Yesterday's Thoughts

Fuck the night joint. I'm way too sleepy and tired by the time I return home, and somehow defeated, to really let the drug stimulate my thoughts. The morning brings with it a wonderful wave of contemplation, so morning joint it is.

So while staring at the spirals of smoke, and in the many long-drawn minutes after, I was steeped in thought, of varied things. 


*****

Going easy on myself has had disastrous results on my money management. I have completely eaten into the savings my grandma painstakingly built for me, and I'm left with 1/5 of a lakh now. It's pathetic. I can't live within my means :( I intend to bring it back to the original amount, if not bring it on par with where it would be if I had let the interest accumulate. 


The Flatmate is currently the likeness of a saint. He is finding the strength to always do right by himself and is enduringly pure. He's a real inspiration, if you are looking for it. 
The city noises on the cab to work are gratingly present, each and every day. Sometimes, you hear the voices behind the noises, the urgent alarm of the ambulance, the bored persistence of car horns, the buzz of the beautiful rains. 


Being a non-vegetarian also changes your personality. The way food is attacked, and the defensive response that one evolves in response to allegations by vegetarians makes one develop a different attitude in life. In other news, Woodside's BeerNBurger festival is great, and Ireland's corned beef burger was amazing. It didn't even taste like meat. Just like a really well-cooked and flavoured patty, with smoked bacon. Mmmm. 


I should not smoke so much if I want to sing. It's not good for my voice or my lung power but it won't even let me practice, because getting stoned makes me unable to approach music a little detachedly. But I get so restless just to think of being by myself sober. 


Ze Stick will be coming over in a few weeks. I will have to sort out my room and get an internet connection and stuff by then. Where will she stay otherwise!

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.