I was reading some articles on the net when I stumbled across this. "Average cost of Indian wedding is as high as $34,000"[Link].In today's exchange rates, that is almost 17 lakhs !!You know, you can buy a Honda Civic and a top end Suzuki Swift in the same amount of money .
Now why is this a tough choice to make ? :)
Driving on Bangalore roads is at times a dangerous thing to do. What if you are in a car with someone who is just learning to drive ? Well, need I say more ? :-)
I had promised one of my closest friends that I would let her drive my car. The wonders of the Indian driving system has ensured that she already has a valid 4 wheeler driving license, without ever having driven one :)
She was very confident. Perhaps a touch misplaced confidence ........
It was a thrilling experience to say the least !! The kind of thrill you face when you jump out of the plane and your parachute fails. Or the kind you get when you realize the oncoming headlight which you thought belonged to a bike is really that of a tanker lorry with one light non-functional:-)
After 30 minutes of intense near misses, missed braking points for humps, stalls in mid road and abuses hurled at us by a truck driver , we were done. My cardio-vascular system was responding as if I had just finished running a marathon ( Not that I can run even 42 meters, but a nice comparison to put nonetheless )
Looking back at the half hour from the comfort of my bedroom, I have to admit that it was not all that bad ;-). Just the common mistakes all of us make when we start. I am the co-passenger described below, cop for short, pun intended ;)
Did she really do all of the above or am I just listing the stuff that I did while learning ?? ;-))
Scientifically it has been proven that victims of severe trauma often have a distorted idea of what really happened. I take refuge in that study just in case the above list offends anyone :-). Also as a writer, I am allowed to take a few creative liberties.
Incredibly, I am ready for more . I guess it gives me topics to write about in my blog :-))
What if my cooking has been such a brutal assault on my taste-buds that they are finally beginning to die ? What if they have given up the ghost, surrendered, sold out to other less 'talented' cooks ?
God knows, my taste-buds are so happy and over the moon when I eat out. I mean it could be any Tom, Dick and Harry place and not a squeak from them, they like it all. The moment I start my cooking the protests start. "Too much chillly", "Too little salt" , "Its ok, but it lacks something" , "not quite there yet" , "if you say that is a curry, then I'll believe it". I don't believe these guys !! To think we were all part of the body called Pradeep, and now they are shameless defectors. Shame on you taste-buds, shame on you !!
Well they say Genius is rarely appreciated in his lifetime. Add one more name to that list .....
Came back from office today at 11 pm and made appams. Ate them with the egg curry that I made yesterday. Now if you are wondering where the cooking tip is , here it comes
Turn off the gas burner once you are done making appams .
Rather disastrously, the humble one forgot to do this. Happily I settled in front of my TV with my late dinner. 20 minutes later I strolled back into my kitchen only to be greeted by this incredibly strong aroma of red hot metal. Quick glance at the gas confirmed my worst fear. Thankfully my non stick tawa is not damaged .
This happened nearly an hour back, still there is a strong smell in my kitchen :-)
And several years back a 4.5 kg baby was born, and the world was never the same again !!
I used to look like this when I was very small. The abnormally big head is surely an indication of superior intellect :)
I guess I will sing myself a birthday song tomorrow, cut an imaginary cake and head off to work. Yet to decide what the birthday special dinner should be. It is just me who will eat it, so should not be a tough choice to make ....
Happy birthday to me , happy birthday to me !!
I suppose all of us have had moments in our life when we thought what the whole point of our existence was . What is your calling in life ? Is it to work in a certain company ? Is it to help people ? Is it teaching ? Writing ? I will turn 32 shortly and I still have not figured out what exactly I want to do.
Occasionally comes the moments of despair when everything seems hopeless, followed by moments of peace and harmony when the world seems a perfect place to live in. Is it just me, or is rest of the world also like this ?
One thing you always hear people say is Life is all about choices. Can you really tell which of those choices were really made by you, with no other incidents/persons influencing you ? None, I bet. So does that really mean that I have been just a pawn ever since my birth, with everything programmed to happen in a certain way ? I would like to think otherwise. I am getting into The Matrix territory here :-) , which happens to be a movie that I absolutely hate.
I can tell you one thing life that is absolutely precious. Taking a walk with your 4 year old daughter and just listening to her shooting questions and comments at you non-stop. The world through the eyes of a 4 year old is so refreshing. I know it sounds very cliched , but it is surprisingly true !!
I am not well read in Frost ( or poetry in general for that matter), but there are some lines that somehow stick to you over the years
Like the classic
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep
Or the lesser known, but equally memorable
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Now why this sudden burst of poetry , you may ask. Well, the poems above must be appealing to any student in Kerala unfortunate enough to choose medicine as their career. I share part of the pain as my wife is a medical student too.
Now here comes the "unfortunate" part of the choice of a medical career. You would know that MBBS is worthless, you need an MD to survive. If you want to excel, DM is a must. Here is where the completely illogical compulsory rural service bond enforced by the Kerala government comes into play. See the table below to get a sense of this atrocity.
| Degree | Years to complete | Bond period (years) | Amount to break the bond ( Rs. Lakhs) |
| MBBS | 5.5 | 3 | 5 |
| MD | 3 | 3 | 15 |
| DM | 3 | 2 | 25 |
Total years for completion = 19.5 , assuming that you clear all the entrance exams in first attempt. You enter the system as an 18 year old, and if you are really brilliant, you can leave at the tender "young" age of 37.5 !! And during the bond period, you could be posted to any village health center, pretty much anywhere in Kerala.
Contrast this to engineering where right after 4 years of studies the students start earning. Higher studies in Engineering ?? You must be kidding !! Why this disparity of treatment is something that fails my logic. What we lack in rural areas is not so much in terms of healthcare, but more in terms of basic infrastructure like power and roads. So all the case of government to do rural service agreements for engineers, one would think ...
As a husband of medical student, I know I am doomed :((. There is pretty much no hope of a family life any time soon .... Maybe things will change , maybe sun shall rise from west.
I have been calling home frequently to get updates on how my Dad is doing. He is recovering and is in post operative ICU, he is not feeling any pain right now.
I guess he would be discharged later this week. I am going home tonight, tomorrow and day after are holidays here.
As a part of my new initiative to expand my cooking horizons, I had lined up Paneer butter masala as my next item. As always, my off-shore consultant was kind enough to send me a very detailed recipe on how to make it. I followed the instructions faithfully and here is what I got !!
Looks nice, doesn't it ? Tasted awesome too !! :-). First time I can really claim that after making something. I will shamelessly re-produce the recipe here soon , continuing my history blatant plagiarism :-)
Cooking has been a good diversion for me today. Been struggling with the news of Dad developing some illness. He is scheduled for a surgery on Monday, hope and pray things will be alright. Initial indications are that it is something minor, hope that turns out to be true
No matter how much we grow up, we never handle the news of a parent not being well, can we ?
Orkut baba says "He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals."
I say "He that falls in love with his own cooking shall never go hungry" :-)
Vada pav experiment turned out with satisfactory results. I followed the recipe given here . I made the vada a touch too big, I think. Also it had bit of a strong taste. I suspect too much coriander or garlic could have been the culprit. You are supposed to eat it with some chutney. Being a keralite, I of course opted for a coconut chutney with onions.
Was lying around this weekend when this sudden urge to cook chicken hit me. Chicken tikka is what I zeroed in on. I always prefer bone-less chicken, much easier to handle for novices like me. I followed the recipe given at the back of the tandoori chicken masala. Not too much of a recipe, though. Marinate chicken in lime juice and salt for half hour. Then marinate it in a mixture of curd, tandoori chicken masala, ginger and garlic for a further 2 more hours. I remember some one telling me that it is best to leave the marinated chicken in the fridge , so that is exactly what I did. This was followed by cooking in in my microwave in grill mode for close to half hour, need to turn the pieces around couple of times.
Turned out pretty ok, very different from the hotel version of tikka, but very much edible :-)
Plan to cook paneer soon, been pressing my on-shore consultant for a recipe, have not got it in full yet. Should be able to extract it in full in like 4-5 attempts, I know the drill by now :-)
They say "A fool and his money are easily parted", I say "A female and her recipes are not so easily parted" ;-))
Before I jumped in with Vada Pav, this thought stuck me today morning as to why I cannot make poori at home . A phone call to my off-shore consultant and discussions followed. The key outcome was the advice to knead the dough more than what you do for chapathi and make it soft. Also I was told you have to fry it in full flame and really hot oil. My previous misadventures with hot oil did make me a bit nervous, but I was confident I could pull it off.
Spoke to my on-shore consultant during the day and was told that dough needs to be hard, only then would pooris come out well. 180 degree phase opposition between consultants !! Not entirely un-expected. ( It is a bit like Kimi Raikkonen and Luis Hamilton are unlikely to take the same driving lines in an F1 course. Why ? Because each has their own distinct way of getting the maximum performance out of the car. I am more of a Sakon Yamamoto when it comes to cooking :-( ). Finally I decided to take the middle path, neither hard, nor too soft :-)
After all the kneading and rolling, I started frying them on full flame. The first 3-4 came out like stiff papads, very crispy. I hate it when pooris are this crispy. S.O.S call to on-shore consultant followed. Got the suggestion that I was probably over-frying them. Good tip, started taking them out a bit sooner and suddenly things were a whole lot better !! The aloo curry was 2-3 days old and was showing every sign of going bad, just was too lazy to cook more curry. So managed with it for the time being ;-)
I am getting pretty happy with the slow expansion of my range. Future projects in mind including baking buns and cookies.
Just one day after my lament about no one seeming to care about terrorism here, I watched this nice Hindi movie called A Wednesday, which deals more or less with exactly the same stuff that I was mentioning. Maybe I should focus on screen plays now :-). Movie was nice, no songs or typical Hindi movie dramas. Very gripping, superb acting and a decent plot line.
Health is back to normal now. And my cooking speed is improving. managed to make 5 chapathis in around 25 mins from start to finish !! ( Used to take me up to 1 hour ). Happily reported this to my North Indian food consultant ( have a seperate one for non-veg, keralite food , cakes etc ;-) ), and immediately got ridiculed. Consultant claims she can do the same in 5 mins !! That is surely an exaggeration, no way you can do it in 5 mins start to finish. Or can you ??
Next in line is the humble Vada Pav. Hilariously, Shiv Sena is now interested in Vada Pav. They claim it is necessary to have a standard taste for it. Surely there are more pressing matters for them to focus on !! I guess I will wait for their standardized recipe , don't want to get stoned for cooking something else ;-)
I was watching the shocking visuals from the Delhi blasts yesterday. I just could not help feeling an overwhelming feeling of bitter frustration as everyone went through their motions once more. The politicians expressing shock and sympathy, the news channels with their share of opinion polls and panel discussions, the mandatory cat fight between BJP and Congress. We have seen the same thing after the Mumbai and Ahmedabad blasts. Sadly, we shall see it again.
Picture this : Some folks come in , murder 20 or so of our own citizens, taunt all of us with an e-mail which says "do what you can, but we will still kill you", and as a country we are not even outraged by it. Why can't someone from the government say something like "As a country we will not take this anymore. Wherever you are, we will hunt you down and we will eliminate you" ? In 2 weeks, no one will remember this, then they will strike again. In a different city, different head count and then the carnival shall start again.
Our own citizens being slaughtered in our own country, what do we care ? Life of an Indian is not worth much, is it ? Life goes on.
Does the word Indian mean anything any longer ? May be I am one of the very few idiots who still think it does
Finally after sometime I am returning to blogging. Drove down home recently in my WagonR. It is a superbly scenic route to Calicut, especially once you enter Kerala. Sometimes it is easy to forget how breathtakingly beautiful God's own country can be. Couple of snaps clicked from the Wayanad Ghat section of the road is below, cameras can never do justice to this scenery.
My family came back to Bangalore with me and spent the whole of last week here. Yesterday was Onam and it was nice to have them around here. My wife and her team won a second price in their medical college pookkalam ( flower carpet ) competition with the following rendering, looked pretty nice
Unfortunately, I have been down with an infection since Thursday, throat pain and really high fever in the night. Gobbling up lots of medicines now.
Most of them induce drowsiness, so I am off to dreamland now.
5 a.m , jet lag is really biting now. I am as fresh as a daisy and hungry !! Had a miserable flight back as usual, I just hate being inside those aircrafts for 18-20 hours ..
Did not make much progress on the V2 specifications front. As a first step I have brought back the long discarded jeans back into my wardrobe collection. Now I can save on my washing expenses :-)
Listening to the song "Maa" from Taare Zameen Par.Such beautiful singing, with so minimal instruments.
I can rarely listen to this song without a tear or two welling up in my eyes. Which would sort of tell you why Pradeep V1 has been having some ups and downs of late, just the heart taking over the mind :-)) Internal wiring at birth, nothing I can do to change it, I guess.
Another song that always moves me, Hallelujah from Shrek. Again, just a piano as accompaniment, beautiful singing ....
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