The Imagined Universe

“What’s for lunch?” my Mom asked me on Skype.  No doubt, she was wondering why I was chatting with her on a weekend instead of feeding her son-in-law.

“Masala pasta”, I said brightly.  My brother V, who was visiting India, grimaced beside her.

“How did you make it?” my Mom asked.

“Well, I boiled the pasta”, I began, when V interrupted “In plain water?”

V can be a little puritanical about cooking.  So I began again “I boiled water, added a little salt, and after it dissolved, I added penne pasta”.

V nodded approvingly.  “Yes, that’s the way to do it.”

“Then as the pasta was boiling, I ground some onion, ginger and green chillies in a mixer..” I stopped.  V’s face had contorted and he seemed to be in a lot of anguish. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he spluttered. “Green chillies in pasta?”  He seemed shocked.

Oh, so this was just his puritanical tastes kicking in.  I could see why he looked so upset.

“Then I had some ragu sauce”,  I continued, “so I mixed that also in and fried all this in oil.  Then I drained the pasta and poured into a bowl, and I poured this masala over it”.

“You can’t call this pasta”, V protested.  “It’s some kind of upma, pasta upma maybe.”

“Upma” reminded me - I did add some boiled peas too.  That didn’t seem like such a great idea, in hindsight.  Then I remembered reading a recipe where someone also added vegetables to the pasta.  I wondered whether I should mention this to V.  Maybe safer not to.

“Well, all I added extra was ginger and green chillies”, I said.  “How does that make it not pasta?”

V had a sudden thought. “I hope you did not add cheese as well to this concoction?”

“No, I did not”, I said indignantly.  Cheese with ginger?  Even I couldn’t have stomached that.

“Do you have a picture?” my Mom interrupted.

“Yes”, I said, and showed her.

“Looks good to me”, she declared.  “How did it taste?”

“Oh, I loved it! I will make it every weekend now!”

I should have stopped at that.  It was bad enough to add green chilli and ginger and still call it pasta.  You’d think I would be quite satisfied with my attempt at Indo-Italian fusion cuisine ;)  But no, I had to try and outdo myself.

So the other day, I opened the refrigerator and found I had a cup of leftover pav bhaji. (I like to blend my bhaji into a paste).  I also found a bowl of excess boiled pasta leftover from the previous evening’s pasta salad.

No prizes for guessing what my lunch was

If you are curious, it tasted wonderful !   The next time I make pav bhaji, I am going to make sure I reserve some bhaji.   Pasta bhaji makes for a great lunch!

But I don’t see V eating it any time soon.

Tags: masala, pasta

Some suggestions:

1. To the World Taekwondo Federation - could you please change your name? To the World Taekwondo Association, or the International Taekwondo Federation, or basically anything else but the World Taekwondo Federation?

2. To the New York Times - can you get yourself to pause and resist the urge to abbreviate? Or at least proof read whatever you write?

Otherwise, you will end up making statements like these:

The stadium announcer read a statement from the W.T.F., saying, “This is a strong violation of the spirit of tae kwon do and the Olympic Games….”

and these..

However, W.T.F. officials later said their ban of Matos was not official, and they would discuss the situation with the International Olympic Committee.

(More here.)

Or is that a coded message to your readers - on what you think of Matos kicking the referree, of those officials and the Federation?

Whatever it was, all I can say is - World Taekwondo Federation ?

Tags: Olympics, taekwondo

She was cleaning out the shoe closet and neatly organizing all the shoes in it.  There were two things that struck her - first, each cubbyhole could hold one pair of her shoes, but only one each of his shoes.  So his shoes were occupying twice the space that hers were.  Second, she also realized that he had much more shoes than her.  This second realization was very troubling.

Isn’t it in the natural order of things that women should have more shoes than men?   Shouldn’t women have much more dresses and shoes and shouldn’t their closets be bigger than men’s?

She realized she was the victim of grave injustice.  Gender equality had been ruthlessly trampled down, and she hadn’t even noticed.  So she went in search of him.  (What, you thought he would have been nearby, helping her organize his shoes?)

“You have much more shoes than me,” she said in an accusing voice. “Your shoes are completely filling up the closet!”

“Well, you can always buy more shoes for yourself, then”, he said. “Have I ever asked you not to buy shoes? I always want you to buy more shoes.”

“But I don’t need more shoes right now!” she said. “That’s not the point.  I don’t want to buy more shoes. But how can you have so many shoes?  You don’t use half of them anyway.  I never see you wearing most of them.  I am going to donate all the shoes you don’t wear.”

“Come on, there aren’t that many shoes, are they ?”, he said, ever the calm one in a crisis. “There are just my four pairs of sneakers, 4-5 pairs of black shoes which you’ll agree are absolutely essential, 4 pairs of brown shoes which are also essential, then my golf shoes, my hiking shoes, winter boots and a few others.”

“I am not discussing this.” she said, putting on a stern face.  “Which one do you want me to donate?”

“I need all of them!” he said, picking up his favorite pair.  She wondered if he was going to hug them like a tree-hugger. Save my shoes! “Why don’t you buy more shoes if you want to have more shoes than me?”

“Well, for a start, this organizer does not have enough space for more.  Actually, this closet will not have space for new shoes.”

But he wasn’t listening, he had already turned away.  So she decided to do the next best thing.  She decided that at least, she needed parity in closet space.  So she stacked all his shoes on the floor, and made sure there were equal pairs of his and her shoes in the organizer.  That was fair, what?

Days later she realized that in hindsight, it wasn’t such a good idea.  He now happily leaves all his shoes on the floor, and all her organizing has been a waste of time.  She keeps tripping over his shoes every time she enters the house.

Plus, he buys more shoes now that he has all the space in the floor to fill.

So last weekend, she took the only choice left to her.  She bought more shoes for herself.  And a new organizer.  She still has much less shoes than he does, but she has learnt to make peace with it.

At least her handbags outnumber his wallets.

Tags: shoes

How many times have we heard people say things like “This younger generation just does not know Indian tradition.”

I just realized they are right.  There is so much I don’t know about Indian traditions.  For instance, I was just reading this New York Times article on how people are photoshopping their vacation and wedding photos.  They are having fun adding absent friends, subtracting ex-husbands and providing everyone with virtual face lifts, liposuction and hair restoration.

Then I read a quote from “Mary Warner Marien, an art history professor at Syracuse University and the author of “Photography: A Cultural History.””

In India, she said, it is a tradition to cut-and-paste head shots of absent family members into wedding photographs as a gesture of respect and inclusion. “Everyone understands that it’s not a trick,” she said. “That’s the nature of the photograph. It’s a Western sense of reality that what is in front of the lens has to be true.”

See how ignorant I am?  I have never heard of this tradition. I am now learning of it from the New York Times.  It’s too late and too many years after my wedding to follow this glorious tradition.  See how I have failed again to follow Indian customs?

Next time I visit India, I am going to take a look at some old wedding photo albums of my parents, aunts and uncles.   Do you think I will find that a long dead great-aunt came back from the grave to attend my uncle’s  wedding?   That would be a gesture of respect, right?

My recycling bin doesn’t like its job.  It is also not afraid to say so.

Every week, I put out the recycle bin on the street.  Plastics, cans, card board, paper, all go into this bright blue bin and get picked up by the garbage disposal truck.

But my recycling bin keeps running away.  Sometimes it attempts suicide by sitting in the middle of the road in the face of traffic, sometimes it tries to get around the corner when I am not watching.  Sometimes, it upends itself and walks away, leaving all the cans on the ground.  In short, it has tried every trick to get out of the job and to let me know exactly what it thinks of my trash.

I am not a bad boss, so I did spend some time wondering how I could increase the bin’s job satisfaction.  I rinsed every empty milk jug and can in hot water, to improve the bin’s job content.  I was also careful not to overload the bin.  Yet the bin kept running away.

The bin was almost successful in suicide.  It got under the wheels of a truck and nearly split into two.  I treated it as best as I could, taping it up with clear tape and using it.  But perhaps getting back to work so soon annoyed the bin even more, for it was missing out on disability leave.  In any case, the bin wasn’t doing much work after the injury - it kept having nervous breakdowns.

With regret, I knew it was time to let the bin go.  I drove down to the city center last week to get a replacement bin.

“My recycling bin ran away and broke,” I told the employee in Engineering. (Why does “Engineering” handle recycling bins?)

“Yeah, it’s just too windy these days, isn’t it?”  she said as she handed me a new bin.

I don’t believe it, I thought, she is just making excuses for the bins.  Her cubicle companions leered at me, all nine of them, sitting in their  blue suits against the wall. I wondered what it would be like to spend 8 hours each day in the company of such suicidal maniacs. Do they talk to her?

Which reminded me, I needed my revenge.

“Can I have one more bin ?”  I asked her sweetly.

“Sure”, she said as she handed me one of the blue suits.  She seemed almost glad to get rid of them.

Now I have two more bins I can torment.

“What should I do with the broken bin?”  I asked her.  “Can I recycle that?”

She looked sideways at the blue bins stacked beside her.  Did one of them just move towards her?

“No,” she said firmly, “you should not.  Put it in the trash.”

I left, wondering.  Why can’t I recycle recycling bins?

Does she know something I don’t ?

Tags: recycling