Category: food

Ramzan Walks

Seven Arabic years ago, when I was still vegetarian, and a rather squeamish one at that, a friend had regaled me with stories of going on a “meat walk” on Mumbai’s Mohammad Ali Road, savouring delicacies (I took his word) like ox’s tongue and cow’s udders. It was Ramzan, he said, and it was the time of the year when delicacies which were otherwise hardly available would make their way to the markets. He was going to make it an annual ritual to “do the meat walk”, he had said. I’m not sure about him, but I know that people who accompanied him on that walk do make it a point to repeat it annually.

I might have documented elsewhere about my transition to a carnivore back on our vacation to Greece two summers ago. At a streetside cafe there, the vegetarian stuff looked insipid while the meat looked succulent, and I converted. “If I’m to lose my religion I’ll lose it completely”, I had decided and started my meat eating career with some beef souvlaki. In the intervening two years (mostly in the last one year), I’ve tried several species, and nothing makes me queasy in terms of the source of my food – though I might change my mind after I complete the holiday I’ve been planning to the Far East.

My first “Ramzan walk” was in Bangalore two Arabic years ago. These walks (in each city) have their own ritual to it. In Bangalore, it starts at Albert Bakery on Mosque Road in Frazer Town, then proceeds across the road to Fatima House where they procure Haleem (flown in daily from Hyderabad). Then round the corner on to Madhavaswamy Mudaliar Road for some kebabs and then across that road for chaat and kulfi. I’ve done the exact ritual twice over already, and have quite enjoyed it (though the first time around I didn’t get down to eating Albert’s famed Brain Puffs). But people had so far told me that I hadn’t done “the real thing” until I did a similar Ramzan Walk on Mohammad Ali Road.

So this evening I made amends to that particular deficiency in my meat eating career. A bunch of people from my client’s office were planning their annual visit to the famed road for this evening, and I tagged along. I write this on a sugar high, after having stuffed myself with sweets through the evening.

The waiter at Tawakkal Sweets, off Mohammad Ali Road, reminded me of the priests at Mantralaya (of the Raghavendra Swami fame, in Andhra Pradesh). Priests and temple officials in Mantralaya are famed for their “maDi”, and their way of keeping themselves clean is by not touching anyone. So you have this ritual where one of the monks there gives you a stole, but in which he throws it over you from about a feet above your shoulders to prevent touching you. I don’t know if the waiter at Tawakkal had similar constraints in terms of keeping himself clean, but he kept plonking our sweets from about a few inches above the table, just enough to make sure that the Mango Malai (something like mango souffle with condensed milk) didn’t arrive on the table perfectly set. But I’m sure I ate more than my fair share of the Malai that arrived at the table, thus giving me the sugar high, which persists.

In Kannadiga Brahmin functions, I’ve never understood the concept of adding plain (unsweetened) milk to the sweet obbatt (aka hOLige). “Why add something that is not sweet to a sweet dish”, I’ve reasoned. After tonight I begin to suspect that the concept of obbatt with milk is borrowed from Malpoa with Malai. I used to think that the Malpoa is something like the “kajjaya”/”athrasa” but here at Tawakkal and elsewhere it seemed like a reconstructed French toast – where wheat flour is mixed with eggs and sugar to make a batter that is deep fried. And it is served with unsweetened thick cream – which perhaps my ancestors adopted as obbatt with plain milk.  It is possible that all my previous encounters with Malpoa have been at vegetarian sweet shops, and hence the absence of the egg.

We wouldn’t be done after the Mango Malai and the Malpoa. There was still space left for food in our stomachs and sugar in our blood streams for us to eat mango phirni (kheer made with mashed rice and mangoes). And it wasn’t even the first time in the day that we were eating sweets. The Mumbai equivalent of Albert bakery is the brightly lit Suleiman Usman Bakery, with boards everywhere claiming it has “no branches”. Except that round the corner at EM Road (perpendicular to Mohammad Ali Road) there are at least two other shops which call themselves “Suleiman Usman Bakery”, and which too prominently display that they have no branches.

We began the meaty part of our walk at EM Road (the one with the two Suleiman Usman Bakeries (with no branches). To celebrate the occasion of the holy month, the street was extremely brightly lit, and shops had put out makeshift tables and chairs under a canopy on the road to accommodate the extra crowds (normally, like at other Muslim establishments, food is cooked at the entrance but served inside the shop). Maybe to add to the effect they had strung up what looked like pieces of chicken in psychedelic colours, and for further effect, displayed cages with little chicks even!

Chicken has taken over the world. Traditionally, Muslim establishments are known for their mutton, and sometimes beef. In certain circles (again primarily Muslim) it is considered beneath establishments to offer chicken. But this particular establishment on EM Road only seemed to serve chicken, apart from the odd mutton dish. It’s not really worth writing home about. And the lack of a regular menu means that people who look like tourists are likely to be overcharged.

Soon we were back on Mohammad Ali road for the main course, which was at Noor Mohammadi. Nalli Nihari was consumed with Tandoori Roti and onions, and washed down with Thums Up. This is one of those old style establishments, and one that doesn’t get bells and whistles for Ramzan. There is this ancient Hussain painting hanging on the walls, and next to that is a large board with the menu. Service was quick and efficient and one was reminded of Bangalore’s Vidyarthi Bhavan as the waiter pronounced the bill without much thinking and with great accuracy.

I’ll probably do a formal comparison after I experience Fraser Town sometime later this month, but in terms of sheer numbers (of people) and atmosphere, Mumbai definitely trumps Bangalore. In terms of food, though, I’m not so sure. Those little paper plates of kebabs you get in that corner shop across the Mosque on Madhavaswamy Mudaliar road seem much better than anything Mumbai serves up. But then, your mileage might vary.

Teerth Yatre

The Yatre (journey) took us through four different worlds. All at the same time. We kept flipping from one world to another. Each of us were going through the worlds independently, yet we seemed to meet in one of the worlds (let’s call this one “reality”) once in a while. Time moved extremely slowly. It was like TDMA (time division multiple access) was going through our minds, as we went through the four or five worlds simultaneously.

Parts of the human brain are sequential and parts are parallel. I discovered during the course of the Yatre that our minds are equipped with a parallel, maybe even superscalar, processor. However, certain features such as context switches are not very well developed in human minds so this capacity is seldom used. The human mind prefers linear processing and thus most of the time, all but one processor is shut. And there is a continuous stream of thought that allows us to “execute”.

Those like me with ADHD seem to have an easier time in context switching. While this results in a generally higher level of mental output, it also means that there is greater discontinuity in thought. This discontinuity in thought leads to what psychiatrists term as ‘lack of executive functioning’. “Executive functioning” as us humans have defined it depends on a single train of thought working continuously to get things done.

The Teertha (holy water) however ensures that all human beings, ADHD or the lack of it, become equal, and opens up the superscalar processes in people’s heads. It is like everyone who imbibes it reaches a state that is an advanced level of ADHD. Four or five streams of thought. Parallel inhabition of four or five different worlds. And constant switches between the worlds. One moment you have a sense of achievement. The next you are paranoid. Paranoid about getting through the madding crowd and back safely to the dirty hotel room.

Fifteen minutes past six, we are on the way to the river bank to watch the world-famous aarati. An eternity later (but with the watch only showing six twenty) we see a chaat shop on the way and decide to imbibe some chaat. Another eternity later, some parallel thoughts drive us to the aarati, the rest recommend stopping at the restaurant for an early dinner.

I order pav bhaji. Four pieces arrive. In my journeys through the various worlds, I think I’ve spent an enormous amount of time eating it. During fleeting visits to “reality”, though, less than one piece has been eaten. The rest of the table also consists of plates with a lot of leftover food. I break a piece of pav. By the time I bring it to my mouth I’m in another world. And when i return to “reality” the piece of pav is still in my hand, uneaten.

The final bit of the teerth yatre is the most surreal, when we have to get back to the hotel. We are in no mental state to tell our driver where to reach us. We decide to take cycle rickshaws. To get to a cycle rickshaw, though, we need to go through a sea of humanity.

We don’t know where we are going. We hold hands. In the moments when we are in “reality” we check if we are still together. In the fleeting between-moments, we worry about losing each other. We do our independent trips of the other worlds (I think we have our own set of worlds and the only intersection is “reality”). We independently worry where we are going. The sea of humanity means that traffic is rather slow and there is little chance of being run over. Yet, we worry.

The teertha in question is a product of this tiny store at Godowlia Chowk called “Mishrambu”. It came highly recommended by a friend who had studied at the Banaras Hindu University. It was sweet, laced with dry fruits and nuts, and dollops of butter. “Shall I put a little or more?” asked the kindly shopkeeper as he displayed a dirty-looking green paste from a small stainless steel box. In one of those collective fleeting moments of bravado we asked him to put ‘lots’. Maybe our inexperienced showed up there.

So what if we had gone to Varanasi and not seen the famous Ganga Arati? So what if we didn’t take the boat-ride to see the various famous ghats, and instead settled ourselves in a rooftop cafe on the banks of the Ganges (we were the only Indians there)? So what if we went all the way to the Kumbh Mela and spent our time mostly clicking photos and walking around, and didn’t venture close to the river?

We’ve undergone the most exhilarating Teerth Yatre ever. I’m not sure any of the religious experiences could match this parallel journey across four worlds.

Pot and cocaine

Methylphenidate, the drug I take to contain my ADHD, is supposed to be similar to cocaine. Overdosing on Methylphenidate, I’m told, produces the same effects on the mind that snorting cocaine would, because of which it is a tightly controlled drug. It is available only in two pharmacies in Bangalore, and they stamp your prescription with a “drugs issued” stamp before giving you the drugs.

Extrapolating, and referring to the model in my post on pot and ADHD, snorting cocaine increases the probability that two consecutive thoughts are connected, and that there is more coherence in your thought. However, going back to the same post, which was written in a pot-induced state of mind, pot actually pushes you in the other direction, and makes your thoughts less connected.

So essentially, pot and cocaine are extremely dissimilar drugs in the sense that they act in opposite directions! One increases the connectedness in your train of thought, while the other decreases it!

I’ve never imbibed cocaine, so this is not first-hand info, but I’ve noticed that alcohol when taken in heavy doses (which I never reach since I’m the designated driver most of the time) acts in the same direction of cocaine/methylphenidate – it increases the coherence in your thoughts. Now you know why junkies in your college would claim that the kind of “high” that pot gives is very different from the kind of high that alcohol gives.

Devoid of attention

Thought is not continuous. Using metaphors, it is more a train like a stream. It’s like thought is organized in “packets” (think Digital communication), which we can call as “bogies” (and hence, a train of thought). For you to think coherently, the bogies should be inter-connected.

So one bogie should connect to the next, and that will help make a coherent thought. Occasionally, though, there can be “slippage”, or derailment. When that happens, you jump a thought, you digress, the normal bogie connection gets broken, and thus your attention breaks.

So, we can model the system thus: your thought is a train of thought packets, each of which contain Q units of thought, and R thoughts per second are produced. Now, with a probability p, the thought i “is connected to” thought i+1 (the rest is the “slippage” we talked about).

Now, for a normal human being, p is low, extremely low  high, extremely high (I don’t know about Q and R, but I guess that depends on (or rather defines) the person’s IQ, sharpness, resourcefulness, etc. It would be an interesting project to research that). Hence, he is able to focus well on work, drive without accidents, speak continuously and properly, etc.

However, when you are doped (by smoking up or whatever other methods), what happens is that p increases decreases significantly. R also increases significantly. So you are now thinking faster (producing more thought units per second) but also there is a higher chance of your thought slipping. You are unable to focus, there are too many things going on in your head, you switch between parallel trains of thought, etc. Because you can’t focus, you are unable to function, and even if you try to function “normally” (by avoiding mistakes, driving well, speaking without a stammer) you do so at a significantly higher mental cost (because you get distracted so easily, you need to put in extra effort to keep trains of thought “alive” as you switch from one to another; so you need to run another process to just keep track of these thoughts, and make sure you can function). You end up not getting as much done as you would normally when you were sober.

There can be several other implications of this. Sometimes, because you are maintaining track of two strains of thought, if you are normally a visual person (if you remember things based on images rather than on sounds or text or any other stimulus), images from two separate trains of thought can occasionally overlap, creating a bizarre and spurious image. And sometimes that might make you think that the spurious image is actually a real image (this can happen if similar overlaps of your different trains of thought occur repeatedly, and thus the superpositions themselves seem to you as another train) and that can lead you to hallucinate!

Sometimes, one train of thought is planning a certain activity, while another train is simultaneously trying to imagine what it would be like when that activity is completed. Now, the superposition of these two trains of thought can occasionally create a picture that the task is actually complete. And then when reality strikes and you realize that the activity is actually not complete, it leads to significant disappointment, and you are prone to feeling disgusted with the task, and giving up.

Higher Lower p and higher R means that activities that involve significant “stimulation” of the brain are likely to completely feed your need for thought, and thus you are likely to get engrossed in such activities and you begin to love them. As a corollary, activities that aren’t as stimulating are likely to bore you (since it doesn’t fully feel your need for thought). So you have trouble successfully completing routine tasks!

A high low p can also (at this moment, my wife walked in and this chain of thought broke, maybe lost forever… so whatever i write to complete this para may not be what i originally intended) mean that your train of thoughts might break when you are performing an activity that demands precision and complete focus. That might result in your becoming clumsy, dropping things, not being able to be delicate, and being highly prone to making tiny mistakes.

So when you are doped, thanks to the higher bit-rate of thoughts, and higher chance of distractions, you function significantly slower and with much higher mental effort, you get distracted extremely easily, you are simply unable to focus, and are prone to occasionally hallucinate. You are easily irritable, impatient, and get pissed if there is inadequate food in order to feed your expanded bitrate of thought (so if there isn’t enough to think about, you feel fidgety, and do random stuff). You are prone to accidents, look for things to stimulate you, want to keep doing something and can give up easily!

Now imagine a state where p and R are higher  p is lower and R is higher than what it normally is for a normal human being, but not as much as it would be when you are drunk. And imagine that this “higher” rate of p and R *lower* rate of p and *higher* rate of R are “permanent” and you are forever in this state. That is ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). It affects 5% of the population, including the author of this piece. It leads to fidgetiness, and can lead to lower productivity and possible learning difficulty. It results in inability to execute, inability to focus, and finish things (think about it in terms of the model that I’ve described above. It will help you understand what it’s likely to lead to.).

The thing with ADHD is that in most cases, the change in p (from “normal”) is so mild (especially compared to the change in p when one is doped) that it is easy to ignore it, and you think your p value is normal. And trying to function at the same efficiency as others, you end up spending significantly higher mental energy, and find yourself falling behind, and not being able to execute. You know the story further.

So ADHD is like being in a perennial state of being mildly doped. And that is the “normal” for people like me.

I’m now on a medicine that lowers my ADHD, i.e. lowers my normal p and R increases my normal p and decreases my normal R. I guess I can call it “antidope”. It is one of those drugs that is distributed in a controlled manner, strictly issued on the handing over of a doctor’s prescription (the copy of the prescription you get is sealed saying “drugs delivered”). If it is an “anti-dope”, I wonder why the control. Perhaps too much of a medicine is also not a good thing.

Update:

This post was edited on 29Sep2012 to correct the inconsistency in the model that I used. Thanks to the commenters for point this out. As you might know by now, the post was written when my p was at an extremely low value, and hence I got my notation muddled up.

Diet redesign

I’m in the course of redesigning my diet. For one, I’ve started tilting the scales upwards again, having “recovered” half of the 20 kilos I rather shockingly lost in the second half of 2009. Given that I aspire to be “party types”, it is important that I look fit, so I need to let go of that paunch. More importantly, traditional South Indian food (rice with sambar/rasam) doesn’t impress my tastebuds any more. Neither does it impress my stomach – I feel hungry soon after I eat that.

The problem with rice (rather, the polished white rice that most of us consume) is that it is extremely low-density. In order to get a certain amount of nutrition (that makes you feel “full”) you need to eat a lot of rice. Consequently, you are full up to the esophagus after your meal, and some rather uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing belching follows. Of late, thanks to a “natural experiment” (due to travel, etc. I ate a highly rice-heavy diet for a while, then a highly wheat-heavy diet, and then back to rice-heavy diet) I’ve figured (I know the textbooks told me this) that rice lacks fibre, and a rice-sambar-rasam based diet can lead to scatological issues that can be rather embarrassing.

As the more perceptive of you would have noticed, we have moved house recently, and as a consequence “lost” our cook (she finds this house too far for her to come). As we look for a new cook (we’re still not 100% convinced we need a cook, given what you’re going to read), it is up to the wife and me to prepare our own food. We are both rather busy professionals, and seek to have good lives outside of work, so neither of us wants to spend too much time cooking.

So the challenge that lies ahead of us now is to redesign our diet, such that it gives us balanced nutrition (while not fattening me up), and consists of easy to make yet tasty foods (if it isn’t tasty it isn’t sustainable). We’ve been doing some experiments over the last 2-3 weeks to see what works. We both like phulka, but it takes way too long to make (more importantly economies of scale are not there in making phulkas). We occasionally have salad with bread, but the wife doesn’t find that filling. We occasionally make pasta, I’ve made Thai curries a couple of times and today I made a (rather tasty) coconut-milk based tofu-and-egg curry to go with brown rice.

With respect to breakfast we’ve achieved the transition. On most days for the last 3 weeks, we’ve eaten boiled egg and muesli/oatmeal porridge for breakfast (occasionally Priyanka has eaten some “traditional breakfast” though, mostly when she hasn’t had the time to eat breakfast before catching her bus). We try and supplement that with some fresh fruit/fruit juice though that hasn’t particularly worked out.

Coming back to the problem at hand, we need to redesign our menu/diet so that we get adequate and balanced nutrition while not spending too much time in the kitchen. No meat is cooked at home (we are a traditional Brohmin family, you see), but we consume eggs regularly. I expect most of my protein intake to come from there – since dals are rather tough to make. We need to eat sufficient greens, and vegetables, and in a form where they’re not overcooked, so that they provide good nutrition. We should probably start using sprouts, and maybe more tofu and mushroom. And we need to find a cereal substitute for white rice that’s easy to cook – brown rice takes way too long to cook (and doesn’t cook in the pressure cooker); chapatis take too long to make.

It seems like a rather hard problem, but I hope to do some good research in this direction and redesign my menu. I’ll write about this as and when I get some interesting ideas, and might even share with you some recipes. In the meantime, if you can think of tasty, easy-to-cook vegetarian food items that provide balanced nutrition, do let me know. If we like that enough, we might call you home and cook for you!

Wine buying

Today, for the first time ever, I went out to buy wine, and in hindsight (I’m writing it having finished half of half the bottle) I think I did a pretty good job.

I had gone to this “Not just wine and cheese” store in Jayanagar hoping to pick up some real good wine to go with our cooking experiments for the evening (we’re making pizza and pasta). Having had really bad experiences with Indian wines (Nine Hills, Grover’s, Sula), I gave them a wide berth and moved over to the international section. The selection wasn’t particularly vast, and interestingly as soon as I moved over to the international section, one of the shopkeepers came over to assist me.

He first showed me a 2009 wine from France, when i asked him to show something older. For a slightly higher price, he pulled out a 2006 wine from France. The pricing seemed suspicious to me. A six year old wine from France, one of the more sought after wine-producing countries, for just Rs. 1600 (inclusive of 110% tax, so the duty free dollar price comes to around $15)? May not be very good wine, I reasoned, and now I decided to let go of all details on production date, etc. and simply asked the shopkeeper to recommend to me a good bottle.

Maybe it was the fact that I had quickly moved over to the international section, or that I was talking about year of bottling, but the shopkeeper assumed I was a rather serious buyer, and enthusiastically recommended to me a few bottles. Now, picking wines is tougher than picking whiskeys (where it’s easy to have favourite brands. Mine, if you would ask, is Talisker). Each country has several estates, the year of bottling, weather in the country in various years and several other factors go into determining how good a bottle is. Also, there’s inverse pricing, where you perceive more expensive wines to be better. So one has to look upon raw economics skills in order to judge wine bottles and pick something that is likely to be good.

What particularly interested me was a bottle of 2010 wine from Chile. Now, at Rs. 1300, it seemed rather highly priced for its vintage (given that France 2006 went for 1600). And then, I realized that Chile is a rather unfashionable wine producer, since most people tend to prefer European wines, and that being in the temperate weather zone, it is capable of producing good wines.

The shopkeeper mentioned that the particular bottle had been procured after a customer had specifically asked for it, and that it was made of superior quality grapes. Now, given that it was a wine of recent vintage and from an unfashionable producer, that it cost almost as much as a much older wine from a much older vintage told me something. That it was likely to be good.

It’s about two hours since I got home, and the bottle is half empty. The wine has been absolutely fabulous, and I hope this is the beginning of a great wine-buying career.

Advertising liqour

I miss liquor advertisements. I really do. There might be some noble intention in preventing liquor companies from advertising openly through television and print (many of them have resorted to surrogate ads, though), but the quality of liquor advertising that I remember from the late 90s (when I was too young to drink) was pretty good. Many of those ads were quite cult.

I remember the vodka ad (forget the brand) where the guy looks through his glass and sees other people in the bar turning into ferocious creatures (the best being the guy with a big moustache turning into a walrus). Then there was the “be what you wanna be” Bacardi ad –  I loved the jingle. The “swinging to Bacardi blast” just doesn’t have the same effect as “sipping on Bacardi rum”. Then there was the Haywards ad, of the two men playing darts in the bar. Such #kvltness! They should have a way to show adult rated ads on TV during late nights, etc. and permit liquor advertising then.

Last night, though, I came across a very interesting form of liquor advertising. Liquor companies are allowed to advertise at point of sales, so you see these huge liquor ads that usually sponsor the boards of “wine shops”. Similarly, you see beer and cocktail glasses that would have been branded with certain brands (in London, for example, the bartenders would be very particular about serving drinks in the right brand of glass. Carlsberg (which I drank a lot of that summer thanks to newfound Premier League loyalty) would be served in a Carlsberg glass only. Guinness in a Guinness glass only. Indian bartenders usually don’t care about this and are happy to give you kingfisher in a Beck’s glass). And in some American style bars, you see neon-light boards advertising certain brands.

At the Hard Rock Cafe, however, where I was last evening, Eristoff vodka has figured out a nice (and innovative – for me at least since I haven’t seen this form elsewhere) way of advertising. They advertise on the menu! It is very simple. Every vodka-based cocktail, or cocktail containing vodka that is there on the menu, says “Eristoff vodka” rather than just “vodka”. For example, the description under “screwdriver” would read “Eristoff Vodka with orange juice”. Simple and elegant way of creating brand awareness, and recall value. And well-targeted also, since if you order the cocktail you immediately get to ‘taste’ the vodka.

There is a reason I avoid whisky-based cocktails. A couple of times I’ve had them, they’ve been generally infused with cheap local molasses-based whisky which has given me  a bad hangover. Now, if only some better whisky company can start branding the menu of whisky-based cocktails, there is a good chance that people like me might order and drink more of whisky-based stuff. Though it still remains that I prefer my whisky neat.

Religious functions and late lunches

I remember being invited for a distant relative’s housewarming ceremony a few years back. The invitation card proudly stated “lunch: 12:30 pm”. I had a quiz to attend later that afternoon, at 3 pm, I think. Knowing there was enough slack for me to go to the function, thulp lunch and then go to the quiz, I went. At 12:15 (I have this habit of turning up at functions fifteen minutes prior to food; that way I don’t get bored, and people won’t think I’ve “just come for lunch”). Some ceremonies were going on. 1:15. Ceremonies continue to go on, no sign of lunch. 1:45, I realize there’s no slack at all, and want to leave without eating. Relatives get offended. Finally I went to the cooks, thulped some sweets and went off to the quiz.

Almost ten years back. My thread ceremony (upanayanam/brahmopadesham/munji). The priest arrives at the hall at eight o’clock, a full thirty minutes late. “My colleagues are coming at 12:30”, explains my father, “and we should serve lunch by that time. I don’t care what shortcuts you use but make sure we can serve lunch then”. Maybe munji rituals aren’t that compressable after all. Come 12:30, there were still quite a few procedures to go. Lunch was served while the ceremony continued to go on.

Religious functions are notorious for serving lunch late, and the religious purpose of the function is often used as an excuse to do so. I fully support religious freedom, and fully appreciate people’s choice to perform whatever ceremonies that they want. Keeping guests waiting while you do that and delaying their lunch, however, I think is gross disrespect for the guests’ time. And the sad thing is that religion is usually given as an excuse for this disrespect of time.

When you bring religion into a debate, it sometimes becomes tough to pursue a rational debate. In religious functions, if you were to make even the smallest noises about the timing of lunch, you are accused of being inconsiderate, an ingrate, and for having come there only for the food (I don’t know if the last mentioned is actually a crime). It is disrespectful to leave from such functions unless you’ve eaten, and so you are trapped into cancelling other appointments, and staying on until they actually decide to take pity and serve lunch.

I’ve brought up this topic in family forums a few times, and each time I’ve been chided for making such a big issue of something trivial. I don’t, however, understand how lunch is a trivial issue. And how disrespect for people’s time is a trivial issue. I have decided that the next time I attend one such religious function, where there is potential for the hosts to waste guests’ time by serving food inordinately late, I’ll take along a framed printout of Leigh Hunt’s Abou Ben Adhem. And tell them that all their prayers and respect to god will have no effect unless they also respect their fellow men.

Home food culture

We Indians have a “home food” culture. Most people consider it immoral and “bad” to eat out, and more so to eat out on a regular basis. People who don’t cook food at home are termed as being lazy. I remember this story I’d read in Tinkle back when I was a kid. It was called “kaLLa giriyaNNa” (it was a translation of a Kannada story). In this story, the thief (kaLLa) GiriyaNNa is scolded by his wife for his “dirty habits of smoking beedis and eating in hotels”. Yes, traditional Indian homes look down upon eating out that much!

Till very recently, this was a result of caste taboos. People would refuse to eat food that was prepared by someone by another caste, and that led to a delay in the growth of the restaurant industry. When people traveled (even on business, and you need to remember that in India even today, a lot of business happens due to caste networks), they would try and stay with a relative, or a friend who belonged to the same caste, and would eat in their house. When I was a kid, outstation holidays were mostly restricted to towns and cities where we had relatives, and in case we didn’t have any, durable foodstuff such as bread (from our “usual” Iyengar’s bakery), biscuits and fruits would be carried, so that we could avoid eating out.

Thanks to this cultural preference, and the taboos associated with eating out, we have turned out to be a “home food” society. Most people cook in their homes on a daily basis, or at least attempt to do so. In my mind, this is clearly inefficient. Back when I was in Gurgaon when I lived alone and would cook for myself, I discovered the beauty that is economies of scale in cooking food. The incremental time and effort in making (say) three liters of Sambar compared to making (say) half a liter was small, and consequently, every time I made sambar, I would make it in large quantities, and keep it in the fridge and repeatedly re-heat. While this may not be particularly healthy (the wife blames some of my lifestyle diseases to prolonged exposure to this unhealthy habit of eating stale food), there was little else I could do in order to achieve said economies of scale.

There is, however, a better method of ensuring economies of scale, and on a much larger scale – restaurants, and this is the practice followed in most places elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, the taboo against eating out means that for most people, visits to restaurants are “treats”, and restaurants have adapted themselves to accommodate this. When people eat in order to treat themselves, their primary criterion is taste. When you eat something once in a while, you don’t really care about the calories or sugar or triglycerides it contains. Consequently, food in a large number of restaurants in India is tailored for this kind of an audience, and hence is not particularly healthy. The main complaint that people have against restaurant food – that it is not healthy, and that one cannot eat that every day, does have its merits, but has a background in the culture of eating out only for treats.

From a national efficiency standpoint, this needs to change. People are spending way too much time and effort in cooking their own meals. It is ok to cook once in a while, but spending an hour of your day every day in front of the stove is a colossal waste of time. The answer lies in good quality restaurants that serve food that is similar to “home-cooked” food, in terms of health factor and taste. If there is a good number of restaurants that start doing that, it will drive a number of people to stop cooking at home (the early adopters are likely to be DINK Yuppies).

In some ways, this reminds me of the Chennai auto-rickshaw problem that I’ve described here and here. Restaurants don’t want to give up on tasty food and go the “healthy way” because they’re not sure there’s enough of a demand for the latter. People are not willing to give up home food in favour of restaurants because the food is not healthy enough! Again, this needs a nudge. And you can see some efforts in this direction. Back when I was in IIMB, I remember having dinner once at this place called Bangliana, which served “traditional” Bengali food at a reasonable price (a Bong friend who accompanied me confirmed that the food was quite authentic and “homely”). In primarily immigrant-dominated localities (such as Koramangala), you see more such restaurants coming up, and that is a good thing. If only it can spread and we move to becoming a restaurant-based culture, precious man-hours (and woman-hours) are bound to be saved.

PS: If the provisions of the Food Security Bill imply that we move to a “ration” model again, it would mean a step backwards, where everyone would be forced to cook at home. Or maybe the act could be implemented differently.. Say you could partly pay at hotels using your “entitlement points”.. Anyway, that is an aside.

Coffee

I have been drinking coffee for as long as I can remember. Maybe I started drinking at the age of  three. Maybe even earlier, maybe later. But I clearly remember that back when I still had half-day school (i.e. kindergarten), after my afternoon siesta, I would sit down with my grandmother (another major coffee drinker) and we would sip coffee together. My father had been pissed off that my mother never drank coffee, and he had told my grandparents (with whom I spent the day while both my parents went to work) that they should bring me up differently. And so my grandmother had initiated me to coffee fairly early in life.

When I was in high school, I remember being one of the few people in my class who drank coffee. Back then, it was before the coffee days of the world came up, and coffee was still seen as downmarket. Something that you would invariably order at the end of “tiffin” at the neighbourhood Sagar, or Darshini. Coffee was uncool, and had an “uncle” feel to it. It was what you got when you went visiting relatives, or when guests came home. In my family, a visit to a relative’s house would not be complete without at least four rounds of coffee, one as soon as you arrived, one just before “tiffin”/lunch, one after food and another one “for the road”. And my poor mother would miss out on all this.

For a strange reason I can’t fathom now, for a long time I used to prefer the coffee that my father made, a nasty “decanted” brew, made from finely ground coffee powder we got from “modren coffee works” in the Jayanagar Shopping Complex. Despite my grandmother’s exhortations that the coffee she made – from a steel filter using “pure” (i.e. without chicory) coffee beans sourced from India Coffee Works – was superior, I would tell her that it never measured up to my father’s coffee. It was only later on in life (maybe when I got to high school) that I started finding my father’s coffee disgusting (interestingly back then, his mother (i.e. my “other” grandmother) and siblings also made coffee the same horrible decanted way), and I convinced him that we should also start making coffee using a filter.

During the last few years that I lived with my parents (ok I didn’t really live with them, only visited them during (substantial) vacations), coffee had the aura of a “special dish” in our house. We would make coffee only if we had guests. My mother anyway hated the drink, and my father would have had his daily fix at work, so instead they made  tea at home, some four times a day, with plenty of sugar. If I protested, I would be asked to visit the nearest darshini (one abominable place called Anna Kuteera). I would grudgingly sip my tea.

So coming back to high school, it was uncool to drink coffee. It was “uncle” to do so, and with friends you only had pepsi (or coke or thums up or whatever). So I was mildly shocked when I found that some classmates in my “new” school (which I switched to in 11th standard, and which was decidedly upmarket compared to my earlier school) had gone out “for coffee”. And a few days later, I ended up accompanying some of them, once again “for coffee”. We all had the relatively inexpensive espresso (Rs. 10; cappuccino was Rs. 20) that day at Cafe Coffee Day (#youremember?) on Brigade Road. It was the first time in my life I had felt “cool” drinking coffee (yeah, back then I was a wannabe and all that).

Six years later, when I got admission into IIMB, my father decided that along with me he too should “go upmarket”. The day I got my admit, we went for coffee (!!) to the Jayanagar Cafe Coffee Day (my mother refused to accompany us since she found that they made chicken samosas there). Soon, I found that my father had started having some official meetings also in coffee shops, rather than in his office (where “office boys” would source coffee in flasks from Adigas a few doors away).

Another level up was when Kalmane Koffee opened an outlet at the forum, and another in Jayanagar. Now, we could sit in a coffee shop and have “real coffee” (I never took a fancy for the taste of cappuccino). It is indeed unfortunate that they haven’t managed to scale up the way CCD has. Though I must mention here that the only time I had a “personal interview” back when I was in the arranged marriage market, it took place at a Kalmane Koffee outlet. And I don’t know why just about everyone I go to that coffee shop with ends up ordering this coffee called Nelyani Gold (I stick to plain vanilla Filter Kaapi).

Some three years back, I had bought a Moka pot from a Coffee Day outlet (they have coffee powder stores apart from their cafes). For the last six months or so, I have abandoned my filter and have been exclusively using this pot to make my coffee. For a long time, I didn’t get good results, but this time I read up and instructed the person manning the counter at Annapurna Coffee Works close to my house to grind my beans extremely finely. Awesome coffee I get, now. Now, if only I can figure out how to froth the milk at home like those Cappuccino machines in Rome do…