A vegetarian, a sea food buffet and a sandwich

Last Friday saw the finishing up of a week-long trip on the road. Dinner was with the GM of our division and with my manager. The venue was a seafood buffet place not too far from the hotel. The assumption, as we set out, was that I would, by virtue of earlier visits, be familiar with this place. The only problem? I'm vegetarian and I'd walk past a seafood buffet place like it was, umm, a seafood buffet. Paying no attention whatsoever. We started walking in the general direction of the place and in a few minutes it was unanimously agreed that we were completely lost. The combined intellect of a trio of professionals sometimes comes up short in the simplest of occasions. We stood by the entrance to a subway station, pointing in different directions, covering an 180 degree arc when, out of nowhere, appeared a lady enquiring if we were lost. To clarify, I don't think it needed any confirmation. But I think she was just being polite. After sheepish admissions, she offered to walk us to the place and even helped us get on the waiting list.

A vegetarian at a seafood buffet place is like a fish out of water. (Bear with the pun.) Food was everywhere but not a morsel for me. After much investigation, I ended up having a couple of varieties of salad and a bowl of cream of broccoli soup with a questionable broth. I also nearly ended up having snails. Trust me, they look exactly like button mushrooms. And by my book, they had no business to be in a seafood restaurant. Anyways, $20 and as many calories later, I was stepping out of the place with a smile.

Why? Cut to earlier in the afternoon.

The party of 3 had split in the afternoon to hold two different meetings. My manager and I had Korean bibim bap at a local joint after our meeting on the way back to the office. The GM, bless his soul, unaware of our lunch plans, got us an expensive sandwich each. He handed me one assuring that it was vegetarian. It was like a premium-free insurance policy and I put it aside for dinner in case things didn't work out well for me. Which, if you haven't skipped the earlier part, was exactly what happened.

Cut to my room, post dinner.

I entered the room and went straight to the sandwich, sitting in the fridge. I let it thaw out while I changed and freshened up. With a flourish that accompanies the comforting thought that my hunger was about to be satiated, I sunk my teeth into it. If you've been a vegetarian all your life, chances are good that you haven't tasted meat. I bit a second crescent out and was chewing away, eyes closed, enjoying the mozzarella chunks. They were particularly tasty and warranted a look - a look of gratitude and admiration at nature's benevolence. I parted the buns and there it was. Seated above the juicy mozzarella was a pinkish slice of what I assumed was ham. Either the sandwiches were switched while being handed out or ham is considered vegetarian in Korea.

I've seen in movies where vegetarian characters, particularly girls, throw up everything upon realizing that they have consumed a piece of meat. I've always dismissed that as cinematic exaggeration. Wrong. One moment I was chewing and the next, regurgutating it, the finer details of which I've avoided here. What followed was a session of substance abuse. The substance in question being listerine. And abuse being rinsing all corners of the mouth. Twelve times.

You know what is worse than having salad at a seafood buffet for dinner after a long day? Throwing it all up and trying to sleep on an empty stomach.

Avani Avittam 2009

This year's avani avittam was truly a strange one. And, trust me, I've seen some real strange avani avittams so far. I've changed my poonal at strange places. Hell, I've even been the makeshift vadhyar, when I was in gradschool, by virtue of being in possession of a spare veshti and new poonals (Smartha variety) and a familiarity with the routine that was good enough to con my friends into believing in my non-existent ritualistic abilities. When it comes to the business of changing poonals, the buck stops with me.

So, what made AA'09 strange? Was it an exotic location? A la 2001 in the balcony of our apartment in Tempe, AZ with 2 guys in line, waiting to avail my services? Or 2005 in Shirakawa, Japan, in my small (8'x8') hotel room facing distant mountains? Or, perhaps, 2006 at Hotel Holiday Inn Express, Grenoble, with a great view and a plastic cup doubling up as the pancha paathram? No. This time, it was right at home, in the comfort of our living room.

At least, was it an adventurous one? Like in 2004 where I turned up, in shorts, taking time off from an early morning work assignment, for the first morning session in an ante-room in Komala Vilas, Sunnyvale, CA and had to scramble, at the last moment, for a veshti to conform to the dress code? (I managed a new one and that, by the way, is a separate post in itself) No, it was a much sedate one, lacking the drama or adventure that have spiced up previous editions.

So, you are wondering, what made this one strange. Well, this was the first all-male avani avittam in our household. But, avani avittam, amidst all the female oriented festivals where the men folks are relegated to being a side act or even a stagehand, is indeed a male celebration - the religious equivalent of the guys day out, you might argue. The one occasion on the Hindu calendar where the focus is on the man and not the woman. Well think again. It is the mother, or the wife, as the case may be, that prepares the site with the kolam, pulls out the pattu veshtis from the deeper recesses of the cup board, locates the spare sets of pancha pathrams, prepares the prasadam and finally puts up, at least in our case, with all the strutting around and attention seeking indulgences of the guys wanting to make the most of this one day. There is an undercurrent of feminity throughout the whole affair and that makes it complete.

This time around, With amma in a different world, and the wife away in a different city, it was an avani avittam minus the scent of the women - an ingredient without which avani avittam is as complete as vathakuzhambu without vellam. And with the brother away in a different country, it was left to the two of us - self and father, to go about the tasks before plugging into the regular routine a little behind schedule.

This year, we could not get a hold of "the sheet" in its physical form, with this year's sankalpam - usually delivered by the family vadhyar. Instead we had to rely on a soft copy of the same that was forwarded by email. And that meant Mr. Dell Latitude, was indeed the vadhyar, and at 15" across, a particularly lean one. The laptop was positioned between the two of us, facing us and the upakarma duly got underway.

It needs to be mentioned here that typically men do little else besides what is asked of them by the scriptures. But that day, since the two of us were racing against the clock to run some errands, and since our cook, a lady, perhaps helping with her husband's upakarma, wasn't in that day, we were forced to multitask. We decided to finish cooking, in parallel, so that we will be left with a few more precious minutes. In other words, we were trying to forge a win-win situation that didn't exist. What ensued was a juggling act of culinary and religious tasks with me scurrying back and forth between the hall and the kitchen in response to a sound or smell from the kitchen.

We got started only for the cooker to sound a third time. By the time we got around to yagnyopaveetha dhaaranam, the preliminary concoction for the rasam was not smelling the way it should and required my immediate attention. Kanda rishi tharpanam was done with one eye on the beans in the frying pan that threatened to demonstrate its inflammable properties. Amidst all the chaos happening around, the vadhyar, I mean the laptop, which could not be plugged in because of our location, went into hibernation twice, prompting violent scrubs on the mouse pad or frantic pounding of the space key to resuscitate it and finally having to log in again.

They say, all's well that ends well. We managed to complete, to the best extent possible, the religious requirements and also fixed ourselves a pretty decent meal along the way. The laptop was not exactly dry and had a few sesame seeds stuck beneath the keys, but hey, who is perfect?

But there were lessons in there all the same that can help us come 2010:

1. Give the lady of the house the Aung San Suu Kyi treatment a good week before avani avittam day. I meant only the house arrest.

2. Make sure that preparing a meal isn't on the agenda.

3. And if you plan to have an e-avani avittam, plug in the computer to a power source. It helps.

I can observe the above rules. If I don't, I'll blog on this topic in a year from now.

Judgement (for the) reserved

I read this news item and was stunned. Beyond words. Five students of IIT Delhi have been expelled based on their poor academic performances. They happen to belong to the scheduled caste and lo behold, all hell has broken lose. What baffles me is that the expelled students have moved the court and the court, in turn, has ruled in their favor! Let me see if I understand this. You don't measure up to some well established, high standards of world renown and instead of improving yourself, or dealing with the fact that you just don't belong there, you turn around and blame the system. And by the looks of it, it doesn't seem to be a bad idea at all.

The Supreme Court, in its ruling has said that the IITs can neither "just cite pursuit of academic excellence as a reason to expel SC/ST students" nor "apply the grading system mechanically to backward class students, especially those belonging to SCs and STs". In other words, the SC has just made a mockery of one of the last refuges of the merit system in India and has dubbed it "mechanical grading". Maybe the IITs should consider developing a more comprehensive grading system that takes into account a student's culinary, oratorical and histrionic skills and factors in his caste and social standing and also maybe, if required, note his academic results while deciding on letting him continue or not.

Or here's an even better and more elegant solution to this knotty problem: An exclusive IITs for the backward, downtrodden classes. If, in the words of the highest judicial authorities of the land, these students are part of a "separate class by themselves", it only follows that this "class" deserves its own IIT. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome the Flexible In-n-Out Institute of Technology (FIIT)s wherein, upon entering, a student is assured of a degree at the end of 4 years, come what may. The FIIT graduates can then be tasked with building all the court buildings and judges' bungalows. My professor used to explain to the new students the pass/fail grades for the periodic safety tests to gain entry into our lab thus: "You don't want to be standing next to someone that got an F in safety". He was not a fool. Sometimes corners can simply not be cut. Period.

The learned(?) men have also reasoned thus: “It is relevant to mention that admittedly all these students had joined IIT Delhi in the academic year 2006-07 and 2007-08 after clearing All-India JEE conducted for all the IITs in the year 2006 and 2007. It shows that they were successful in securing the minimum cut-off marks earmarked for the SC/ST categories”. That is, they were good at some point in the past and hence their current dipping grades should be overlooked. By an extension, if Ajmal Kasab, the nabbed terrorist from the Nov 2008 Mumbai shootout, had been a philanthropist and a man of good standing in society till a couple of years back, should he be absolved of his latest crimes and be set free? If this argument is used as a model, I think so.

If an individual is not good enough to excel in a certain sphere of human activity, it is not a crime. And that individual, should take it on the chin and learn to cope with the truth. Not everyone is blessed with what it takes to go through the grind of premier institutions like the IITs. And if you are one such, hard luck. Go find what suits you best. But resorting to bend an already abused system and lowering the bar so that one can scrape through is just bad. It is like Sourav Ganguly asking for juicy half volleys so that he can unfurl his silky cover drives to cover up his weakness on the leg side. This judgement aims to do just that: mollycoddle failure and breed mediocrity.

Reservation is a double edged sword that can cut both ways. While I agree that the real backward folks (not the creamy layer, rich, urban OBCs/SCs/STs) need to be provided opportunities to develop, it also poses a threat, in its present form, to churn out mediocre or even downright sub-standard products that can't stand up to scrutiny in the job market. This system is doing nobody any favor besides placing a strain on tax payers' money. These students got into the portals of such hallowed institutions through a concession (the backdoor). Now to expect such concessions to continue and shepherd them through the rough seas of rigorous standards and exacting syllabi is really pushing it.

This is OK (till you learn to ride)

(Image courtesy: www.ehow.com)

But this? I don't think so.

(Image courtesy: www.strangevehicles.com)

Ticked off by stickers

Is it just me or is everyone annoyed by the stickers on fruits?

Thanks. I knew I wasn't alone.

I don't have anything against stickers per se. I used to have a collection as a kid. Of fast cars, bikes, fighter jets, super heroes and such else stuck on just about any surface. Besides their "artistic" service, there are the other applications as well - price tags, labels etc. So what drove me against these sticky friends? Things started to go wrong when the fruit folks, particularly the apple guys, at some point between the fruits getting plucked to being stocked on the store shelf, decided to get some critical piece of information attached to their products. Only, their products are edible and the piece of information-bearing sticker isn't. By any stretch of imagination. The sticker bears a number and, in most cases, the picture of a solemn apple for good measure. In theory, the sticker helps charge the customer the right price for the right variety, which is fine with me. Swindling a farmer is the last thing on my mind. But in reality, it happens to be the quickest way to get apple under your fingernails. This glossy piece of inconvenience gets a life of its own when it senses that it is about to be evicted from its fruity perch. The time between when you pick up an apple from the fridge and when you can finally sink your teeth into it could be between 20 minutes, if you possess the dexterity usually demonstrated by neuro-surgeons, to an hour, if you are me. Even if I manage to get it off, there is the lingering doubt about what kind of residue still sits at the former site (never mind that the apple is soaked in pesticide) which prompts a neurotic scrub and the eventual decision to amputate a chunk and consign it to the trash can. I can already see someone accepting the Nobel prize for his work on adhesive toxicity in apples and I don't want to be a statistic. Although I'm not on an apple-a-day regimen, I still end up sending a significant quantity of otherwise edible fruit chunks to the dump in a year. Surely there must be an elegant solution to this. Sigh.

Next in this line of madness are the steel vessel manufacturers who put them at the most inconvenient places. Like the business end of a ladle, for instance, or bang in the middle of the inside of a plate and other such places where the sticker is as useful as an elephant in a kitchen. I don't know if things were this bad traditionally and I'm beginning to notice this only now or if these guys have decided to get creative with pushing their brands only recently. We had christened a steel container as the "J.K dabba" (J.K being the letters on the tenacious sticker that could not be removed at all, passing the tests of multiple washes). These are not informative stickers, mind you. And even the critical wash instruction tags on garments get stitched only on to the insides. Unobtrusively. Now, I'm all for sensible advertisement and disseminating information. I mean, how else do you expect people to know about your wonderful products? But, if these annoying pieces come off easily, I wouldn't be writing this stuff. Instead, the guys over at T.S.K Steel Works (and Apsara Steels) believe that it is not a bad idea to use industrial grade super adhesives to affix these wonderful stickers that cling on to the surface with a wicked force. Along with the price tag that the retailer affixes. You know whats more annoying? People choosing to leave the stickers on and use the vessel. Last week I tasted adhseive flavored cabbage curry.

I've now officially condemned 3 tonnes of utensils as "unusable" and sent them on their way to rebirth in some other form. Probably with a different sticker. I wonder if and when will the folks over at T.S.K Steel Works (and Apsara Steels) realize that people don't exactly flock to buy their particular brands. A ladle is a ladle and as long as it doesn't cut my fingers and doesn't have a sticker at the most inconvenient place, I'm fine with whoever makes it. And if you are keen to spread your name around, stick that darned thing on the handle/outside!

(Image courtesy: http://www.ddbseattle.com/blogs/hillary_miller/)