Summer Cooking 2012!

Summers always make me get up to making my food. I despise what’s usually cooked at home – the usual North Indian Affair – though my mom makes amazing food. Her lentils taste different each day, she experiments – but that fat is always the killer in her food! So, I’ve been doing a lot of fooding around lately. And I’ve managed to cook some of these – Tomato and Garlic Soup, Peanut butter, Hummus, Curd & Mint Dip, Thin Crust Pizza, Bruschetta…and the likes. In fact, mom made some out of the world baked vegetables in white sauce, I should have clicked, but the three ladies just gobbled it all up!

So here’s to a ‘COOKING’ summer 2012!

Homemade Peanut Butter

Tags

homemade, peanut butter, recipe

Homemade Peanut Butter!

Tomato-Garlic Soup

Tags

garlic, liquid diet, thick soup, tomato garlic soup, tomato recipes

Tomato Garlic Thick Soup

Sharing something very touching from @Pinterest. Lovely, isn’t it?

Tags

books, dating, love, pinterest, reading, Reading habits

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader.

They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami.

See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day.

You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”

The conversation within

My best conversations are with myself. and like so many others, I think aloud.

 

 

“How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.” – Oscar Wilde

Bellicose Noises Within

Tags

Bellicose, random acts of writing

A song’s looping in my head,

I am unknown to its lyrics,

As I am head-on with my thoughts, I linger in my bed.

I am in quadrants of memories

as they are classified and justified

by actions and thoughts.

but I am tongue-tied

for now, I do not speak

But I reek

of those memory-makings.

It lingers on

soiling the past

and smoldering the future.

I write and I write, aimlessly

intertwined is my heart and mind, intricately.

let it flow,

let it be

says the heart to me.

Look not front, not back

but ahead and, incautiously

For when you tread the unknown

and uncharted territory,

you really are , and you really be.

 

 

 

The Bad Habit

Tags

books, By nightfall, Michael Cunningham, Reading habits

I’ve never had this habit, but it’s annoying me endlessly. First, because I’m torn between my course readings and the umpteen number books that I am swimming in. The difference being that the first category is so NOT tempting, and the other tantalizes me into reading them. To top it, I start reading two books at a time. And end up reading neither. Rather lugubrious.

I have, like for many other things, decided to start afresh. What a wonderful word – afresh. I like the way I start ‘afresh’ for almost every other thing. Getting up early morning everyday and deciding to eat healthy today – amusingly failing – ending up eating half-cooked, colorful & chlorine-tasting food at the college canteen. So much so for starting afresh.

So, I have started reading this book, ‘By Nightfall’ by Michael Cunningham. I refuse to read the half-read books, for I don’t wish to re-read the bits I already have read. This book is a symbolic of a new reading habit – one book at a time. I can’t multitask, except when engaging in household chores.

This particular book was very inviting. Its the latest by Cunningham, and a theme I’d enjoy. Somehow distresses attract me far more than happiness. At least in books and movies. I’d always go in for a movie with a deeper message, a soul, than a frivolous chic-flick. But there are also those rare times my heart feels so loaded, that I have to unburden and lighten it with a Diaz movie!

SO, I’m going to pick up on this one good habit. Pray that I may stick to it, for old habits die hard.

 

 

 

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. – Virginia Woolf

International Holocaust Remembrance Day – 16th February

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Alliance Francaise, Auschwitz, holocaust, International Holocaust memorial day, Nazi, Shashi Tharoor

Ironic. How only yesterday I attended a workshop on conflict writing, and today I decided to be in attendance at the Alliance Francaise in Delhi to commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.( http://delhi.afindia.org/node/5128 )

The speech by Shashi Tharoor was perhaps the best amongst all that evening. I felt he played the role of a perfect diplomat – not forgetting to refer to the Israel-Palestine conflict and India’s rather neutral stance on the conflict. The man certainly did his background research before penning down his thoughts on the day, as he made some very interesting points about the history of Jews in India.

Though the very intimidating men in black did make me feel a little uneasy, it wasn’t like you could escape their gaze, given what the attack on an Israeli diplomat in New Delhi recently. Also, since the the Israeli Ambassador to India was to make give an address.

Yoni Avital broke that ice though. I felt transported to a different world altogether, as put his lips to the flute. Intense. The very vibes of the auditorium changed. He also later played ‘Eli Eli’ on the guitar. Here is Eli Eli, though in a female voice. It is a quintessential Hebrew song.

The film screening left many stunned. I had my sister next to me, crying. It was a tear-jerker, undoubtedly. But to imagine that this was a plight of one of the 6 million Jews that were exterminated (plus another 1 million as ‘others’) , it did shake the foundations.

Suddenly, all of these very ‘flowery’ and grand sounding research fields ‘War & Peace studies’, came through to me as a sham.

If you have a chance, or if you can somehow gain access to this documentary – ‘The Heavens will open for you’ – The story of Malka Rosenthal (Israel, 2009) – then please do watch it.

Every conflict text has a message. The text may be in the form of a documentary, a piece of poetry, a journal entry, or any other form. In conflict, visuals along with text, always make the greatest impact out of all other mediums.