I can haz gourmand syndrome

Rule 34 may have to be amended to throw in the word lolcat somewhere.

So I'm in maximum city. And every weekend has been a weekend of fun and frolic, some of it forced. But I've eaten at some fabulous places and have a lot to say of food, drink, ambience and service. In this post (since I don't have a food blog) I shall tell you all about interesting things I have been eating and also, cooking.

Went to this nice Italian place on sunday, called Quattro in Lower Parel. Now I'm not one of those underexposed comfort eaters who rely on potatoes and cheese to give them a global food experience. But I'd like to write about this place because the service was very good. Of course, I also went to Fenix last week and the service there was overwhelmingly good, yada yada, but you really pay through your nose for that kind of attention, y'know? The prices at Quattro are certainly reasonable by Bombay standards.

We ordered a cream of mushroom and leeks soup, siciliano pizza and gnocchi. I didn't have my camera with me, so no photos. The soup came with a few interesting breads and were very subtly and freshly flavoured. (I notice how I've been gravitating towards fresher flavours, even if tossed with stir fried something or a heavier sauce, as an alternative to heavy, spicy, overly rich food.)

So here's a list of the interesting things I've eaten over the last few weeks:

• Gado gado salad (Busaba, Lower Parel)
• Tuna carpaccio with orange, walnut and vinaigrette dressing. (the abovementioned Fenix, Oberoi)
• BLT with cheddar and pesto (Salt Water Cafe, Bandra)
• Beef Bulgagi Maki Roll (Busaba, Lower Parel)
• Mediterannean Salad & Caesar Salad (Kala Ghoda Cafe)
• Gooey Chocolate Cake (Cafe Churchill, Colaba)
• Emmenthal and Pesto sandwich and Olive and basil tapenade sandwich (Moshe's Cafe, Colaba)

And oh, I fell in love with Mediterannean food in Himachal. Now, the list of interesting things I've made (I realise this is extremely tedious without pictures):

• Quesadillas (spring onions, cheddar etc)
• Risotto rice pudding (drenched in mangoes and nutella :-p) 
• Two varieties of salad with Greek Yoghurt dressing. 
• Mushrooms on toast.

And the gourmand syndrome? It's for real. I read a story about a snowboarder, Kevin Pearce, who had a near fatal accident, and re-emerged post severe trauma with an inexplicable craving for basil pesto. Now, I wouldn't generally attribute this to syndromes or afflictions, I can completely understand a craving for basil pesto, with its creamy cheese and fresh basil and quirky, crunchy pine nuts, but he was quite indifferent to the food before.

Pesto is, indeed, the best-o.

Within every extrovert, there's an introvert screaming to get out.

I've been an extrovert for far too long. So long that I have little clue what to do when I do find myself alone. <cue jokes about jilling off> More often than not, I spend my time dilating my pupils and retreating into that passive wonder-world which also, apparently, obeys the economic dictum of the law of diminishing marginal utility.
It's getting difficult to shake off this state, where there are always things to do, but then you always have so many choices - and you know, YOU get to make the right choice for yourself, the overwhelming knowledge of the fact that your freedom is your responsibility - that I get stuck with what Stephen Fry called options paralysis. Truly, I need to spend more time just doing my own thing and getting the hang of it. Not that I didn't, in the past, but really developing it, honing it and making it my own. Even 'doing my thing' feels like a borrowed pastime.

But really, the way to get unstuck from options paralysis is to reject everything. The most peaceful place in your mind is where there is nothing. Try as you might, 'nothing' is an exceedingly difficult state of mind to achieve. So, the next best thing follows, one thing. But to really do that one thing right, and do justice to it, you have to die first. Die completely. Leave your half-hopeful ambitions, your distant dreams and your exotic-for-the-sake-of-it choices. Let go over the cliff, as the zen monk says. And then your own fears and lethargy and false hopes will never deceive you. Maybe I should give it a shot.

Oh, and hat-tip to ol' Prufrock for that line in the title. It's true. 

It's been a bloody long time since I blogged, but I'm not going to dwell on that.

I'm not going to dwell on much, actually. Except to say that I have come back here, because it reminds me of a time when I looked into myself to understand my thoughts and to find sense in what I did, and so, who I was.

Even if I am not that same person any more, as would be the case with anyone after 5 years living an unchronicled, pretty much unhinged existence - I want to reconnect with this dear old identity I had. One I may not entirely recognize, or appreciate all the time, but certainly, this is still me. Somewhen.

And, I have been gripped with a fear that I will slowly, but surely, start losing my voice. Literally and metaphorically. I intend to seek out a music teacher over the weekend, (does anyone in Bombay know who's a good hindustani vocals teacher anywhere in central or south bombay?) and to find what I want, and say it the way I want to, with the words I used to covet as mine. If it is my opinion, and an interesting one, it won't just go on chat windows or into a ear and out the other.

And hopefully my writing will improve as well. It will feel good once I hit publish. But then, I should get down to changing the template and all that shizz. You'll be seeing more of me. :)

Yahweh

Let it be the most obvious of faux pas and the simplest of jokes. To be in that situation, when you're nicely unconcerned with the world because of some WWW, is bloody hilarious.

So we were on the beach yesterday, at Udaipur, which is a fishing village along the coast of Digha. It's in Orissa, and yes, the other one is in Rajasthan. So well, we were on the beach and indulging in a bit of debauchery. Primate and I joined these guys a little late, and found them having a brilliant time with some chilled beer - they'd bought a whole crate. The beer tasted unbelievably good with the sun and the sea, and we downed it like hungry little babies. (Woody, by the way, has excellent bottle-opening skills. Just cracks them open with his canines. Maybe a little scary too.) Then, Primate proceeded to get buried under the sand, with a bit of beer being poured down his throat occasionally, courtesy me. And he drifted into glorious, undisturbed sleep. Sure, right after that, the LAN guy and I got ourselves buried as well. It's the most relaxing feeling, with so much soft, warm weight over you, I'm surprised they haven't turned this into a money-making venture. A little while after, the other guys moved to the really shady woods right next to where we were camped. And funnily, a few local urchins had started gathering around us like we were a sight to watch. Maybe we were, but they stood there and stared for more than 5-10 minutes.

So we decided we'd need to take turns watching over our stuff and Primate just so nothing happens to either. When I got to my shift, these boys had gotten bolder and started to release this little crab that they had on a leash near us. I kept telling them to go away and not bother us. But they must have sensed that I was a little disoriented and could have some fun when I wasn't looking or something, and released the crab near Primate. I shouted at them that time, and got the rest of the onlookers to leave, except for the boy with the crab and a couple of his friends who hung about a little away from where we were.

LAN guy came back for his shift and I explained the situation to him. By this time the rest of the guys came back from the woods, and we decided to wake Primate up since he seemed to be the centre of attraction. By this time, the boys had alerted half the beach's attention to us and fishermen and random rickshaw drivers flocked towards base camp and stared down at Primate. We woke him up, and a man in the gathering confessed that they thought he was dead. Skinny Legs was really pissed off and commented on the villagers' daftness to them, said "does he look like a ghost to you?" - the guy said "yes". In five minutes, we packed up and left.

There's so much you can do with a Kurkure!

We are a trendy Punjabi family who love the good life and do everything to make it fun. My brother B.K. has the most colourful collection of shirts, we fondly call him rainbow man. My sister-in-law Anupama is so beautiful, she’d give Hema Malini a complex. My husband Amit loves to wear his pair of baggy jeans and starter cap and looks hilarious trying to imitate his favourite rap star. And I, Monika, used to look like the gorgeous Nargis in my youth, some people still think I do.

In the spirit of everything cool and funky, we always experiment with new & exotic cuisines. We had bought ourselves matching ponchos and decided to make something Mexican for tea. While making burritos, we added our favourite Kurkure to the recipe. Even real Mexicans couldn’t have made something this mast!

An Advertisement on the Twitter website

About using Twitter on your phone

Twitter really shines when you're away from your computer.

By hooking up your mobile phone, you can receive updates from those you're following (or just some people) when you're waiting in boring lines. And you can send updates, like "OMG, there's a monkey walking down the street!"—which, lets face it, you're unlikely to see while you're indoors. It's all done through text messages (aka "sms"), which you probably use all the time anyway, so there's not much to learn. Twitter doesn't charge anything for this, but be sure to know what your text plan looks like with your wireless carrier. Also know that you can shut text messages from Twitter off at anytime by replying with "off" (and back on by sending "on"). And you can even specify that it turn off automatically at night over here.

see it for yourself

Hyper-linker

• I've been listening to Cake as I write this. Cake is an indie-rock band, and they're so-so.
  
• I found a quiz on the India Uncut website. (And what a website it is! Super stuff; congratulations Amit Verma, for writing and managing so well)
• The quiz led me to this page. It doesn't make a very great read, but did you ever know the line was so bluddy long?
• This is a good online newspaper. Better read, I find, than a lot of American ones. (While you're at that, if you wanna know where some of the flashy, dripping-in-your-face-with-colours-and-eye-straining-graphics Indian websites get their ideas, check this out.) It has been around for a while, and is a regularly updated, often used website. I found it when I read an article that talked of legislating against the underwear-baring, lower than low baggy pants that are worn almost everywhere around USA now. I also happened to read about the zoot suit riots. Good stuff.
  
• I used to regularly read the curious gawker, but I had not once visited the other, casual, more personal blog of his. It is SO good. I enjoy his style a lot. Check it out here.
• And because I may have told you to read my blog and you come and see this bulleted list of links instead, and that irks you, you may want to read Kaushik's blog. I disclaim any responsibility of your well-being for after you read the blog, and also, don't hold anything against me :)
• You may want to leave a comment. Just so.
  

The pursuit of philosophi (Will Smith took my y)

I enjoy writing. It's one of the few things I truly enjoy engaging in, and when that doesn't work out well, like it didn't - so many times over the past year, when I'm at a loss to find words to string together to explain what it is that I'm feeling, I would be so terribly bothered by it. Because, well, it's not just about a pastime here. It was more like sustenance, I used to blog a lot more from home and after that, everything just got so disconnected and, um, random.

So I decided to do a blog post about that today. About the story when things started to go downhill for me, when I wasn't aware that I was indeed on top of a hill, when I had so much that I never knew I'd bargained for, and how...uh I'll save the punchline for later.

(Isn't there a justify on this thing?)

Yesterday I decided that there was a significance to the address of my blog - blackframedspectacles, although until now, I myself deemed it to be a random, get-people-to-wonder-bout-it sorta name. Yesterday, I decided upon its significance. It's a nice story, even if you don't know me personally. In fact, all the better for that.

Mom bought me those frames, I think the rage was Sania Mirza coupled with Kal Ho Naa Ho, that made mom acknowledge those hideous frames and bring them home because I was too lazy to go out to the shop and select some for myself. Let me say this for myself, or at least how it was then, that I was no great judge of appearances, accessorizing or the other appalling a's. I just went with the flow (of course, I did have judgments to pass on certain others, but they were none too scathing, and none had any effect on my general attitude) and didn't really find them much too bad.
But they were bad. In fact, the colour of my skin made it worse because of the contrast it created - thick black frames and sometimes alabaster-white skin. (I have tanned excessively now, but ANYway...)
I got through NUJS, came to Kol...blah blah, we know the story, and one night when I went down for dinner, I revealed them to the world. Everyone, as a rule, detested them. They didn't say it to my face, of course. People are polite when around I years. But that made it worse for me, because I tend to imagine, and speculate and ruminate and brood and just run myself to ruin solely with my thoughts. It's amazing how I can actually manage it, but I have created situations, problems within situations, the loss of a solution to that problem due to a turn of events within that imaginary situation and spewed the anger resulting from that on people. My alcove-mate was witness to one such hysterical outburst, and I asked her, very uncharitably, to leave my room. But I digress...

The spectacles, of course. I did have a different pair of spectacles, decent, thin ones but I lost them very soon, while I moved to my assigned room. So I realized I was stuck with this for a long time, and I didn't mind it much. Or so I thought.

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Day by day, there was a growing alienation between myself and my peers because of that introspection that I got lost in much so often, and it wasn't even that much fun. I would want to go out and have fun without a thought and yet something really strong would pull me back to my chair and keep me there.
And then a day came when everyone decided to tell me how much they hated me and those ugly blackframedspectacles. How they even hated my blog because of it, and they spat on my presence in cyberspace. They told me how they wished I was never born, and why I should get away from there as soon as possible.

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Now, this situation reminded me a lot of my time in kindergarten (not the paragraph directly above this, that's just bull) when I was mostly observant, very quiet and sometimes given to being bullied.
That kinda happened. And this year, I came back with new spectacles, and man, have things changed.
Life is very different now, here. I suppose my blog was just meant to stand as testimony to the role those spectacles have played in my life. The past they brought to life, the present that they made me value, and the future because I will turn them into a laser gun and burn anyone I look at through them.