Potter - Back Cover
Big words scare people. It’s the truth. But big words needn’t scare you any more after you’ve read (Prof.) Simeon Potter’s Our Language. The beautiful Romek Marber cover was enough to convince me to buy this book long before I opened it. Its ambition of telling the history, structure, dialectic branches, trends and future of the English Language (also known as ‘Merican’), and that too in only 200 pages, sealed the deal.

Our language book interiorThis is the kind of book that publishers seemed to just pop out on a lark back in the 1950s and 60s, and is now unjustly forgotten. They do not make them like this anymore. Here’s something that doesn’t claim to have the answer to everything, is not a trendy pop-culture phenomenon, the latest gee-whiz-ain’t-it-spiffy nonfiction breeze that gets blogged to death and launches a thousand speaking tours (even though I greatly respect and love things like Tipping Point and Freakonomics). It’s just a simple, well-researched, intelligent account of a subject, and we’re all busy reading about Britney’s navel grit.

Shame on you, human race.

5. Teen-Age Vice/Designs in Scarlet

Teen-Age Vice or Designs in Scarlet by Courtney Ryley Cooper - Front Cover - Click to EmbiggenTeen-Age Vice or Designs in Scarlet by Courtney Ryley Cooper - Back Cover
Speaking of the human race…

Oh, where do I begin? This 1939 (but 1957 edition) book is so deliciously cheesy. Told in a Bob-Woodward-channeling-Raymond-Chandler style, only bad, it apparently took Cooper eighteen months of “relentless, coast-to-coast personal investigation to ferret out the facts. If you are shocked by what he found, remember — he meant you to be.”(!) — this from the inside flap.

The entire book is like this. I should probably point out here that the author started his career as a clown, and at the time of his suicide in 1940 was the chief publicist for a circus. Of course, nothing I could say about this book could match the back cover copy, so I’ll just let it do the talking:

teen-age vice interiorWhat makes them do it?
Who is to blame?
They hold orgies in cellar clubs, go on juke-joint “honeymoons.” They get hopped up on liquor and dope, then rob and rape and murder. They are the young people under 21 who commit more than half the major crimes in the U.S.A.

Inspired by J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Courtney Ryley Cooper gives you the grim and tragic answers in this brilliant and blistering exposé of TEEN-AGE VICE.

…To paraphrase Renée Zellwegger, “You had me at ‘Hoover.'”

6. Cool Kids with Hot Ideas

Cool Kids with Hot Ideas by Jules Archer - Front Cover - Click to EmbiggenCool Kids with Hot Ideas by Jules Archer - Back Cover
Likewise, this book had me the second I saw its cover. No, I’m not just talking about the naked girl on the bike (although it is a well-posed photo, and she isn’t bad either). The cover design is remarkable, though entirely uncredited (and in a rare instance, they paid attention to the back too. Cover, that is). I routinely pick up books I have no interest in if the cover is particularly good. Being a graphic designer (with the emphasis on graphic), strong stark covers like these have always appealed to me over today’s wispy, layered and overworked Photoshop monstrosities.

cool kids with hot ideas interiorThe text itself is a lot less sensationalist than the cover would have you believe; certainly, it’s not as SHOCKING(!) as Teen-Age Vice. A compilation of articles, Cool Girls… may have lost its edge when viewed from our media-saturated times. Perhaps, in 1968, this boook chronicled the kind of shocking behaviour people associated with fringe sorts like hippies and beatniks, not ordinary teenage daughters. Most stories deal with unplanned pregnancies, unwed mothers, and illegal abortions (remember, Roe Vs Wade only happened in 1973). The others deal with drugs and teenage prostitution, and none of them are made to look sexy.

It’s interesting that a book with such an unabashedly titillating cover disguises what is fairly straightforward, even depressing, content. I could go on and on about how news has always been latently pornographic, but that’s another story. This book is the perfect example of ‘Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover.’

But what a cover.

7. How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home

How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home, by Harry Walton - Front Cover - Click to EmbiggenHow to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home, by Harry Walton - Back Cover
“Enough!” I hear you say, “all this teenage vice is too much for anyone to take. Can’t we talk about those nice mushrooms or sexy dingles again?”

Well, sure, I’d love to, and if you do want to chuck it all and move to the farthest wood, it would be a good idea to have some place to live when you go there. The first thing that strikes you about this Popular Science Skill Book (other than the splendid Bauhaus cover by Frederick Charles) is the little note on the inside that says it’s printed on 100% recycled paper. Somehow I never imagined that people highlighted that fact before the 1980s.

How to Build a Cabin InteriorThis is an honest to goodness 160 page attempt to teach you how to build a cabin. It’s pretty successful too, and I have little doubt that a person of average intelligence might actually end up with a functioning home in the woods if he used it as a rough guide. The genius of the book lays in the fact that it doesn’t just show you ‘four methods of supporting rafters on top plates in gable-roof construction’, but also covers things like ‘how to develop a spring’ (as a reliable water source), how to choose a site for your home in the hills, and an overview of the tools you might use (of chainsaws it says: “Gas-powered chainsaw speeds log-cabin building. It is strictly for outdoor use.“).

My favourite part has to be an early chapter showcasing classic and avant-garde cabin designs to inspire you. I have half a mind to buy a plot of land and try one out, but I think I’ll start in miniature with ice-cream sticks. The fun doesn’t stop there, though; the back cover gives the names of several related titles, including How to Work with Concrete and Masonry (for my closet brutalist, of course) and How to Build Your Own Furniture (I’m also vaguely intrigued by How to Do Your Own Wood Finishing by Jackson Hand, but only so that I can giggle like a schoolboy).

How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home is strange; it’s set up almost exactly like every book on drawing I have ever seen or purchased, only at the end of it you get a house. How cool is that?

In Conclusion

Used Booksellers
I hope you’ve enjoyed this short trip through a little corner of my book collection. Even though I didn’t look through the majority of them, there were enough good ones that I was spoilt for choice, and could even group them by theme. This first one was a pick-and-mix of strangeness to whet the appetite, an amuse-bouche for your bibiomaniacal palette.

Vishal

Neat stack of books.

Giant Iguana Not Included

Dubai-itis is the term I use for that low, frustrated feeling that sets in almost immediately after I return from vacation, to suddenly realise that I live in a flat, hot, congested city where people dress up to go to shopping malls. Any place that makes me miss even the most tedious aspects of a city like Bombay (the chaos, the infrastructure or lack thereof, the garbage and the idiots) is noteworthy.

My escape often comes in the form of a trip to the movies. I begrudgingly overlook the snip-snip of the censors and the twenty minutes of brain-killing advertising, and do enjoy myself. The pre-fab box multiplex model that cinema has transformed into doesn’t damper my spirits (I am, in fact, thankful that for now at least the projection and sound quality is better in multiplexes), and once the lights go down I’m a sucker for the experience.

The worst weeks, then, are when there is nothing worth watching. I’m finicky that way; I revel in cheap entertainments, so nothing is going to convince me to watch No Country for Old Men (yes, I think Fargo is vastly overrated… but I also think O Brother, Where Art Thou? is underrated) no matter how much people rave about it. The fact that Subhash Ghai seems to have turned over a new leaf and is now actually delivering coherent cinema (in the form of Black & White) may sway others, but if anything this new turn of his is not weird enough to warrant my money (because Yaadein had a reference to ‘Poisonous Marine Worms’ and we all know you can’t top that with sensitive post 9/11 Terror vs TLC).

Then there is of course the big, shiny new 10,000 B.C. (and shouldn’t it be more PC by being called 10,000 B.C.E?), which doesn’t in the slightest pique my interest, and I’m a fan of the original Stargate movie! I suppose the reasons are plain and simple: the movie is just not sexy enough. Camilla Belle may be quite fine looking, but she’s no Raquel Welch. Also, frankly, the movie doesn’t look bonkers enough. Where are the giant lizards? Where are the giant sunny-side up pteradactyl eggs? Where’s the fun?

And that, I suppose, is part of what I mean by ‘sexy’; in this strange race to make every movie relevant, to have a message and a moral (and 10,000 B.C.‘s seems to be some kind of ham-fisted rejection of false gods let’s get all the various races together to beat the crap out of the guys with the good architecture), big movies have ceased to just be fun.

And fun is very sexy. Just ask Raquel:

V

Anybody have €2.3 million?


Now this just isn’t fair. Somewhere in Italy is a fantastic looking monastery up for sale. It’s got eleven bedrooms, twenty-six hectares of land, a stable converted into a restaurant with a professional kitchen, and it was recently fully restored.

It costs about three-and-a-half million dollars, and you might think that’s a lot of money, but really, it’s a steal*. You know what I could get for that much in Dubai? A decent four bedroom villa in a cubbyhole ‘planned’ community. In India I may manage to get a three bedroom apartment in South Bombay. God only know what kind of matchbox that money would buy in London or New York.

*(Not that I have the money, and any attempts to amass such an amount would require actual stealing, hehe).

Beyond that, the property is clearly begging to be turned into a quiet out-of-the-way hotel. If I tried to open something of a similar size in Dubai I would need about five times as much money, and about ten times for Bombay. And none of them would have the kind of view this place has.

Of course, if it seems too good to be true then it probably is, otherwise why would such a tempting looking thing be unsold, and that too found on the freaking interwub?

Ghost Infestation. Has to be.

….Still, very, very tempted.

V

Hyperfast Food: The New Indian Eating Experience


Modern Indians have never heard of slow food.

In the great 20th century drive for ever more urgent instant gratification, India developed demands of food and its providers that would stump even the cleverest American fast food giant. We want any dish off a menu of 200 items, and we want it here within five minutes. An Indian waiter will very reluctantly inform you that a special dish will take fifteen minutes to arrive, with good reason: most people will both complain about the time as they place the order, and then precisely five minutes later they’ll yell at the waiter for their food being ‘late’.

We also want it to taste like it was slowly cooked over a coal fire for two hours, and we will not settle for anything less. The second most common outburst from the Indian restaurant patron is that the plate of baingan bharta that has just arrived does not — horror of horrors! — taste exactly like the baingan bharta he’s had in every restaurant across the country for the past forty years.

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A Time Paradox

The problem here is that very few of the dishes that are now considered ‘Indian’ — I’m talking here about daal, saag paneer, naans, biryani and yes, even baingan bharta — can be made in five minutes. A good biryani takes about two to three hours from the time you chop the first onion. The longer and slower you cook the saag, the nicer it will taste (There’s even a legend of a Kashmiri variety which is cooked for three days!), and let’s not even get into the time required if you decide to make your own paneer. Naans and chapattis are perhaps less time consuming but no less labour intensive. No wonder there’s a thriving market in ready-made chapattis.

“Daal and rice only takes ten minutes,” I’m often told by aunts and elders. They fail to account for the hour you need to spend sorting and cleaning both the rice and the lentils; the other hour it must soak in water; the hour it takes to slowly cook the lentils until they’re a rich, soft consistency; the fifteen minutes it takes to wash the rice thoroughly of its extra starch. No, all they see is the ten minutes in the pressure cooker to turn the rice — by now wholly devoid of any nutrition by the repeated washing and soaking — into a stiff, uniformally gloopy cake. They see the five minutes it takes to make a tadka for the daal; oil in the pan, crackling cumin, some curry leaves and tomatoes, garlic and then the already cooked lentils. Fifteen minutes, and that’s if you let the daal simmer for a bit before serving to get it all smooth and comforting.

These same elders blanch when I mention the thirty minutes it takes to make a good risotto*, or the same time it takes me to put together a hearty salad (I’m very particular about cleaning the leaves, and prepare the dressing fresh every time). “Why don’t you just make daal and rice?” they coo. They also spend most of their day in the kitchen, or spend any time out of it planning or shopping for the next meal. The last time I made daal and rice was two years ago. I enjoy it, but it isn’t my One True God.

* (Yes, I know it takes around 16-18 minutes for the rice to cook. But I never bother with horrible flavour cube stocks, opting instead to slowly cook the onions and vegetables, chuck in the rice and cook it with water. Cooking the vegetables with the rice results in something equally tasty.)

Throughput Errors

When the food does arrive, it’s a frenzied race to see who can finish the most food within ten minutes. Mountains of rice are piled onto steel plates the size of hubcaps, and then drowned in seas of daal or curries. Stacks of chappattis, tubs of sabzi, and gallons of water in tall glasses to wash them down — usually while they’re chewing. “Oh, but only a little dessert please,” they say, “I’m dieting.”

Yeah, right.

There’s a reason most foods in the modern Indian canon are soft; why daal is cooked until it’s paste; why rice is washed and washed and washed until it can be pressed between fingers and literally used to glue envelopes shut; why spinach is pureed and paneer is butter soft. In order to meet the ten minute gorging requirement, the food can’t have any texture or bite; it has to go down smooth, and it has to go down quick.

Why spend most of those ten minutes chewing when you can be shovelling another pound of rice down your throat? My brother and I cause some irritation to all our hosts when I spend fifteen and he spends twenty minutes finishing his meal (not counting a second helping, which we rarely find the energy and space to take on).

Once, I tried to make some french beans with my grandmother. We sauteed some onions and garlic, added in the chopped beans and stir-fried them, adding a little grated coconut when I was happy; the beans were cooked but still crunchy and fresh. Ten minutes later I returned to find that my grandmother had doused them in two cups of water and boiled them until they were a sick, mossy green-brown.

Menu Musings

I’m not kidding about the 200 item menus, by the way. The average (vegetarian) South Bombay eatery has:

1. South Indian Snacks: Dosas, Uthappas, Idlis, Medu Vadas, and probably Upma and Sheera. Dosas and Uthappas alone take up a whole column. Thirty varieties are common, from the simplest Sada Dosa to the most elaborate Ghee Paper Mysore Masala Onion Rava Dosa. “Steam Idli, Fry Idli, Tomato Uthappa, Onion Uthappa — wondu soft pongal!” a satirical ad used to say back when I was a kid.

2. Chaat: Bombay street food. Bhel puri and Sev puri, pav bhaji in all its varieties (sada, khada, cheese, jain, special, etc). Fifty or so dishes.

3. Sandwiches: another twenty types, from cheese toast to club sandwiches. The club sandwich itself is an Indian institution. Double decker; on the upper level, layers of cucumber, tomato, beetroot and red onion, with spicy green coriander and coconut chutney lubricating the buttered slices. On the lower, a tomato ‘omelet’ (really a pancake made of chick-pea flour and tomato). The stranger ones on offer might be Russian sandwich: alterantely a mayonnaise vegetable filling, or marinated sweet and candied fruits with jam. Note that even pizza (but not as we know it, Jim) may also be listed here.

4. North Indian Food: the stuff anyone in the west will most likely identify as Indian food. Sabzis, bhajis and curries, rice and pulav and biryani. A hundred dishes and more.

5. Chinese: Do not for a moment think that this is actual Chinese food. It’s basically Indian food with soy sauce and lots of chillies. So you have fried rice, gobi manchurian (battered, deep fried caulifower florets in a lethally spicy sauce), noodles, chopsuey and the uniquely Indian Triple Schezwan (fried rice noodles cauliflower/vegetable nuggets in an even spicier, red sauce). While most people either opt for manchurian rice or a Triple, there will still be two dozen types of each thing (rice, noodle, ‘gravy item’).

6. Juices and Milkshakes: Here’s one of the few places the variety in a menus actually helps. The ridiculous variety of seasonal and year-round fruits available in India ensures that you can come to a restaurant every day and not have the same drink twice in a couple of months.

7. Dessert: From gulab jamun to gajar halwa, all the way up to my favourite, fruit salad with jelly and ice-cream. At least twenty things.

Perhaps this kind of restaurant is only prevalent in South Mumbai where ten million people from twenty five same-same-but-different cultures come down every day to work, and have as many same-same-but-different tastes. But I have seen this template growing, at least on the inter-state highways where, no doubt, people from Mumbai fully expect to find the same dining experience as they do every day in Fort. And all delivered to the table in five minutes, of course.

Thali Terrorism

The New Indian Eating Experience, is, rather fittingly, epitomised in a restaurant that shares its name with an express train. Rajdhani has no menu; it doesn’t need one. It only serves thali, a staple Indian restaurant item consisting of a few sabzis, rotis, rice and dal in a big plate, with either limited or unlimited refill options.

Now, I like thali; I like the variety and the satisfying nature of it. Chefs go all fancy and set up a degustation menu (a.k.a. a Tasting Meal) but this is the same thing, only without the pretension. Rajdhani, however, takes thali to a whole new level of crazy.

I entered the overly lit, overly yellow restaurant which seemed to have more waiters than patrons, after a late movie. At such a time I would rather have had some fruit juice or a light sandwich, but alas I was in the minority and the rest of the group were starving for some real Indian food. We were seated and a foot-and-a-half wide steel plate was placed before me, filled with a dozen little steel bowls. Then the madness began. No less than six servers came around, bearing everything from two types of daal (semi-sweet and spicy), three types of sabzi, three types of sweet, three types of roti… er, I’m struggling to remember everything.

Five minutes in I was left staring at the already gargantuan meal. I had’t even taken two bites when the procession of servers began again. Throughout the meal I was keenly aware of a tie-wearing server captain’s eyes boring into me and everyone else at the table, scrutinising each’s plates and snapping his fingers at servers to come and top up any of the seventeen things on our plates if they ran low. I spent more time saying ‘no’ to servers than I did actually eating. I never took any seconds other than rotis, and that, despite the supposed vigilance of the captain, took ten minutes to arrive when I asked for some, and meanwhile I had to shoo away several people bearing more sabzi and daal.

It was perhaps the most uncomfortable meal of my life. I just wanted to be left alone to eat in peace! Needless to say, my views are firmly in the minority, and Rajdhani enjoys a steady stream of clientele, all of whom are in and out within fifteen minutes.

Digestive Tract

I’m not sure what triggered this Indian obsession with hyperfast food. Perhaps because earlier we never had so much to eat, and therefore meals could be completed in ten minutes. Now that there’s more to eat we’re simply binging on it in the same time. Perhaps the food itself was of a simple nature — fruits and raw foods are considered the healthiest diet in ayurveda — that it didn’t require an hour to prepare and eat.

But let’s turn this argument on it’s head: the food now is so prepared, so over-the-top, that in any ordinary day you’d require a lot of down-time between meals simply to process all that junk you’ve taken in. And so the daal gets softer, the rice pastier, and the halwa richer, because after a thali you’d better have time for a quick lie-down, my friend.

You’re going to need it.

V

Khoya Khoya Chand – Movie Review

Khoya Khoya Chand Review Image
The good thing about living in a country with a Friday/Saturday weekend is that movies release a day earlier than other places, and because of the extra day an early evening screening can still be relatively empty (most people are still at work). Not that I expected a huge turnout for Sudhir Mishra‘s latest, Khoya Khoya Chand, but in multiplexes Hindi films are shown in the smaller screens, and those hundred odd seats can fill up quickly.

Starring a bunch of well regarded actors who aren’t quite stars yet (and one wonders why), Khoya Khoya Chand is a gorgeous, quirky and ultimately satisfying movie about Indian movies. Om Shanti Om from a couple of weeks back also was an homage, but while it was a loud and tongue-in-cheek pastiche of 1970s potboilers, Mishra’s film is a subversive, adult drama set in the fifties and sixties, the transition era from black-and-white melodramas to technicolour kitsch. It does so with class.

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The theatre was pretty empty; in this neck of the woods stars sell, and unfortunately, despite Shiney Ahuja and Soha Ali Khan being in more than a couple of hit films between them, they aren’t considered box office darlings (…yet). In this film, Ms. Khan’s the dancer turned ingenue turned rising star, while Mr. Ahuja’s a novelist turned screenwriter who’s drafted in to work on one of her films. She’s being groomed and bedded and marionetted by an older star (Rajat Kapoor), he’s exorcising his demons through cinema.

In anyone else’s hands, this film with its hackneyed premise would be a complete shambles. But Sudhir Mishra is not your average director, and when you buy a ticket for one of his films you should expect something a little out of the ordinary. Don’t get me wrong: on the surface the film is a melodrama. There’s enough stolid weeping and heaving sighs, but that’s just a device that puts you in the period that defined Indian cinematic melodrama. Everything else — the screenplay, the characters, the dialogue — are refreshingly new. It feels less like a movie and more like some kind of epic novel, and is structured like one. It’s a weird, sometimes surreal film and I’m sure that will put off a few people, but it really worked for me. This isn’t a documentary, it’s a poem.

Of course, if the actual film had been a complete dud I wouldn’t have really cared, because it just looks so good. The cinematography, the lighting, the set design are all top notch. They’re hyper-real, expressionistic like the screenplay, changing as the years go by to suit not just the period but the look of the films that came with it, and also the characters who are experiencing it. Shiney Ahuja’s scenes, for instance, are shot in warm brown hues with deep blacks, while the sequences in the sixties are riotously painted with the pinks and turquoises of early cheap colour films. It’s done with a kind of subtlety and grace that is breathtaking. It’s like watching Guru Dutt — in colour! It’s what that sepia-dunked monstrosity from earlier this year — Guru — should have looked like (and that was probably made at thrice the budget). This is a film worth watching just for watching.

That the characters are as good as the visuals only adds to the enjoyment. They shake off their stereotypes, stamp them into dust and are unapologetic about it. They’re politically incorrect, sexist, misogynist, exploitative and flawed — and you still like them. While the lead pair are the focus of the film and they do their jobs very well, it is really an ensemble cast, and what a cast indeed. Rajat Kapoor brings his A-game as usual, while Vinay Pathak, Saurabh Shukla and a host of others (even Sushmita Mukherjee, who never gets a good part!) play equally complex characters — actual characters — instead of just the filler roles or comedy jobs they are usually given.

But the real revelation of the film, for me, is Sonya Jehan. She’s terrific in a role that would otherwise have just been throwaway. She shows some real acting chops, and there’s parts of the film where you wonder why Shiney Ahuja is still pining for the that other woman. Hopefully, this role will lead to more good stuff from Ms. Jehan. I’d hate to see her slumming around in the latest Mahesh Bhatt bollysploitation thing a few years from now.

Now, of course, the big question: will this film do well? Um, probably not. It’s just too weird. Young people won’t get the strange 1950 affectations of the characters (the young couple a few rows behind me chattered and giggled all though it, and were laughing at the film). Old people will be outraged that their nostalgic vision of the pure classic era of Hindi films is shown to be full of immoral, oversexed, inelegant and rude people, however realistic that might be. It’s still a great film, and I dearly hope that it will find an audience, but I fear that audience will not be in the hundreds of millions.

But what do I know? I’ve been wrong about this stuff before, so don’t let that get you down. Khoya Khoya Chand is a fantastic film, and is well worth your money (just don’t expect a typical Bollywood movie).

And now, a rant about the english subtitles. Warning: lots of naughty, naughty words.

Those Fucking English Subtitles

Of late, somebody’s been sending out Hindi films with English subtitles, and whoever subtitles them seems to think that the word ‘fuck’ is interchangeable with the comma.

Note to subtitle dude: “STOP THE FUCKING USE OF ‘FUCK’ IN YOUR FUCKING SUBTITLES!”

It’s horrible! “What are you doing?” says a character. “What the fuck are you doing?” reads the subtitle. “You’re as selfish as he is,” says the girl. “You’re as much of a bastard,” reads the text. So much of this movie especially is in the nuanced dialogue; the particular accents and colourful patois of these varied characters.

When Shiney Ahuja’s mannered Luknowi tells someone off, he says, “Here’s what I suggest you do: Take your script, place it under your rear, and take a long, deep breath.” What does the subtitle say? “Shove it up your ass!”

Half the script is lost in this inane, immature subtitling job. If you don’t understand Hindi, then I’m sorry, but the film is pretty-much ruined. The only problem with Khoya Khoya Chand are those. fucking. english. sub-fucking-titles!

FUCK!

V

Scrambled Eggs, Indian Style

Scrambled Eggs, Indian Style.

Burji is an Indian Railway Station institution. Throughout the country, stands with sizzling cast iron griddles serve up plate after plate of this stuff with soft, butter-seared pillows of pav bread late into the night. You shovel it off steel plates, sopping up every last bit with the spongy bread, and perhaps contemplating another serving (or even eyeing the tray of sheep’s brains which the stall also prepares in a similar way.).

It’s hard to say which came first; the silky, creamy Continental version of scrambled eggs, or this spicy Indian one (anda bhurji). It’s fair to say that both could have cropped up independently, and I’m certain that scrambled eggs were invented before the omelet (everyone tries to pass off a failed omelet as scrambled eggs when they’re learning).

I like both versions; they each have their purpose. The Indian, for instance, wouldn’t be the best match with buttered white toast and ketchup, and the Continental would not take to chapattis very well. They’re both easy and quick to make (though this one requires a few more ingredients), and are equally scrumptious.

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Recipe

In a heavy bottom pan, heat a tablespoon of olive oil on a medium flame, and add in one clove of garlic, sliced or minced, and one thumb-sized green chilli slit down the middle (you may scrape away the seeds to reduce its heat, and remember, in India at least the smaller the chilli the hotter it is). Finely dice a medium onion and add it to the pan; sautee until translucent (I know some people who like it still crunchy, and some who prefer it brown and caramelised. It’s up to you).

Take a tomato that’s a little smaller than the onion and dice it large. If you’re using cherry tomatoes you can simply halve two or three of them. When the onion is cooked add the tomato and sautee further.

When the tomatoes are cooked, add a pinch of turmeric powder. Good turmeric is strong, so use sparingly, and use a spoon to dispense it if you don’t want your fingertips to turn yellow for a few days. The rich, deep yellow colour that results from adding it is something you’ll want to replicate in all egg dishes, and so turmeric may be used in omelet mixes as well (just dissolve it in a teaspoon of milk or water so that no lumps are fomed).

Along with the turmeric I also add a little chilli powder. The powdered red chilli adds a different kind of heat to the sharper fresh green chilli, and when used in tandem they give a more rounded spicy taste.

Note that adding in curry powder instead of turmeric may be okay but I wouldn’t advise it. Curry powder contains several other spices such as coriander and cumin that would interfere with the generally clean and simple taste of the eggs.

Sautee for a minute until the spices take to the onions and tomato. Turn the heat up to high and add in a quarter cup of water, bringing it up to a simmer.

(A Side Note: This mix you have in the pan right now — before you add the eggs — is a very versatile one, and is sort of like the ‘trinity’ they use in Cajun cuisine. From this point, you can pretty-much add anything to this and come out with a good dish. Green beans. Mushrooms. Strips of Chicken. Tuna. Spinach. Paneer. Boiled, diced Potatoes. Tofu. Broccoli. A drained can of beans. Seafood. The list is endless, and what you’ll end up with can be called a bhaji. Anyway, back to the burji…)

If you like, you can break all your eggs into a bowl beforehand and beat them as you would an omelet mix, seasoning that with salt and pepper. I just season the onions and tomato and break the eggs in whole, scrambling them in the pan one or two at a time with a wooden fork. Either way now is the time to add in 4-6 eggs, depending on their size (i.e. 2-3 per head).

Stir the mixture around until the eggs are cooked. That water we added earlier will make the burji crumbly and more like mincemeat rather than creamy scrambled eggs. You can keep it creamy by omitting the water, beating the eggs up with some milk beforehand and not cooking them as much, but in general this is how burji is prepared in India. Finally, plate up and garnish with finely chopped cilantro.

Serve immediately with either chapattis or spongy bread that has been buttered on one side and seared on a pan (soft baguettes work well).

Eggsplicitly Speaking… (and not)

I mentioned before that the basic preparation of onions, tomatoes, garlic and chilli with turmeric is a base for a lot of dishes — bhajis — in Indian cuisine. If you’re vegetarian in the Indian sense then you may substitute crumbled paneer for the eggs, and end up with a popular dish called paneer burji. It’ve also had a similar paneer dish where the tomatoes and onions were pureed instead of whole (blitz the raw ingredients seperately beforehand, then fry as above), and the dish was finished off with cream for a strangely italian-tasting dish that might have gone well with the right kind of pasta.

Indeed, even this kind of burji might make a nice variation on Chinese Egg Fried Rice, if made in a wok with cold cooked rice put in just before you add beaten eggs.

I’ve had proper scrambled eggs much fewer times than burji. Chalk it up to the more pungent taste and the fact that it is easier to get right; you can prepare it without obsessing over it. It also works as a good lunch or dinner for one, and it firmly fits in the category of Comfort Food for me.

Perhaps it’s the memory of late nights coming home in Bombay, hungry and tired, when the only things open are the hawkers outside the train stations; islands of enticing aromas lit by kerosene lamp beacons. In the pool of their turmeric light, many a truly great meal has been had.