Chaat the f*#@ up!!

I don't know how I do it but I find myself at the receiving end of bad service at restaurants more times than I wish. For those of you that don't know me personally, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I'm not a prick, a difficult patron or a bad tipper. OK, not on all days. Alright, definitely not last Sunday when the latest episode of my run in with an Indian restaurant happened. But in hindsight, this was something that was waiting to happen and that it happened didn't surprise me the least.

Chaat Paradise is a restaurant in Mountain View along the famous El Camino Real. Tucked away in a corner of a mall, they are purveyors of North Indian food. I have in the past taken my business to them on many occasions. The prime motivation in choosing them over half a dozen other places right along El Camino Real is that we live a short distance from their establishment. Take away this advantage and there is no reason why I wouldn't go elsewhere as one can hardly tell them apart inasmuch as taste, quality and service are concerned.

Cut to this past Sunday and we were driving back home from somewhere and decided to pick up some food for dinner en route. Since we would have to pass Chaat Paradise on our way, we decided to go there. I placed my order with the manager at the cash register - some rotis and a couple of run-of-the-mill curries that wouldn't require fancy culinary maneuvers. The wait time, I was informed, was 15 minutes - par for a Sunday evening dinner time. I went back to my car and was passing the time trying to convince my kid that he could go back home to his toys very soon.

The food was not ready in 15 minutes. The manager rummaged through the few take away bags on the table behind the counter, checked with the kitchen and asked me to wait for ten more minutes. I go back a few years with this place and this was playing to the usual script. On time food was never their strong point. Back to the car and convincing an agitated kid expressing his burning desire to be set free from the car seat.

Fifteen minutes later, the food was still not ready. The manager checked the new take away bags, checked with the kitchen and came up to the register.

"Sir, there are many phone orders ahead of you. So it is going to take some more time." This in Hindi. I know just enough Hindi to know that this asshole had messed something up.

"But you knew this when you said 15 minutes right?" I was holding myself back. This wasn't the first time this has happened to me here and my patience was paper thin.

"I was only giving you an idea." This only confirmed that not only had he messed up but was trying to act smart. When I'm hungry and trying in vain to pacify my kid holed up in a parked car, someone trying to pontificate his sorry ass out of a fuck up of his own making in Hindi doesn't help the situation one bit.

Three options presented themselves:

1. Punch him in the face and storm out of the place. After dealing with the aftermath of course.
2. Demand a refund, go to another restaurant and spend more time than what would have taken to fix a homemade dinner.
3. Play along, wait for the food and go back home.

All things considered, option 3 seemed to be the prudent one to pursue and I came back to the car with the assurance that the kitchen had dropped everything else to prepare my order in five minutes.

Five minutes later, and by now I had spent close to 45 minutes just waiting for my damned order, the food is still missing. I'm trying to get the attention of the manager who is busy on the phone. He did a quick kitchen check and asked for more time citing too many orders.

I lost my patience and asked for a refund figuring that I was better off going back home or trying some other place.

The bugger agreed to refund the money but instead of reaching for the register, picked up the phone, called someone and started talking while I was standing there.

"You ordered twenty rotis, right?" Hindi reared its head once again. And the idiot gave it away that he had no clue what I had ordered.

I repeated my order, this time barely concealing my frustration.

With the correct information, he sauntered up to the line of take away bags and quietly fished out mine from among the earlier ones: my food had been sitting there all along for the past 45 minutes. The entire time that I was made to wait, this filthy animal posing as a manager was feeding me false information, buying time for no reason without even the foggiest clue that my food was already done.

I was now in a flying rage and started shouting at him at the very top of my voice about why clowns belong only in the circus and shouldn't be running restaurants. The portly bastard, showing not even the faintest trace of remorse, even started accusing me of not clarifying something or the other to him soon enough or clear enough. In Hindi.

Hearing the commotion, one of his waiters appeared and used a swear word. May be he saw this as his only chance for a long overdue pay hike or he had illusions of becoming his son-in-law. Whatever be the case, I was forced to respond in kind. A heated and colorful exchange of pleasantries in English, Hindi and Tamil, which made a late but forceful entry to give vent to my rage, provided live multi-lingual entertainment to the crowd of diners tucking into their dishes. At some point during the melee, the bugger even threatened to call the cops. To which I offered him my phone and urged him to dial them right away which, of course, promptly quietened him. No man in his mind would want to be declared an idiot by the police force.

I got a full refund, vowed never to step foot into Chaat Paradise, advised the waiting customers to find a better restaurant and returned home. They were, of course, absolutely thankful. Not for the advice but because their wait time just came down.

As I had mentioned, this wasn't the first time that that guy had tried to be a smart ass. On multiple occasions in the past, it was always something or the other. Lousy service, missed orders, dirty utensils and I had taken them all in my stride. But that Sunday, I just let go. It was as if the sluice gates were thrown open and all the pent up frustration came gushing out.

In the eyes of those that were there that night, I was some random idiot pissing off a restaurant manager. But to me it was a cathartic exercise. And although my wife disagrees, I walked out of that damned place a free man. A free hungry man. 

Roger Ebert

I join the millions of movie fans saddened by Roger Ebert's demise. In his passing away, the world of cinema has lost a qualified, popular and knowledgeable sounding board.

I was first introduced to Roger Ebert's work through my good friend Prasad (who blogs here, by the way) - a movie aficionado in our midst. It was at that time, that I also got introduced to good movies outside the realm of the ones that were staple "Hollywood" fare in India: movies involving alien invasions, a British spy, a sinking ship or dinosaurs running amok.

Just as I was beginning to awaken to a world of good movies, I left the USA. Maybe I was looking at the wrong places but somehow between living in India, then Singapore and holding a traveling job, my movie watching became limited to inflight choices - not the best way to enjoy a movie. And Roger Ebert faded into the background.

All that changed dramatically when we moved to the USA a few years back. With a reasonably well-stocked public library nearby, we were able to watch movies that we have always wanted to watch. Good ones, bad ones, famous ones, classics - we started ticking them off one DVD at a time, making up for lost time. And Ebert's words became the hand guiding us to the forgotten delights of movies. And on occasions, delights of forgotten movies as well.

As a teenager, I remember waiting restlessly for The Hindu to be delivered to our home in the morning so that I could relive the experience of Steffi Graf's on-court exploits or a scintillating knock from Sachin the previous day through the prose of Nirmal Shekar and R Mohan respectively. This was the closest to watching a sporting event live a second time, if that is even possible. Ebert's words, similarly, gave me the opportunity to prolong the enjoyment a good movie had to offer. Reading his thoughts about a movie that we watched quickly became a post-viewing learning ritual.

Over time, "Ebert enna solraar?" (What does Ebert have to say?) became the benchmark that helped decide which ones we would bring home. The ones with the most stars or the "thumbs up" naturally made it to the top of the pile. And when we did stumble upon a good one of our own, we would be on his review page even as the end credits rolled by on the screen.

I'm not a movie expert in any sense nor do I possess the intellect to critically analyze one, looking for deeper meaning or a "thesis" in the plot. But over the past few years, I have been able to develop a taste for good fare in my own limited ways and appreciate the nuances of this medium through the words of a great master. And God knows that it has been a truly enriching experience for me personally.

A Shabari that helped identify good movies for our pleasure and shared his passion for the art of movie making is no more. Rest in peace.

Chasing away the fortune tellers

Kamal has stepped on one.

The beautiful Amala then stepped on the same one.

Together, they stepped on the same one again.

I too have stepped on one (read here).

But now the train station weight machines are going away. We no longer have the time to stand and tare.

So with a "heavy" heart, so long friends.  

Viswaroopam: life may be fair after all?

As with many habits, it started off as a tendency. A slur here, a humiliation there. All done under the pretext of humor, of course. With time, the tendencies slowly but surely became deep rooted and turned into behavior. And Brahmin/Hindu baiting became the norm.

•         Michael Madhana Kamarajan – fish in a Brahmin wedding feast, a conniving paati with stealing tendencies
•         devar magan – the Brahmin lawyer as a scumbag
•         kadhala kadhala – caricaturing Hindu Gods
•         Avvai Shanmugi –the maami (particularly, the “coming out” scene in front of Nasser), Delhi Ganesh and of course, Gemini Ganesan as the tanning factory owner
•         panchatantram – Yuhi Sethu and Nagesh
•         anbe Sivam – an overt Sivan devotee (Nasser again!) indulging in sins
•         Manmadhan ambu – poetic slur

There was also a second concurrent narrative. Of the minorities and the atheists incapable of doing anything wrong.  

•         Avvai Shanmugi – The Muslim Nasser going through hardships to honor the strict norms of the Brahmin household/kitchen
•         panchatantram – the atheist Kamal is the morally upright guy, his Hindu religious type friends are promiscuous. Well, nearly.
•         anbe Sivam – Kamal is the noble atheist , the good Christian sister healing the wounded Kamal back to good health
•         unnai pol oruvan – Kamal’s beard suggestive of a Muslim identity (Naseeruddin Shah didn’t sport one in A Wednesday)

With viswaroopam’s release hurdles today, orchestrated by the "Muslim brothers", life has come a full cycle I suppose. Karmic justice, anyone?

P.S: With the political twist to this ongoing fracas, there is perhaps another take away: Hell (which Kamal doesn’t believe in, ironically) hath no fury as a woman scorned.

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In writing this, I just realize that the Brahmin baiting was focused almost exclusively at the Iyers/Shaivites. The intellectual Brahmins have invariably been Iyengars: Hey Ram & dasavatharam. Is Kamal a closet Iyengar in an atheist’s garb?

Disclosure: I have not watched dasavatharam, unnai pol oruvan and viswaroopam and do not plan to watch any of these in the next 72 hours. 

A quick trip

There are a few spots on earth that have a pull on me. Places that make me want to go back again and again. One such is Arizona: a second home for me for four years in the not so long past. This place helped transform me from a fresh-out-of-college kid with not a worry to, let’s just say, someone very different.

So when the US airways jet began its descent into Sky Harbor and the city lights came into view, an indescribable visceral feeling, a mix of expectation, nostalgia, sadness, happiness and guilt, took a firm hold of me. It has been nearly seven years since I last visited this place and I looked forward to being home again.

As I drove out of the airport, I rolled down my windows and let the cool desert air caress me. I powered down the GPS unit and started driving from memory. My first stop was, of course, the ASU campus, a place steeped in personal history. Both the university and the surroundings have undergone tremendous changes. Surprise! Every inch of open space has been gobbled up by a new building that clearly doesn’t gel with the ASU “feel” that is locked in my memory. 

Across the road, the apartment complex where I had landed 13 years ago with heavy bags and big aspirations was hardly recognizable too. It now goes by a different name, sports a completely different look and has clearly moved on from being a simple, crowded, under maintained Indian ghetto. To give you a better idea, I was there on a Thursday night with the spring semester in session and yet there was no smell of Indian food wafting around. A very dramatic makeover indeed.

My destination was Chandler. Most of my previous visits to Chandler have been religious affairs: either to visit the ISKCON temple or to participate in the weekly Vishnu Sahasranamam chanting at someone’s place. This time, it was business which isn’t all that different from religion: both help put food on the table. I drove north on Rural Road, past familiar streets, intersections, landmarks; each triggering a set of memories from an era gone by. I checked into the hotel: my first time ever in Arizona. I spoke with a very close friend of mine for a few minutes, almost lamenting about the changes. How could you let this happen to our home?

After I was done taking care of the business part of my trip the next day, it was time to drive north to the edge of the valley. My destination was the nicer end of Scottsdale. I took the northbound AZ 101 loop, driving past familiar territory. McKellips, McDowell, Thomas, Indian Bend…each exit a throwback to the days when I used to travel down this freeway on many chilly Saturday mornings, in whites, during the season for a game of cricket. Thankfully, the fantastic views of the rugged Superstition Mountains and the San Tan range have been spared by the march of time.

A lot of catching up and a quiet dinner at a nice restaurant with a very special person rounded off my visit to AZ as I made it just in time to the airport for my flight back home. The plane had barely lifted off when I was already grappling with the sole question on my mind: When next?

Sultans of Swing

This one is going to be a shamelessly nostalgic post. What triggered this off was a recent email from my cousin, S. The title of his email read “gnyabakam varudhe” (I’m reminded). And it had just one picture in it: that of an Arun ice cream ball.

Cut to any summer vacation night in the eighties. We’d (me and my brother C) be camping at our perippa's (father's elder brother) place. The temperature would be hovering around the 35C mark despite the late hour. Chennai’s signature humidity would be playing its part in making the weather that much more unpleasant.

Our perippa would be enthralling us – 3 well fed cousins, with his homemade brand of James Bond stories. The stories would start off the exact same way every single night: a real badass James leaving his London apartment with a pistol in his briefcase, nattily attired in a hat, dark glasses and a pair of gloves. The family-safe, no-women, no-alcohol plots would see Mr. Bond pull off high value heists, knock off bad men, get involved in dramatic, high speed chases night after night.

After about half an hour of spinning a tight yarn, loud snoring would prompt us to leave perippa alone to carry on with that night’s exploits  in his dreams. For us kids, the night was still very young and there was more fun to be had.

We would shift our camp to the living room and start going over the day’s events that may or may not have included a few sporting injuries, a couple of cycling accidents, some property damaged around the neighborhood, a few acts of animal cruelties biological studies and a few scoldings received from a very hassled perimma (Mrs. Perippa, of course) if we were caught while immersed in any of the above activities.

Our perimma would be closing shop in the kitchen, looking forward to retiring to her favorite corner of the living room (under the fan, in front of the TV set) in her favorite position (lying sprawled on the floor with a single pillow for support) ready to flip through the pages of the latest edition of Thuglak to concur with Mr. Cho Ramaswamy on what the political future held for Tamil Nadu. With everyone well fed, the kitchen taken care of and our cricketing gear confiscated, she could be forgiven for looking forward to a peaceful night, perhaps even aspiring to go through the Ananda Vikatan too before being overcome by sleep.

Although physically tired, each one of us would be secretly looking forward to the fourth cousin, AP, the eldest of us all, finishing his dinner and joining us. And each one of us knew just exactly what that meant: indoor cricket.

Because of the yawning age gap between him and the rest of us (5-8 years), we always looked up to him to lead our mutiny against the elders and stage a game of cricket under lights at odd hours in the night. He was truly the Kerry Packer of our family. Lest you be wondering about his cricketing abilities, he was our clan’s very own Kapil Dev.  Imagine a right-handed Wasim Akram with a poonal across his shoulders. Or a fair-skinned, Tamil speaking, vegetarian Curtly Ambrose. (Let’s pretend you never read the previous sentence.) Although he has abandoned his cricketing aspirations in favor of more laid back avocations, and hence resembling Arjuna Ranatunga these days, he still remains Saligramam’s answer to Dale Steyn. A sambhar-slurping, sandhyavandhanam performing Brahmin Botham, if there ever existed one.

But more pertinently, he was able to match our perimma word for word, daringly retrieve our confiscated cricketing gear from her custody and firmly silence muted protests from our perippa. All the while serving up toe crushing yorkers to us to negotiate. A true leader and an example for us to emulate both on and off the field.

By now, perimma would have yelled herself hoarse and retired back to her favorite corner of the living room, seeking solace from either a late night Hindi program on DD (this was the pre-cable/DTH era) or continue to decipher Tamil Nadu’s political future with Mr. Cho’s aid. Perippa, now wide awake from all the ruckus and in a futile effort to get us to keep quiet, would make a bouquet of tempting offers: a bottle of Thumbs Up, double the daily quota of rental bicycles to two hours and an assortment of goodies from McRennet. The man, I must admit, had his ways with kids. Yet, we would politely turn him down in favor of answering our true inner calling: raising hell under the pretext of playing cricket. Honestly, independent of whether we heeded his requests, we knew we would end up getting everything that he had offered. We kids had our ways with perippa.  

Having sorted out the family problems, the teams would be drawn up: AP and C, S and I – the usual configuration based on age and cricketing skills. The weapons of choice would be a battle weary Pioneer bat that had clearly seen better days and a shiny Arun ice cream ball with a pink lid (Strawberry flavor?). On special occasions, we would even use the roughed up one with a faded blue lid (Vanilla?), capable of producing deadly reverse swing. I don’t know what reverse swing exactly is, but let’s pretend that I’m smart enough to use it in any random sentence and get along with the story, shall we?

Given how the house was laid out and the space restrictions thereof, batting was restricted to only the Puthu Koil End. AP would begin operating from the thatha kadai End (not far from our perippa’s resting head), hurling the ice cream ball at us at mach speeds. The projectile would disobey a half-a-dozen laws of Physics as it danced down the corridor of uncertainty before homing in on either the stumps (an oversized painter’s stool) or our bodies, but rarely the bat.

The peace of the night would then periodically be broken by

a. the loud ring of the plastic ball striking either the mosaic floor or the steel bureau that also doubled up as long-off

b. our howls of pain when plastic met tender, sweaty skin or

c. the choice epithets from AP for dropped catches.

After having put up with the cricketing mafia silently, perippa would gather enough courage, say around 12:30AM, and request that we stop playing and that the lights be turned off. Taking into consideration that he was generally a friend of the youth camp, we would heed his request partly. We would turn off the lights but continue to play.  Friends, say hello to cricket in the dark.

With the thatha kadai end now enveloped in complete darkness, AP’s inswinging yorkers would only become even more lethal. We would be staring into darkness one moment and the ball would be whistling past us to disturb the stumps the next. In the rare event that the ball did meet bat, AP would come tearing through the darkness and complete the catch in any of the permissible forms: one pitch, one pitch one hand or two pitch, to dismiss us.  When it comes to ingenious training routines, Gary Kirsten got nothing on us.

And after having made us duck, dance, weave, cry and wail at the wicket, AP would proceed to wield the bat like a mace to get his share of gaji (Chennai street-speak for batting). That meant only one thing: the thatha (old man, in this context) of the thatha kadai (old man’s shop) would go laughing all the way to the bank. In his case, MCC Bank, Dasarathapuram branch. We would have easily broken, at a conservative estimate, a dozen light bulbs every summer throughout the eighties and early nineties. Not to mention an assortment of other items around the house, including the blue screen of the ancient Dyanora B&W TV. Said differently, by the time we mastered the dark arts of nighttime cricket under the tutelage of AP, the thatha had managed to marry off his three daughters, educate his sons and turn his ramshackle shed selling sundry items into a proper general store.

Our nocturnal sporting carnival would come to a grand close around 1:00 AM when a very annoyed and sleep deprived perimma (not perippa) with blood shot eyes would stagger down the corridor of uncertainty and make us an offer we couldn’t refuse: we either stop playing right then or Mr. Pioneer Bat ends up as firewood for the water boiler the next morning.

The players would then head into the bedroom, pile up on the bed (pushing perippa to the very edge) and continue to go over the day’s events that may or may not have included…

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P.S. 1: Although reading this may lead you to think that our perimma was perhaps a strict person, let me assure you that she was anything but. Granted, she could raise her decibel levels at will. But she was a real darling that had deep reservoirs of patience and has put up with four kids for many many years. [Parenting a single kid has given me a lot of perspective in quick time.]

P.S.2: The march of time robs us of so many things close to the heart. One such recent loss is the house that was the altar for countless rites of passage for us four kids. With the sale of our real ancestral property on South Usman Road in T Nagar, a piece of earth that had remained in our family for six decades, the one other house that could qualify as ancestral was our perippa’s in Saligramam, Chennai. Built in the early seventies, this house was the theater for most, if not all, of the youthful adventures of four guys, yours truly included. I still have a picture taken years ago of four skinny, gawky kids woken up from an afternoon nap, posing in that front yard. Kids that learned to ride cycles, honed cricketing skills, made and flew kites, dissected frogs, raised fish (or tadpoles?), made a kid visiting from New Delhi dig a decent sized pit in the backyard in search of hidden treasures, conducted many thermo-chemical experiments that may be considered illegal in many countries and generally had fun while preparing to face the world.

That house may not exist anymore in its old form. We may have grown up, conned girls into getting married to us and also got kids of our own. But fond memories from our good times there will linger on.