Joke, machi!

Overheard at the restaurant during a Saturday night dinner -

Loud Tamil Guy 1: He asked me for a name for his future to-be-born daughter da machaan. Imagine, she’s still not born and he wanted the name.

Silent Tamil Guys: <uncertain laughter>

LTG1: So, he said he wanted some name starting in ‘Ba’. I said ‘Banana’! <uncontrollable laughter from LTG1>

STG: <trying to laugh, not quite succeeding>

LTG1: <still laughing> but machaan, then he says he wants some name which will make heads turn da..<laughing away to glory>

STG: <almost silent, not knowing what to expect>

LTG1: Appo you know what I told? I told him to name her ExcuseMe <laughs hard enough to fall down from chair>

STG: <just when I thought these guys’ were not as moronic as LTG1, they all burst out laughing>

LTG1: <apparently, still enjoying his joke immensely> Correct no, da? When someone comes into the room and calls her ExcuseMe, all heads will turn no?! <still laughing>

This is where I wanted to drown myself in the bowl of Dal Tadka.

Indisposed

A minor irritation is how it starts. A rub along the brow and a firm press on the sides almost fixes it. Important tasks take precedence over a throbbing head – emails to be replied too, statuses to be updated. And before you know it, as if it were out of nowhere, the feeble ache is a full blown attack of a wrench on a human skull, with the mind and body teetering on the brinks of impending nausea.

It starts right between the eyebrows, radiating towards the back of the head – an invisible belt of pain, such mind numbing pain. A whisper becomes a shout, shouts reach summits hitherto unexperienced and the rumbling cacophony of traffic 8 floors below feels like death itself.

Walking hurts, talking hurts, listening hurts.

Thinking hurts.

There is this sudden urge, a desperate wish, to mute the entire world around and sit in such perfect heavenly silence to concentrate on the pain, hoping against hope to feel it rescind, back to where it came from, back into the nothingness. But no, such pleasures are not to be.

Food doesn’t help. Fresh air doesn’t help. An Aspirin doesn’t help. Caffiene doesn’t help.

A bullet to the head might.

So all I need now is a bullet. And a gun. And a person to pull the darn trigger and put me out of my misery.

Really?

Nike – Flat 50% off

Adidas – Upto 50% off

Reebok – Upto 50% off

Levi’s – Grab offer – Grab 1, get 10% off, Grab 2, get 20% off, etc. Upto 50% off

Pepe – Upto 40% off

Restaurant Basil – Anniversary celebration, desserts are on the house.

And what exactly happened?

Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Pepe - The merchandise worth buying are not on sale. The ones I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, incidentally, are.

Levi’s – Ditto reason above. And the worst part is, every single pair of jeans there costs upward of 2k. After the darn discount!

Basil – Apparently ‘on the house’ means ‘complimentary’. Pardon moi for thinking it actually meant I can order what I want on the dessert menu and it’s ‘on the house’. No sir. They decide what dessert  I eat. And FYI, it contained 2 milligrams of coconut-burfi like thing, 2 teaspoons of Kubani ka meetha and 2 microscopic pieces of rasmalai floating in a nanogram of the malai – all this for 2 people!

  

Lesson learnt: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

Kitchen tales

Ingredients

Whole Moong Dal – 2 cups

To be ground together -
Ginger-Garlic paste – 2 tablespoons
Coconut (grated or chopped) – 1/2 cup
Red chillies – 4-5 medium sized ones

For tadka -
Coconut Oil
Mustard seeds
Urad dal (optional)
Curry leaves

Method -

Boil the whole moong dal in a pressure cooker till it’s cooked, but not over-cooked (not mashed). After it cools down a bit, mix it with the ground paste of ginger-garlic/coconut/red chillies. Keep aside.

Heat the kadai and add the tadka ingredients. When the mustard starts spluttering, add the urad dal. Adding curry leaves now would take away the aroma and leave the leaves burnt, so keep it for later.

Toss in the moong dal mixed with the spices. Add salt to taste and the curry leaves. Cook till the raw smell of ginger-garlic goes away.

A slight variation could be to sprinkle grated coconut instead of grinding it with the other spices towards the end.

Wondering why my blog is suddenly hosting recipes, given the fact that I’m no great shakes in the kitchen? Well, read on.

Now take the prepared curry above and place it in a clean bowl on your serving side of the kitchen. In my kitchen, I’m currently facing a crazy problem of red ants that miraculously appear near anything that even closely resembles food. Return after 20-30 minutes and see that this moong dal fry is NOT inhabited by ants, while the chapatis in the hotpack (or whatever you call ‘em dishes that’s supposed to keep food hot) have an ever-growing line of industrious li’l buggers resolutely getting in.

I’ve convinced myself it’s because of the chillies and the ginger-garlic. It has nothing to do with my cooking ability. Absolutely nothing. Ok?

And woe to ye, if you hint at it.

I love TV

There’s FRIENDS from 7:00 PM to 7:30 PM.

Then there’s House M.D from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM.

And what does one watch?

Though one likes FRIENDS way better than anything else, one still chooses to watch House M.D for the sole reason that it can keep one occupied for 30 minutes more. And there are no words to express one’s irritation and anger to know that regular programming on Star World from 8:00 PM onwards will be on hold to show the American Music Awards!

When life suddenly revolves around a remote control and a reminder-enabled DTH system (called Tata Sky), it’s freakworthy, isn’t it?

Boredom is an understatement. So is laziness.

And ofcourse, thank God for the miracle of television.

I have a backlog of unanswered comments – please bear with me for a while longer till I find it in me to get off the bean bag and actually get some work done around the place. And no, the TV doesn’t help one bit. It never did.

A for Apple, B for Burn, C for Candle, D for Dunce, E for Email, F for Forward (this is my longest title ever. I think.)

If you thought an apple a day keeps the doctor away, well, apparently you thought wrong! Now I’m not the one who puts up forwarded posts on the blog, but I just couldn’t pass up on this one – reproduced verbatim (with pictures) from the email I received.

Be Careful while eating apples

Pls don’t eat the skin of the apple becoz it’s coated with wax

Plz Plz Plz … Dont spoil ur body Please, I beg ur pardon.

Check before you eat many of the fruits.

WAX is being used as preservation Purposes and then cold stored.

You might be surprised especially apples from USA and other parts are more than one year old, though it would look fresh. Becox wax is coated preventing bacteria to enter. So it does not get dry.

  Please Eat Apples after taking the wax as demonstrated below.Please follow this and send it to 100 people so that after your death, you will be welcomed by candle lights.

 If you disobey , even if u believe or not, you will be burn with candles. As we cannot bear that heat in our body, please forward it to 100 or more. This is real one.

Now, in all honesty, I don’t know if this is a hoax or not.  They could really be using wax on apples to keep them fresh, I wouldn’t know!

But the reason I’m laughing uncontrollably everytime I read this is the desperation in the person’s tone when he/she doesn’t want us eating apples with wax on it! And the concern? Oh my God, the concern – ‘Dont spoil your body Please, I beg ur pardon.‘!

If you send it to 100 people, you will apparently be welcomed by candle lights after you die! And guess what? I’ve posted it on my blog! I think I should be gettin’ some fireworks and not just candles, eh? That would be nice.

And the next big thing: if you don’t send it, you will be burned with candles. Now if you’re the kind who doesn’t know what ‘burning’ means, explanation is right at hand – ‘As we cannot bear that heat in our body‘! Goshdarnit, how come I didn’t realize that! Man, what a genius!

Finally, the clincher: ‘This is real one‘. Reminds me of another clincher: ‘Yellow yellow dirty fellow, White white Orbit white. It does not rhyme, but it is a true’.

Yep, absolutely. No more waxed apples for me, no sire! And I’d hate to be burned with candles, so if I have your email ID, rest assured you’ll be hearing from me very very soon.

And, hey, don’t mind the title, I just had a wave of creativity wash over me when I was typing the title. I started with ‘G for’ also, but then there’s no point killing all my readers all at once. Easy does it, what say?

Monkey business?

Is it just me or does anyone else feel like taking a mallet to Messrs. Bucknor & Benson’s respective heads? Not to mention firing an entire nuclear warhead on His Royal Lowness, The One with the Most Integrity, He Whose Cricketing Spirit Shalt Not Be Doubted, Ricky ‘The Cheater’ Ponting?

And I don’t know why people keep talking about ‘bad’ umpiring as opposed to ‘blatantly biased’ umpiring. It can’t be that you suffer from selective blindness when the Indians are batting!

You know, it just makes me oh so angry!!! AND I’M NOT EVEN A CRICKET FAN!!

Darn, I hate writing about cricket (mostly because He-Who-Has-The-Remote-Control refuses to switch channels for hours together when a match is on) and look what these creeps Down Under are making me do?!!

And what’s this whole circus (pun unintended) about the ‘M’ word? You know what, it’s Monkey. Not ‘M’ word. Monkey Monkey Monkey. There. It’s not like it’s a swear word, for Godsakes!

BTW, if there’s anyone who should be complaining the loudest, it has to be the monkeys. Did Procter even bother hearing the monkeys’ version of events?! Doesn’t that amount to racism against the poor simians?

In Gavaskar’s own words (while doing the commentary for the Sydney Test) – This is utter nonsense! Utter nonsense!

  

P.S: If one’s level of literacy were to be measured by one’s knowledge of Cricket or the nuances in it or the politics in it or just about anything in it, then I’m someone who probably flunked kindergarten twice. So if you have plans of ‘enlightening’ me on why I shouldn’t be mad at Ponting, Bucknor & Co. (PBC), thank you very much, but no thank you. I’ve got all required cricket gyan already from You-Know-Who.

As to colorful descriptions of PBC, hey, what’s a game if I can’t call the players names! (Yes yes, it almost rhymed, you’re very attentive, good.)

The Prison

She placed her hands on the cold wire of the fence and felt the dew tickle her palms.

“Please move away from the fence, Ma’am. Thank you.”

The guard had moved a step from his usual place, towards her. She turned around to him and smiled. And continued leaning onto the fence.

“Ma’am, I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. Please stand back.”

It was funny how formal he was being. She wondered what stopped him from just shouting, ‘Get outta there, you freak!’. Must be the uniform. She also realized she was enjoying this little rebellion of sorts.

“And what if I don’t move back? You’ll shoot me?”

Read on…