An Idea for Icecream

Lately, sheer laziness and a good cook has conspired to make my attempts at culinary innovations a fairly rare occasion. It's unusual at this time of the year - usually the brightly coloured vegetable barrows in winter are a sheer temptation to try my hand at something new.

Several friends, at the receiving end of new experiments, often ask me, where do you get ideas for all this? They usually have a look of martyred resignation, steeling themselves for bouts of nausea, food poisoning, diarrhoea or worse. Only when they find themselves to have miraculously survived another sunrise do they trickle back to ask for the recipe.

At such occasions i am strictly truthful, even to the point of admitting a modification to a published recipe. Over the years I have admitted:
(1) Recipes that have come in dreams (Honestly!!!),
(2) Reverse engineering from food at restaurants,
(3) Sneak peek at someones kitchen,
(4) Sheer random exuberance

But this time I have taken professional help. During a development of a fairly bitter concoction I briefed all the well known flavour houses - IFF, Firmenich, Givaurdan Roure and Symrise. And they have come out with brilliant combinations that will persuade the sweet little kiddies not to spit out what mamma spoons into their mouth.

One of the flavours that failed has, however held me spellbound. Forget Lily the Pink's Medicinal Compound. This flavour - a combination of alfonso mango, peach and vanilla is a shoo-in for the next icecream to be made during the week end.

The flavour house, which I shall not name, has thoughtfully provided the individual flavours - none of them are as good as the three of them put together. Even a small deviation in the percentage of the flavours takes away the entire charm.

So what is the combination? Sorry, that's the secret that stays in-house. After all, I did take the trouble to brief the flavour house. To the victor goes the spoils, doesn't it?

Never mind! Friends are always welcome to visit during the week-end! Advance warning (in the form of a telephone call) is a must...

Packing

I shall be travelling again at the end of the week. Its a thing I usually look at with dread. Travelling means packing.

I am bad at packing. Every time I travel, I end up postponing the packing part of the journey till the very last minute - and then hastily dumping the things I need to take into a suitcase. I end up leaving quite a few things I needed to pack, toothbrush, shaving tackle, socks, slippers...

I've never left my ticket behind. I check a million times before I reach the station or airport.

My wife loves packing. Not only for herself, but for me. She takes time and effort to select what she is going to take, intuitively works out the most optimum way of filling the suitcase, with due care to ensure that everything comes out more-or-less intact. The suitcase is carefully shut (without a pair of socks sticking out from the side), locked and carefully arranged near the front door in anticipation of our departure.

Naturally I have passed on the responsibility of packing to her capable hands. Once, in a burst of guilt, I did try to pack my bag myself, but the resultant chaos, lost temper and delayed journey swiftly convinced me to leave something to the experts.

There's something about packing that creates a mental block. Theoretically, I should be pretty good at it. I managed an A-grade in Optimisation in college, breezing through the section on Cargo Loading Problem. Even practically, my wife defers to my expertise in stuffing the last bowl of left-over into a fridge bursting to the seams.

But when it comes to packing I have waved the white flag long ago. I have done many hectic first-flight-in, last-flight-out type tours so that I didn't have to pack. I've sent colleagues out on tours instead of going myself for the same reason.

Unfortunately in the end you end up with tickets in your hand and an empty bag on the floor and a cupboard from which you've got to select which combinations of shirts, trousers, undergarments, nightwear and accessories need and should be coaxed into the suitcase.

"It's easy," says Nilanjana, "all you have to do is to first put the trousers in this way..." I don't listen any more. My wife's home, and the packing is finally in safe hands.

Just to be contrary... (Part 1)

The UPA government will be viewed in history as a group of visionaries who brought true equality to India or as a group of idiots who destroyed the chances of India ever making it big in the world economy.

With our relatively elite background, our instinct tells us that doom is near; the government is pulling us to destruction. The forcible lowering of drug prices will kill the competitiveness of the Indian pharmaceutical Industry and ruin the possibilities of innovations happening out of India, the reservation of SC/ST/OBC/Muslims in elite institutes and in the private sector will utterly ruin the effectiveness of the industry, the wastage of the taxpayers money in ruinous and futile projects like Sarva Siksha Udyog and Rural Employment Guarantee bill will bankrupt the exchequer and the Prevention of Domestic Violence Against Women will only help a small number of scheming women with an agenda against their husbands and in laws.

It's easy to agree, and predict Armageddon.

But what if we're wrong? What if we, in the words of Naipaul, the nattering nabobs of negativity, have as usual caught the wrong end of the stick? Way back in the early 90's when the economy was opening up, it was fashionable for us to look at the east Asian economies with envy and curse the government for a non convertible currency, a socialist mai-baap sarkar and for too much protection for the domestic industry. And lo and behold! The entire East-Asian economy collapsed, causing untold misery to millions and only poor left-behind India, due to its non-convertible currency emerged unscathed from the mess.

Today, we can see the ruinous short-term effect of the reservation in the private sector. But even without reservation, there is a severe shortage of employable people. The labour pool has to be seriously increased, and unless the vast numbers of backward classes are brought into the pool of educated people, India will not be able to have the necessary workforce it needs.

Of course the government is not going about it in the optimum way. Neither the 5-year term of a government, nor the necessity of reaping short term electoral benefits guides politicians to take the sensible, optimum, decades-long path to social upliftment. It has to be done now, by force if necessary, so that we have our names in the history books and our constituency votes for us.

Of course we will not get excellent English speakers with proper table manners in the first few generations. The straight-out-of-the-boondocks hillbillies will be gross misfits in the steel, glass and concrete corporate offices in Gurgaon, Andheri or Whitefield. But slowly, over a period of time the elitist culture of corporate offices would change, and the hillbillies will get smarter with the exposure.

It's not as if corporate houses are the epitome of civilized behaviour that we need to worry about the barbarians at the gates. In my experience, the veneer of civilization is very thin indeed. If SCs and STs enter the office, the infighting may become more open, but cannot be more vicious than it is now. If the new employees favour nepotism as a policy, so do the current people, under a garb of civilised behavior for sure. If we object to people who will be so sure of their immunity from dismissal that they do no work, so do many people in any office today.

We will face many hiccups initially while we adjust to the presence of each other. We may lose many American and European customers who will fear that our productivity will decrease with our reduced ability to speak fluent English, will take their business elsewhere. But once the SCs/STs/OBCs pick up, they will return, out of a greed for cheap trained labour.

After all, to a WASP executive in London or San Francisco, it doesn't matter if you are a upper caste Brahmin with a degree from Harvard or Oxford, or a poor Harijan educated at NIIT from Raigarh or Bhopal, if you can be voice trained to speak with an American or British accent. You are a FTE (so much more civilised to refer to you as an impersonal FTE rather than a Brownie, Paki or a Nigger!), who does the work for one-tenth the cost of an American employee.

(Cont...)

Driving Home

If you've ever driven down the Mehrauli Gurgaon road at a reasonable hour, it's likely that you've sometime or the other lost your temper and wanted to punch another driver on the nose. At any given time of the day it seems that most of Delhi and Gurgaon are travelling to Gurgaon or Delhi respectively. The road, originally designed for bullock carts ambling from Indraprastha to Gurudakshinagram (seriously, after one shower, the top layer washes off, showing archeological remains c 1500 b.c.) is used by literally lakhs of cars every day. It doesn't help that this road is probably the only route to much of Gurgaon, given that the NH8 super expressway is still in the distant future.

I wonder, if Guru Dronacharya had been around today, he would have probably shot off arrows to murder all the stupid drivers on the road. Naah, most likely he would have sold off his land for a few gadzillion rupees and would now be lying on the beaches in Bahamas with a nice cool drink in his hand...

I'm working on a long standing ambition - I shall buy a nice used T-72 tank from the army and use it to drive down the MG road. And if the damn Qualis from the call centre dares to cut into my path I shall roll over it with the panache of a Ukrainian cavalry man. It's nice to dream, isn't it?

Wailing of the Italian Cats (or, An Evening at the Opera)

I've always learnt about things the wrong way. I learnt about the Greek myths from the Freaky Fable spoofs by Alan Coren in Punch. I read excerpts of The Prince in Science Fiction stories. Yesterday I saw the Parma Orcestra and opera at the Italian Festival in Delhi and realised that I'd known about the derivative long ago, and had to wait years to see the original.

We've all see the Hollywood musicals - most of us have, or at least seen their derivative, the Bollywood song-and-dance movie. If you've thought about it, you'd realise that they were based on stage musicals at Broadway and at other places. My fair Lady, Sound of Music, Oklahoma, ... all these were extremely successful musical shows on Broadway before they were made into acclaimed films.

Of course, these shows were the child of a tradition exemplified by Gilbert and Sullivan, and (AHAAA, now we come to the point!) G&S themselves were anglicization of the European traditional opera.

It takes a short time, listening to the soprano and tenor from the Parma opera to make that connection. It's easy if your not distracted by the language, or the beauty of a trained voice. Once you've made the observation that the opera does sound like a team of wailing cats, and you've glanced at the explanatory notes in the programme by the light of your mobile phone, you soon realise that the singing is strikingly similar to what we've seen and heard in the films - the same acting with the voice, the same kind of story-line and the same kind of music. Of course, a purist would say that a Verdi was a greater composer than say a music hall tune-meister, but it's a question of the type of music - they are so very similar.

I enjoyed the show quite a bit, even though we had to sit in one dingy corner, where a view of the stage was obstructed by hordes of people, and we had to see the stage on a screen (The better seats were occupied by Sheila Dikshit, her entourage and VIPs from all the embassies in Delhi). We were surrounded by softly whispering pairs, each more eager for the chance to hold hands than to figure out what was being sung. The conductor, Marco Boni, a gentleman who looked a stouter version of Tom Hanks in the days when he still had hair, and the orchestra played beautifully - at least music has no language or dialect, and the mosquitos had a feast at our expense.

We ended the night with dinner at Flavours, and while waiting saw NDTVs Sonia Singh having dinner with Andy Sehgal of the Oil-for-Food-Scandal fame. The food was as usual good. The service, as usual, was lousy.

Bi-Curious & Other Tales

Today at the lunch table, where the conversation usually veers from the rotten food towards the risque, a colleague of mine dropped a bombshell:

Men notice women. Women, on the other hand, notice
both men and women.

Um um!

No issues on the first part. Almost every man aspires to be a lovable lecher (A title held by Asimov, before he succumbed to the dratted HIV), but usually manages the latter title. The ones who don't are usually either (a) good at hiding their gazes or (b) gay. I used to think Einstein was an exception till I read about his escapades in one of his biographies. If the tales are half correct, he didn't have much time in between leching and sleeping around to cast a glance at E=Mc2. And poor Mileva had to do the tensor calculus for him.

OK, accepted.

But if my colleague is correct, women are (in the words of a journo acquaintance), bi-curious. Not bi-sexual, mind you, or we'd be living in a Joan Russ world, but clearly enough to hurt the egos of a lot of preening peacocks. I mean, what's the use of thinning your wallet to get that stud look if the girls are actually wondering about the vital statistics of the new girl in the corner cubicle? At least half the time. It would be a shock for many of my college friends, who spent most of their waking hours thinking of the inhabitants of Meera Bhavan, to realise that they were being thought of only half the time. What a waste!

Of course if you were me, you'd welcome the state of affairs. When you dress to look like a walking garbage bin, and have been too lazy to shave, and reek of mebendazole laced sweat, you'd be glad if the ladies looked the other way. Anything is better than having to spend hours in looking presentable. Slobs of the world, rejoice. Our keepers aren't bothered about us, half the time.

Yippee!