100 days

As I complete 100 days in this country, I sit and reflect on the number of times I've sat and reflected in the last 3-and-a-half months. Most of my sit-and-reflect sessions ended in two-line posts that never saw the light of day. There were so many things I wanted to write about, that I ended up writing nothing. A couple of posts did go beyond two lines -they actually grossed more than 1000 words each- but were directionless and seemed to never end. It's very likely this post will meet the same fate. If we were still in the 70s or the Bollywood of the Barjatyas, I'd have a thousand dustbins filled with crumpled pages. It's in times like these that I stand up and applaud all authors and film-makers; all of them- including Bazmee and TLV Prasad, for their sheer determination and will to take their ideas to completion. Both writing and film-making are notoriously difficult tasks, and successfully completing them are victories in themselves.

There's so much happening in the world these days that it's impossible to not have an opinion about at least some of the issues, and the fact that I seem to have an opinion about all of them is more a pain-in-the-brain than yay-I'm-up-to-date. My day isn't complete without visiting 3 websites- www.ndtv.com, www.ibnlive.com, and www.cricinfo.com. While Cricinfo is a joyous read -some of the best, most unadulterated, most unbiased cricket reports- NDTV and IBN are continuing to paint the world in whichever colour they want to. When I thus lay my brain open to the manipulative forces of NDTV and IBN, they spice, dice, dress, caress, drape, rape, arrest and molest it at will. So while my brain is bursting at its seams (damn! that's a tongue twister) with honest and unwanted opinions on everything from Lehman Brothers to Hindu fundamentalism to Anil Kumble, I'd rather not jump onto the bandwagon of second-hand reporters.

What news channels around the world will not tell you, and what you need to know if you ever plan to dine in my kitchen, is that a middle-aged cockroach was not-so-stealthily climbing up the kitchen cabinet and heading straight for whatever was putrefying on the counter. This is only the 2nd time I've been alone with a cockroach, with no physical support in the form of broom-wielding-grandma, slipper-wielding-mom, or HIT-wielding-dad, or moral support in the form of similarly paranoid hostelmates. The first time was also in this house, where 1 hour into a movie I realised I had company. But the need to exterminate this 2nd crawler was more urgent as failure to do so would lead to contamination of food, leading to the need to visit an American doctor, which implies going in with a bad stomach and coming out with a bad debt. I thought quickly and sentenced the creep to a violent death.

But before this incident, and since it, my kitchen has been a sporting witness to my deeds with the dishes (or kartoots with the kadhaais for the maligned North Indian community). From the highs of semiya payasam to the lows of pulikaachal; from the serendipitous pulao to the wrecked moong daal halwa; from the aroma of simmering spices to the stench of the capsicum that I forgot to put in the fridge; and from the ecstasy of making bhindi raita to the oh-shit of melting a plastic container in the process, my kitchen has experienced a gamut of emotions it could write a novel about if it wasn't just a lifeless kitchen. Technology has infiltrated my kitchen in a big way- apart from the regular stuff like a microwave, and a food processor, it is home to online cooking lessons by Ketaki, the latest being rotis and aloo parathas.

When co-expatriate Rajat told me in no uncertain terms that my passion for cooking would wane with time, I laughed it off like I was a dedicated homemaker for whom cooking was as much a routine as watching Bigg Boss is. But with time, the stock of vegetables in my fridge has reduced, and the stock of ready-to-eat parathas, tamarind rice, roti wraps, pizzas, and curries in the freezer has shot up. While in my first two months I emulated my mother by carefully picking tomatoes and bhindi, I've since been emulating the cult of the lazy bachelor whose world starts at the freezer and ends at the microwave. I still cook, but with less frequency and more passion than before. I can dedicate a whole post to my recipes, but I suggest you read it with a full stomach lest you be tempted to try some of them.

When I'm not busy cooking or eating the outcome of the activity, I play tennis and watch some of my favourite movies and Hindi sitcoms. We stopped playing tennis sometime back with a collective decision to grow fat. Let me preempt amma's enna-da-Akshay by saying that we've decided to take the court again. I spent my first 2 months in realising the American dream of living in a nice house and driving a nice car; it's now time to realise the American nightmare of a continuously bulging waistline- and it's all-round growth, so if you care to overlap snapshots of my waistline over time, you'll actually get concentric ovals. It's not as tough to gain weight here as it is in India; you just need to follow the following strict weekend regimen- sit all day in bed with a laptop on the lap, a bag of chips on the left, and a gallon of orange juice on the right. The size of the packet of chips and the gallon of juice (3.8 litres) will ensure you never need to budge from your place- not even for a refill. And given that there are no mosquitoes around in my house, I'm deprived of even the basic exercise I had in India.


It's not tough to find obese people in this part of the world. In fact you don't have to look very far. You look in any direction around you in your nearest Walmart (that's the only place you realise humans don't end at the chest), and you'll find a gigantic auntie or a humungous uncle moving their overflowing cart with enviable ease. And when I say obese, I don't mean Indian style obese people behind whom you can crouch and win hide-and-seek; I mean OBESE people who can substitute lead in nuclear reactors, who tie their shoe laces by trial-and-error. But the good thing is, they can walk around normally without having people stare at them (apart from the odd shameless ones like me), unlike in India where they would be potential Aaj Tak fodder.

I've come across two kinds of Indian strangers here. One kind consciously ignores you- It's almost like they're scared you're going to ask them for food, lodging, and a mug. The other kind starts chatting up immediately and makes you wonder about your father's trip to Kumbh Mela in 1987. But the most memorable Indian I've met thus far is a Gujju auntie in a subway outlet. While she goes about her business of fixing sandwiches with the enthusiasm of a corpse, she sports a wide grin from "What kind of cheej?" to "Salt and paper?" when she's fixing mine. Right from my first visit there she's been offering me free chips, free cookies, and free drinks, prompting me to rethink the now canonical adage about no free lunches. Just last week, I went in at 2 p.m. and saw nobody else at the counter. She took the opportunity for a casual chat, talking about her apartmaint, her husband's bijnes, her kajin's subway, how she manages to stay vegetarian while handling meat, her children in India, how she's yearning to go back to India, and finally asked if I was interested in a job in subway. Now where did that come from! When I politely turned down the offer, she offered me a job at a liquor store in California.

All said and done, I'm growing to like this place. The people are nice and it's fun to drive fast on good roads. My interactions, strictly non-technical, with my colleagues, and my general bad habit of thinking have given me an insight into the American mind, but I'll stack up my observations in my next post. Just one thing though- while we curse the Americans for writing dates as mm/dd/yyyy, it's not altogether crazy. Like us, they too write the date the way they say it. We use dd/mm/yyyy because we're accustomed to saying 5th October, 2008, where as the Americans say October 5th, 2008. It's as simple as that; nothing non-conformist about it.

I'll sign off now then. This is actually not the end of the post; I've written a lot more, but it makes the post too long for even me to read. I'll post the next instalment soon.