Category: General

All gods have long hair. Be it Greek, Indian or other gods. No, I havent met them all yet, but I am sure about this fact from the several photographs and paintings of them that I have seen. And why not, long hair does look divine. I dont like people cutting their hair, particularly women, whom I think look lovely with more kesham.

But my thinking doesnt seem to matter to my family or the world. From childhood onwards, I have been programmed to cut my hair at regular intervals. The most regular cut from childhood was “summer cut”, where I had to convince myself that I had some hair on my head after the “summer-cut”. Yet at home after the barber-shop visit, my mother would exclaim that the barber has not cut it properly, and there was a bit more he could have cut! And while taking bath after the haircut, I always consoled myself saying that it will grow back fast.

But wait another three weeks, amma will exclaim “thalamudi kaadu maathiri valarnthaachu” (your hair has grown into a jungle!), preparing the ground for the next hair-cut. But that was during the school days. It was during the college days that I caught the fashion bug and went to a “modern” hair cutting saloon. They did the same thing my old barber did, except that they washed my hair with shampoo, and cut much less hair, making me appear more ugly to myself! The first thing I did after going home and taking bath is to apply oil to my hair.

Yes-sir, I still apply oil in my hair. If you are producing wierd sounds of disgust at the other end, I am fine with it. I love my hair with oil, even if it contains enough oil to fry pappadoms on a sunny day. The only change that has happened with the oil application is the oil itself. From kaachina ennai (oil prepared with herbs, I believe) now I use dabur amla kesh tel. And yes, I do apply it daily.

Coming back to the topic, Whatever changes in life happened hair-cut still happened at regular intervals. Be it kerala, Bombay or London, the hair-cut still remained, as barbers changed. Several barbers came and went. In kerala there was our regular barber, who twisted our heads in different positions and expected us to hold it there while he went about business. Then there was a communist barber, who reminded us that by touching the scissors to our head, we owed him the “haircutting fees”. In bombay suburb the barber was more sort of a village person, very innocent and trying to make my hair look great in every possible way and in London a middle-aged nice white man who did the job in quickest possible time.

But then the tubelight came on, yes I mean the idea of long hair came to me. I never had the opportunity to grow my hair, but now I had. I am a grown-up adult and can choose to grow hair. And If it looks good on gods, it definitely will look good on me. The bonus was that I didnt have to do anything for that as well, except avoid the visits to the hair-cutting salon. The hair will grow by itself, I couldnt ask for more! I was soon imagining myself with long hair, tied neatly into a ponytail. Just like the gods in the paintings.

The project was running smoothly for a couple of months before the first attack on it came. No, it was not an outsider who criticised it, but my wife herself. She started complaining that I was looking uglier and couldnt stand the sight of me. Initially I shrugged it off, but then she linked the ugliness of my long hair in relation to my extra layer of muscle around my waist. That was outrageous. She didnt have to link my muscle deposits to my growing jet black shiny hair and call me ugly. But I was determined to grow it long. I knew some of my friends were on my side, or so I thought.

My hair was growing unaware of all the politics that I was going through for it. But day by day the resistance was building up, my parents also lend their support to my wife, and one by one my friends were also getting in her camp. I was standing up to all these pressures when one of my friends, whose advise I value a lot, asked me to get rid of my hair. Same time my brother too issued a fatwa that I cut my hair soon.

I was devastated. The whole world was against me this time. I was alone fighting for my growing hair, which had now grown long enough to cover my eyes and nose, another few months and I would have a nice looking pony tail. Succumbing to pressure, I did the unthinkable final act. With trembling feet I entered the barber shop after 3 months, and mumbled to him “summer-cut”. He started snipping my hair away with evil glee in his eyes. While my long dark black shiny hair was falling around my chair, a song was playing from the back-ground of my mind. “Dost dost na raha, pyaar pyaar naa raha“.

This years Nobel Prize for physics have been won by 3 scientists who proposed the theory to describe the force that holds together quarks, the elementary particles with which nature constructs the neutrons and protons that make up the nuclei of atoms.

They fancifully described their force in terms of “colour”, saying that quarks could be red, green or blue, rather like electrical charge can be positive or negative; and just as electrical opposites attract, so combinations of quark colour can make for stable collections of quarks.

Their theory successfully explained why quarks tended to group in threes. It also explained why, paradoxically, the “colour charge” weakens as the quarks move together and strengthens when they move apart. It is a property that has been compared to a rubber band. The more the band is stretched, the stronger the force.

The researchers’ discoveries, published in 1973, led to the theory of quantum chromodynamics, or QCD.

Read the full news here.

My website was down for 4-5 days. Thanks to excellent support by my webhosts, my site which was offline for 1 day went offline for 5 days.

I have written a sweet letter to the customer support manager. And yes very soon I might be moving to vesana for webhosting. Atleast they reply fast.

My first taste of vaangi bhath was after marriage, when my sahadharmini made it. It looked a bit dodgy and avoidable, but my palate proved it otherwise. Nothing like vaangi bhath with dahi and roast pappadoms. I never made vaangi bhath, but decided to document it for the future generations, who might enjoy it.

I felt that the process for making vaangi bhath was a bit tedious, which my wife pooh-poohed. She maintains a separate food blog and is the “chief cooker” at home and might be right. But I let you decide the same, not from the pictures or the recipe, but judge only after making the same.

So, as always we start with ingredients. As this dish is called vaangi bhath, you can easily guess that vaangi and rice are integral to this. so here we go in detail. These ingredients are for “well-eating” 2 individuals. There are around three-four steps involved in making a perfect vaangi bhath and I will group the ingredients also like wise.

For Rice

1. Rice (My measurement for 2 people is to take 3 fist-full of raw rice, others follow the image)
2. A bit of turmeric powder (only a bit)

For Masala

Take a bit of mustard seeds(rai), coriander seeds(dhaniya), cumin seeds(jeera), urad dal, chana dal(split peas), turmeric powder (haldi), red chillies and kadi patta.

For Seasoning

Again a bit of mustard seeds(rai), cumin seeds(jeera), chana dal(split peas), red chillies, kayam (asafoetida powder), kadi patta and a bit of oil.

Other main ingredients

Tamarind concentrate, vaangi (aubergine/eggplant) and obviously salt to taste.

Now if you dont have a few items in the masala, ignore them and make the dish, it would not taste bad just because you skipped a couple of masala’s. So lets dive straight into the preparation with the ingredients that we have gathered.

Take the rice and wash it. Add water and turmeric powder and cook it. I know, I know, thats not very helpful, but there is nothing more in cooking rice. The water proportion goes like this, for 1 katori/cup of rice, 2 katories/cups of water. Once you have done that, you cook either in a hob or you can microwave it. When cooking in a hob, ensure that once the water starts boiling, you close the vessel, reduce the flames to low and allow the rice to cook. it will easily take around 15-20 minutes to cook.

While the rice is getting cooked, lets prepare our masala. For this, take all the masala ingredients listed and saute them. You dont need to add oil to saute them. Just do it directly on the pan without any oil.

Now you need to mix them well and saute them till they appear a bit roasted.

Now, you can remove them.

Grind this mix into the vaangi bhath masala.

Ok, now chop the aubergine/eggplant/vaangi to cubes, if you have not done it already.

Nows the time to prepare tamarind water. Add a spoon of tamarind concentrate to a katori.

Add water to the concentrate and dilute it to get the tamarind water (wow, I am brilliant). Now if you dont use tamarind concentrate, prepare it the way its done back home. Take dried tamarind, soak it in water and later mash, sieve and use the tamarind water.

Now check the rice and wait for it to cook before proceeding. Now we are entering the final process in making vaangi bhath and it will be good to have the cooked rice ready, unless you have got some expertise in cooking already.

Now take the kadai (or the vessel you want to make vaangi bhath in) and put 2 teaspoon of oil. Add the seasoning ingredients and saute well.

Now while sauteeing, add a bit of kayam (asafoetida) powder.

Once the seasoning is well sauteed, add the chopped aubergines/eggplant/vaangi to it.

Mix occasionaly while it cooks.

The vaangi is cooked, when they appear transculent as in the picture below.

Now add the masala we prepared earlier to it and cook for a couple of more minutes.

Mix it well.

Now add the tamarind water to the mixture and stir well.

Allow it to cook till it appears to be a paste. Now add salt to taste.

Now we add cooked rice to this.

And mix the rice well.

The vaangi bhath is ready. Serve it with raita or plain yoghurt, with a couple of roasted pappadoms.

Yum. Enjoy.

It was a sunny sunday we did our experiment. It was altogether a new experience. Read about it here.

Happy birthday, you cheeky little bugger.

So the olympics came to a close. I am happy that India won a silver medal, though I was sure we would have been in the top 10 medal winners, only if the olympics adjudicators were not so biased. They should have given consideration that anju had a pollution problem, malleswari had a back problem, our delhi sports center where all the olympic people were preparing didnt have proper water supply etc. There is a whole host of things which they just ignored, and guess what happened, we got only 1 silver medal. Not that we need any medal from the olympics, as we can make as many we want in Ulhasnagar.

I thought the whole olympics thing was something which was not needed. There were several events which never made sense to me anyway. Lets start with floor gymnastics. You have got a rectangular area, where a young lady/gent does some exercises, hop-on hop-off and stands and bows. Now I wonder what on earth was that, and even before I can figure it out, the judges come out with something like 9.7, 9.8, 9.6 and so on. Wow! you say. I wonder you havent seen dombivli train platform in bombay at around 8.00 am in the morning. The acrobatics that one does to get into a local train will beat all these cutie figures jumping up and down on the mat at olympics.

Another event that beats me is marathon. I had some sympathy for Paula Radcliffe when she couldnt complete the marathon, but I laughed my backside off, when she couldnt even complete 10,000 meter race. My wife told me it was not good to laugh at others, particularly at such situations. So I sincerely made a serious face, which lasted for around 1 second. Coming back to the event of marathon, the whole thing seemed pointless. The history of marathon was even more funny. Its said that a soldier ran all the way from a battlefield back to athens, just to tell the message that they had won. The sad and stupid part is he collapsed and died just after delivering the message. Now, look it from an Indian perspective. Would we do that, no way. We have more intelligent ways of communicating the same message – women power.

What a shrewd Indian would have done is to go to the nearest village and tell the lady a secret, that the Greek had won, and ask her to keep it as secret. Trust the gossip-power, the message would have reached athens faster than an email goes over the internet, or even the time photon takes to circumnavigate the earth. This stupid guy who lost his life by running a marathon and didnt even had a clue about this technique. And since then have something called marathon to commemorate that running. Hey, why run marathon, when you can phone in this day and age to inform whats happening. Totally pointless I say.

I could go on and on like this for several events. It would require lot of time for me to write my angst that “iddli-theeta” (iddli eating competition), and such similar traditional competitions are not at all even shortlisted to become olympics event. In short, I didnt like the olympics that happened, and finally just to clarify, this entry is not a result of my bitterness that India did only manage 1 medal at olympics or that our neighbor China stood second place in the medals tally. Darn.

Why do I have to run in the wheel from 9 – 5.30, asked the young hamster. The elder hamster looked at him sagely, and told “you need to work so that you earn your food and pay your bills.” “But, I dont want to work” cried the young hampster, “I want to figure out what I want to do and do my stuff, maybe sleep more. Whats the point in living like this?”.

“shut-up, and keep running” scolded the elder hampster.

The man watching the hampsters in the cage, grinned devilishly.

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? (mathai aaru:irupathaaru)

damn, I am late for work today.

I have received a lot of emails from someone in some war-torn region of africa. They needed my help to take out the riches from the bank. As usual, my delete button was put into quick action, but some people decided not to use the delete button and reply to them. Read about it here.

I have been troubled recently after the death of a dear friend of mine, Minnie Mowse. She was a very, very dear friend indeed, and her death affected me greatly and started to make me question my faith. I have decided to leave the church and join a travelling circus.

I have already made two very good friends, and tomorrow I will be starting my circus training with them…

:-)) Minnie mowse indeed.