I made a delicious lemongrass dip today, and I shall avoid writing stories about it :)
I chopped 2 chillies, some coriander, 2 long freshly cut lemongrass blades, 6 cloves of garlic, a little bit of ginger and a few teaspoons of water and grind it all up.
Mix that paste thoroughly with 500 gms of hung curd, a teaspoon of lemon juice and 2 teaspoons of cream and some salt.
Voila! Here's your dip or bread spread :D
Add some finely chopped cabbage and capsicum to make it crunchy.
Have you ever had a creamy foamy Indian version of the Italian Cappuccino?
If you haven't, I suggest you do! It's easy to make. In the local Indian English dialect, it's called 'Beaten coffee' and according to me, it's quite popular in the Northern half of the Indian subcontinent. Or maybe just India.
For four cups of creamy coffee, take four teaspoons of instant coffee, sugar as per your liking and a narrow cup. Add the coffee and sugar in the cup with a few drops of water/milk and start beating it vigorously with a spoon (like beating an egg) in the cup till the concoction turns a few shades lighter and gets a smooth texture and with a honey like consistency (cake batter like, if you want to be a bit more specific.) The more you beat it, the better it will taste. (I think it's mostly psychological)
Mix 2 cups of milk and 2 cups of water and heat it till just before it starts boiling. Add equal parts of the coffee concoction into four cups and pour the milk into them and stir a bit for the wonderful creamy rich foam collecting on top.
Serve hot!
Add a pinch of cinnamon to the coffee concoction as you beat it for a lovely feeling of a warm comforting cinnamon embrace from within.
Not everyone's going to like it, but if you are a cinnamon lover, you might just fall in love with your cuppa all over again!
An old friend of mine shared her brother's photos from last year The tone of the post was too nostalgic to ignore as just another. I hadn't read any update from him so I checked his profile and to my shock, I read that he had passed away in November last year. He was so young -just twenty four.
Deepak was not just my friend Divya's brother, but my friend too. And he was a smart young man who didn't deserve to die so young. I read in news reports that he died of severe head injuries sustained in a bike crash (while speeding over a speed breaker - according to times of India.) It's not the first time I've lost a friend to a bike accident. A classmate of mine - Girish, died after riding home drunk on his motorbike without a helmet on his head. His parents, his steady girlfriend and his devoted friends were all shocked and devastated. And all that just a few months before we graduated. He might have been pure at heart and a good person, but when it mattered, he acted irresponsibly. Whats the use of all that goodwill in the end? I used to feel angry, but I don't feel much anymore. Most of his friends were in denial about drunk driving. I blame them as much as I blame him.
I don't know much about the circumstances in which Deepak died, but I would prefer to be ignorent. I prefer to be in denial about what happened, and blame it all on the lack of common knowledge of CPR which might have saved his life in such a circumstance. It's all a game of ifs and buts. I have been trained to administer CPR in case of emergencies. I pray often that I shouldn't have to be in a situation where I have to give or receive CPR. Yet, every day I read about accidents happening on streets, highways and lakes and streams. So many of them are avoidable. Yet we lose precious life everyday.
I wanted to write to Divya, but it feels too little, and a bit too late for that. I wish I would have known before. I have a lot of excuses, but I wonder if I could have been more proactive and kept in touch with the two of them more than just through facebook? Would I have come to know of this accident earlier otherwise? Is it ok to justify not keeping in touch saying the others don't either? Now only those faint memories of Deepak remain from ten years ago.
A cruel coincidence - As I unravelled the story of Deepak's death, the song playing in the background was 'Car crash'
I woke up late having watched half of the live telecast of the olympic games closing ceremony till early morning. The day wasn't going good. I was pissed off about a lot of little things. Then I opened facebook.
Someone had posted a link to this youtube video:
The moment i started watching it, I was laughing, and things didn't seem so bad anymore.
Through this video, I found the link to a spoof of the first video which is already a spoof of the batman movie!:
I fell out of my chair laughing my ass off! ... and I had a good day!
It probably started long time ago, when I was exposed to the world De Stijl - the Dutch Pre WW2 art movement.
Unfortunately, I've never expressed it on canvas or in architectural design. But A few days back, when I read this nice blog I felt like i could easily buy a pair of inexpensive bata canvas shoes and transform them into a De stijl (masterpiece).
Step 1: Buy simple white Bata canvas shoes.
Step 2: Buy acrylic fabric paints and paint brushes
Step 3: Remove laces and pencil out the rough template of the your masterpiece.
Step 4: Dip a thin brush in the black paint and start drawing it out. This dries quite fast.
Whatever am I doing on twitter? Other than ranting, or just giving out useless information to the general junta? But I must say that sometimes I come across links to interesting reading matter, most of which, though it is said that any information/knowledge doesn't go waste, is of absolutely no use for me at all.
Whatever is interesting and different need not be good every time.
Being on twitter is just like watching a terrible soap on TV. But you just have to see whats happening...
'It's not insane, it's inane' - Anon (No not really, I know the guy who said it)
When I read this post a few days/month/years later, I might laugh.
If by any chance, someone finds my blog on Mars's internet, I request you to please take me back to your planet.
I always wondered why Pune wasn't a popular subject of any work of fiction. Be it a movie, a book or a short story. So imagine my surprise when I came across the trailer of a marathi movie called 'Pune 52' - A Noir thriller like never seen before from any Indian Movie.
Another happy co-incidence being that I live in Pune - area code 52.
Watching the video on youtube and reading a bit about the movie on their facebook page, made me realise how regional cinema, is slowly and slyly outclassing the commercial hindi film industry. This film also addresses that phase in our country's recent past which is a blur. The success story, the boom and the liberalisation is seen, but the repercussions of that very change on the society is largely undocumented. It's an ambiguous, grey phase between the dark ages of post emergency - pre liberalisation and the technologically fueled and mobile era of the first decade of the new century . The 1990s.
Every now and again, I wish I was born seven or ten years before I actually was. I wish to be an active part of the change rather than be the receptor of the radical change. I could have changed. I could have brought about change. I could have been the change.
Since our school text books have failed to acknowledge the post independence era as a part of our contemporary history, it becomes ambiguous. The only traces found are in Pop culture, literature and art. But stifled. Scholarly. Elitist.
I wish they made more movies about the times I was growing up. At the times I was absorbing the change from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s and actively participating in it in the 2000...
The exponential rate of change has resulted in a collective memory loss of that important phase. The heightened sense of liberalism and self awareness of intellectuals who were hungry for knowledge, for the truth, made our society more open. Free. Tolerant. More interesting to live in.
That very sense of intellectual and creative freedom caved in to a fear of losing control. And today, we are controlled more that we were in that very grey, ambiguous and blurry phase.
Let us remember that time and document it, lest we forget the golden era of that turn we as a nation took, and a where it could have taken us.
But we took that turn a bit too seriously. A bit to literally. And we have lost our way.
Stairway in the bungalow for Sayali and Deepak Kulkarni at Girivan, Mulshi.
These two labourers posed for me during a short break on site. I love how their colourful sarees are a lovely contrast to the dark grey basalt stone wall and the cantilevered precast concrete steps.
When I was all of four years old - I was given my first ever tintin comic - The land of black gold. That was 1988 at a book fair in Vishakhapatnam.
And this is today.
A few nights back, my friend sent me a link to a Tintin quiz on Facebook. Since I am a tintin fan, I managed to become the seventh person to answer all the questions correctly. The first five won Tintin movie DVDs while the next five - which included me- won gift vouchers from crossword.
I went to my nearest crossword bookshop today and redeemed my gift voucher worth a hundred Rupees.
