Sunday, February 26, 2006

From a faint hearted Epicurean

Today I woke up and decided I wanted to make lunch. Told Ma as much on the breakfast table and she wasn’t amused. Why can’t I cook? I could sense ma’s trepidation as a vision of me meddling around in her kitchen flitted across her eyes, so she put on her ‘on the verge of a nervous break down’ act again and told me that I should do it another day as today she wasn’t up for it. Well, I’d be doing the cooking, not she! Anyway, even after I said ,that, I am not at all ‘groomed’ and what would my future in-laws say, how would I bear the insults? My pleas (all done in a melodramatic and highly amusing fashion) fell on deaf ears, so I decided to get pleasure out of writing about food.

Hmm…I love all kinds of food, and seriously there isn’t much that I wont eat, except ofcourse tohri, tinda, parval and lauki...I am allergic…just like I am lactose intolerant.
My absolute favourite is street food, maybe because I cant afford the gourmet delights of the higher end restaurants on my meager pocket money, but then also, street food has a charm all of its own.

The thela- wallahs around Sarita Vihar have some really interesting fare to offer- from tikki burgers to Lebanese wraps. But away from the main market there is this innocuous old man selling boiled corn. He takes some corn and mixes in it this chutney, which is deep rust in colour, made out of red chillies and tamarind. The hot chutney with the mildly sweet corn is amazing, and enough to make your ears smoke, and one plate/pattal is for five rupees!! So much better than the corn you get everywhere else these days.

Now that we are on the corny topic- I also love roasted bhutta with lots of nimbu and masala.(sorry for using all the local terminology but the flavour of the food is lost without it!!). This bhutta is perfect when it’s drizzling, the air is a little nippy, and people are running with umbrellas. Then stop and have freshly roasted bhutta. It has the warm smell of coal and there is nothing like the crackle to beat the cold. Drenched, biting into the nimbu smeared bhutta, while the smell of freshly wet earth fills ur nostrils- umm…divine!!

Another one of my weaknesses is Aloo Chaat. Again from the roadside vendors, crisp, steaming and deep-fried, with masala and very little chutney. Of course then there are the tikki burgers which are ok once in a while, though look extremely suspect, but what’s so wrong with a bit of dirt anyway, if the food is good.

Now I am a die hard Carnivore, so this whole bird flu thingy is something that’s giving me nightmares. So I propounded a reasoning- look, a) No human cases of the flu have been reported in India. b) Very effective government control of the situation. c) It can affect our economy n the poor poultry farm owners very negatively, so we should consume more meat to help them. d) Indian cooking methods kill the flu- so boil n pressurize the chicken, who’s asking you to have it raw? And e) I’ll shrivel up and die if I don’t get some meat soon enough.
Would someone please explain all of this to my mum?

She finds my state extremely amusing and yesterday she said -“whats wrong in being a vegetarian for a little while?”. I’ll tell you whats wrong in being a vegetarian(ghaaseatarian)-as someone I greatly admire, Anthony Bourdain, says- “vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.” And that’s one of his more polite remarks.

Now I will dwell into the Tamsic pleasures of MEAT-

Isn’t this post already long enough? - hmm (to be continued…)

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

nobody loves me, everybody hates me, i think i'll eat worms

Alone and heart broken. I have officially been abandoned by terrible chintzy Chino(i am glad i gave u that name, u deserve to sound like twilled pants!!). boohoo- i donot believe that they are no PCos where u are. you are online and not even replying to my messages. and here i am missing you so much, that my message on msn is all mush n Sinatraesque- Dream a little dream of me--EEEaauuu!! i feel sick- i shall change it to Victims of Change.

Heart break aside, i had such a great time on sunday. dancing to 0bscure songs, well if u can call that dancing!! made such a complete buffoon out of myself, was delicious fun. i had a great time Leela, sunderBUN, and Cat- thx guys, i love you!

I am ofcourse on an all time high after my sudden burst of philanthropy when i gave my ohh so sexy only mango top (which i wanted to wear) to Rajy and wore my skirt n black spaghetti instead. but still had Leela n SB leching, so was all too glad.

believe it or not- Monday morning i gotup on time and attended all my lectures, then got my act together and made a study schedule for the upcomimg internals- 6th and 8th. Wish me luck!

Yesterday was such a beautiful day, all bright and sunny. Spring has come to campus (like the Giant's garden)- there are flowers all over the place and everything smells divine. in the afternoon SB, Leela, Cat and me had ice lollys sitting under a tree on cool grass. Then i picked(not plucked, mind you) soft pink flowers for all of us and we wore em in our hair. ummm....i love spring.

hmm...wasnt this post supposed to be about heart break...well, i might not sound too sad but i am. And on top of that am reading Tristram Shandy so am on the verge of a nervous breakdown coz as AS put it- it does seem like retribution for my past sins that i have to study Sterne.

so as limbo beckons- shall start reading volume 3...

(just reread the post and seems very staccato, but if Sterne could be cannonized for Tristram Shandy, i think i can get away with this...)

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Oral Sex!! (how many hits now!!!)

‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice-

One of the greatest mysteries (do I dare say unsolved?) of my adolescence was Oral sex. Well, when I was about thirteen the hottest news was the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton saga and for the first time everyone was discussing, well, sex, and the word most oft heard was oral sex. At that age I was the only one in my class who used to read Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey archer, so was looked up to with a certain degree of awe and respect,(in my defense, I gave up reading those books ages ago!!). anyway, so when the alien concept of oral sex reared it’s head(pun intended) all the kids turned to me for answers, and I didn’t have a clue, but of course I had an image to maintain so I came up with the darndest of ideas.
I knew that oral, of course, was something to do with the mouth so in an extremely sagacious manner I said-when a girl and guy talk about it, say over the phone or something, then that’s oral sex. :-)!
Sometime back I was telling my friends z story and tiny Maya told me that she thought again that of course oral sex was when a girl and a guy spoke about sex but,(and it has to have the Maya touch) they had to be sitting across each other(and here’s the clincher)- naked!!

'But then,' thought Alice. 'shall I never get any older than I am now? That'll be a comfort, one way--never to be an old woman--but then--always to have lessons to learn!'

After about eight years and two boy friends later I am none the wiser. I have actually had someone use the words ‘tongue tornado’- yeah well he thought it was such a turn on- okayyy then!

The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed `off with her head! Off--'

While we are on the topic, let me tell you about the most intense description of an orgasm ever. It’s from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway-

“It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then as it spread, one yielded to it’s expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split it’s thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over- the moment.”

Hmm…

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Henna!!

I woke up today morning with the smell of henna emanating from my palms and it roused in me a warm sense of sensuality. This smell brings back so many memories- Ma's beautiful hand, full of intricate patterns, almost weighing it down. Yes, always just the left hand, never both, 'one has to be practical', karvachauth or come what, you wouldn’t let anything tie you down. Late night 'sangeet' and 'mehandi', tinkling of bangles and anklets, women playing on the dholki and singing some seriously raunchy songs. I was always the one who would never dance, with this complete teeny expression on my face, like how i was so above all this. Hardly ever got mehandi put then, it was silly and I pretended to hate the smell. But ohh, how I loved it!! There is something so warm about it, so soft. Something extremely erotic, maybe because of the snatches I remember from hindi songs, like ‘116 chaand ki raatien, aur tumhaare kaandhe kaatil,gheeli mehandi ki khushboo…” – or like that song from Dil Se, “jiya jale”.

So many spiels surrounding the intensity of the colour, but what I like to believe is that the more passionate a person is, the richer the mehandi, as the heat of ones blood makes the colour bloom. Well, my hands are rust almost,(oh well. I always like to think of myself as this passionate sex goddess anyway!!). But I had no occasion to get my hands thus, except that Chino and I were at the Surajkund Mela yesterday. There was this group in a corner stall selling henna powder and Chino was busy clicking their pictures. They were from Rajasthan and their attire, or faces, I don’t know which he found so interesting that was clicking away to glory. With nothing better to do I started chatting up this little girl, also so that she wouldn’t look straight in the camera and he would get her ‘natural’ look.

Then the smell started working it’s magic on me and I just couldn’t resist getting some put on my palms. Well, I have never been a huge fan of intricate designing with peacocks n what not, so I just asked her to make a circle in the middle of my palms and fill the tips of my fingers. Ofcourse this was something most unusual and quite amusing, so her kid brother also wanted in on it. I was reduced to this guinea pig that the two were testing their skills on, and in the eagerness to out do each other made a complete mess. I could feel the eyes of passerbys gazing at my hands with mirth, and some actually passed some silly comments, but I was least bothered, coz it was so much fun. Sunny afternoon, C with his camera(taking my pics now), two highly amused kids and this Rajasthani woman singing folk songs, I couldn’t have asked for more. Exactly why suraj kund mela was so much fun this year, coz usually its this crazy shopping frenzy with ma, but this time all I bought was a li’l papier-mâché bird to hang in my room and a book mark. All we did was watch folk performers and when C gave them the photographs he had taken last time their faces lit up, and they all surrounded us and wanted him to take more pictures. They performed again and again for the sole purpose of being photographed. Then they clambered around C for the pics and when I smiled they all blushed and looked away shyly. Such simple people who were happy just to see their pictures, and C was so happy to just to see them smile (and yeah I am sure the adulation didn’t hurt too much either!!).

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Names To Faces

This is just something i wrote during a very boring lecture. Usually i just doodle in the margins but somehow i caught a phrase and started penning random thoughts. This is just free writing and not a poem...though i would like to think of it as a rock song, but hey, who am i kidding!!

Names to Faces

Dont ever give faces to names, a whole
Just let me not know I feel
and weep and weep and weep I may, this way

I still cant believe that I've been trapped and my cage is built and ready
I starve and starve and don't remember my own self
There is beauty in all but there is no beauty in pretence

So wish could break free, wish could get away
These years sitting on my eyelids, drooped all day

The man on top of me
Grew and flew away

This bog
I cant follow the lights
I fall into faces and hollow eyes

Touch me, love me or just let me be
It's all torture to my soul and my eyes are like little slits now
So hard to see

Then sanity, and acceptance
End of solipsism
A fond touch, a friendship
Thats beautiful