For many years now, my idea of light, healthy and, most of all, interesting food has been a salad. Now I do not speak of the conventional salad that has a leaf or two mixed up with some other vegetables and a selection of cold cuts or anything as boring as that. What I mean is the really creative salad, with either just one or two ingredients or the whole shebang, occasionally with a crunchy bit or two added for fun rather than edibility (sometimes it could be fragments of the kitchen sink, since all of it and more go in). I am not sure I like fruit and veggies mixed in together, not unless the tastes and textures really work in tandem, but some of the more fun melanges of crisp and crunchy, soft and chewy, light and solid, sweet, bitter, acid and spicy.
Perhaps, for me, the worst salad ever but the most basic and elegant in a strange kind of way is the standard Indian ‘salaad’, ubiquitous at restaurants of the particularly Punjabi-Chinese-Continental ilk. It has slices of cucumber, tomato, onion and sometimes mooli, all nicely arranged on a dinner plate. Punctuating the display will be small slices of lemon, that you are supposed to squeeze on to the veggies after you have delicately transferred them to your plate and dusted them with salt and pepper. You eat them as a wonderfully persistently aromatic hors d’oeuvres (which I can never spell right without a little help from dictionary.com) or as a crunchy accompaniment to the rest of the meal. There is also the mixed version of that, commonly served in office canteens, which is mainly carrots, cucumber, tomato and onion, with a little cabbage and the occasional sliver of beetroot thrown in. It is served with a small spoon from a large bowl on the counter and is best eaten judiciously – all the constituents are guaranteed to produce amazing amounts of stomach acid or gas, especially when consumed in conjunction with the food itself.
The first time I made a salad was a leafless occasion. I had watched my mother make the usual potato salad and had watched enough television versions of it, along with various other recipes in various other kitchens. But I was feeling adventurous, so I added a little of this and a little of that and created a marvellously fragrant and – as it turned out, I must admit with some immodesty – delicious concoction. It had a base of potatoes, yes, but also incorporated peas, carrots, beans, onions and bits of leftover roast chicken and slivers of juicy pink ham, all bathed gently in an unctuous dressing that blended mayonnaise with yoghurt with grated cheese, garlic, kothmir, dill pickle, olives and mustard. There may have been some salt and pepper, too, I don’t remember. It went on the table redolent of herbs and spices and made us all reek rather of the garlic and onion for what felt like days afterwards.
From that, I graduated to macaroni salads, tuna salad, even coleslaw. But my favourite (at least in theory) was a salad I ate with a close friend that I have written about before, in a place called the Delhi Gymkhana. It was a French food festival and my friend, an elderly army man who had known my family since he and his brother and my father and his brother were in boarding school together, escorted me fondly to it. The food was nothing spectacular, a fairly decent stab at cuisine from that wicked, wicked country called France. But the labels with the large dishes of food were the ultimate delight for me. There was Wall-drop Salad, complete with its apples and walnuts. And for the rest of the meal there was Rose Marry Chicken, a whimsical take on modern taste in culinary matrimony, we giggled. And, of course, for dessert there was the ever-favourite Apple Tart, the ubiquitously army Bread-Butter Pudding and, much to my eternal amusement, Peach Cobbled with Plum Compost. When the wall dropped whatever it did drop, the shoe did too, but we were too overjoyed editorially to protest. It was probably the nicest meal I have had ever!
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
A tree grew on Long Island
(This ain't strictly food, but it was fun, published yesterday in the paper I work on. And, yes, it is true!)
It was very late one Saturday night. My education in popular American culture has just received a fillip with a rollicking performance of Pirates of Penzance at the Port Jefferson Theatre. Long Island was quiet, but by no means asleep. A cruise ship moored just off the pier glowed with a party, the thumping syncopation of the music coming faintly over the water to where we stood on a sidewalk of Main Street in the village. Should we eat or should we not eat, was the question we had to deal with at that moment. And our tummies had their own rather insistent opinions to offer.
While the debate raged within and without, I decided that my ‘date’ needed a dose of Indian culture, in return for the favour he had just done me. So I carefully explained to him what a Hindi movie was like. I was not at any great advantage in this, since the only Bollywood production I had seen in a movie hall up to that point was Bobby, at a retro festival, which added little to my general state of awareness. But I had watched Chaya Geet and MTV, and I knew my tree from my Mughal garden from my jharokha. Any which way, I did know more than he, half-Italian, half-Hungarian and all Noo Yawker, did.
We had stopped just outside the mall in our wanderings, the car safe in its slot in the almost-empty parking lot. Lights and a warm wave of oregano and hot cheese wafted out of the pizzeria and a frozen yoghurt store was starting its nightly sluice-down. I looked around the scant greenery that rimmed that shopping area and spotted with my beady black eye, a tree. True, it was not a tree of the kind Rishi Kapoor and Dimple ran around, but it would serve the purpose of my demonstration. I hauled my friend over to it and we surveyed it thoughtfully.
“It’s a young beech, I think,” he said after some consideration. “It’s a tree,” I commented helpfully, and put one hand around a sprig that would one day grow into a branch. “And this is how you do it.” Humming what I fondly hoped to be Hum tune k kamre mein band ho - which on some further cogitation much later was obviously completely unsuited to the occasion – I swung gently around the slim bole of the sapling. He grinned fatuously and followed me, as directed.
It was then that things went off-script somewhat. On my second round, I heard the scream of sirens and saw the blue and red flash of police lights. Before I had aborted my swing, the cop-car was parked by us and a stern-faced official had stepped out, one hand on his holster, cold eyes on my gradually reddening face. My friend, being genetically chivalrous, tried to explain.
It took a few moments of pretending to be a ‘furriner who no spik Englees’ for me to get off the hook I had impaled myself on. It took my friend a few moments longer to extricate himself. Our crime would not have been noticed if we had chosen our location better: we were doing our running around trees just outside the plate-glass windows of a national bank.
It was very late one Saturday night. My education in popular American culture has just received a fillip with a rollicking performance of Pirates of Penzance at the Port Jefferson Theatre. Long Island was quiet, but by no means asleep. A cruise ship moored just off the pier glowed with a party, the thumping syncopation of the music coming faintly over the water to where we stood on a sidewalk of Main Street in the village. Should we eat or should we not eat, was the question we had to deal with at that moment. And our tummies had their own rather insistent opinions to offer.
While the debate raged within and without, I decided that my ‘date’ needed a dose of Indian culture, in return for the favour he had just done me. So I carefully explained to him what a Hindi movie was like. I was not at any great advantage in this, since the only Bollywood production I had seen in a movie hall up to that point was Bobby, at a retro festival, which added little to my general state of awareness. But I had watched Chaya Geet and MTV, and I knew my tree from my Mughal garden from my jharokha. Any which way, I did know more than he, half-Italian, half-Hungarian and all Noo Yawker, did.
We had stopped just outside the mall in our wanderings, the car safe in its slot in the almost-empty parking lot. Lights and a warm wave of oregano and hot cheese wafted out of the pizzeria and a frozen yoghurt store was starting its nightly sluice-down. I looked around the scant greenery that rimmed that shopping area and spotted with my beady black eye, a tree. True, it was not a tree of the kind Rishi Kapoor and Dimple ran around, but it would serve the purpose of my demonstration. I hauled my friend over to it and we surveyed it thoughtfully.
“It’s a young beech, I think,” he said after some consideration. “It’s a tree,” I commented helpfully, and put one hand around a sprig that would one day grow into a branch. “And this is how you do it.” Humming what I fondly hoped to be Hum tune k kamre mein band ho - which on some further cogitation much later was obviously completely unsuited to the occasion – I swung gently around the slim bole of the sapling. He grinned fatuously and followed me, as directed.
It was then that things went off-script somewhat. On my second round, I heard the scream of sirens and saw the blue and red flash of police lights. Before I had aborted my swing, the cop-car was parked by us and a stern-faced official had stepped out, one hand on his holster, cold eyes on my gradually reddening face. My friend, being genetically chivalrous, tried to explain.
It took a few moments of pretending to be a ‘furriner who no spik Englees’ for me to get off the hook I had impaled myself on. It took my friend a few moments longer to extricate himself. Our crime would not have been noticed if we had chosen our location better: we were doing our running around trees just outside the plate-glass windows of a national bank.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
China syndrome
The Chinese would probably laugh with a mixture of horror and embarrassment. I almost did. In fact, I probably would have, except that if I had opened my mouth to do anything, I would have burped, with all the gas that the lunch had endowed me with. And the irascible boss and I made amusedly disparaging remarks about it, too, standing in the middle of the corridor, as the late afternoon bustle scurried around us with people getting work done, pages made, the paper published. ‘It’ was a plate full of food that the canteen downstairs in the office fondly believed to be ‘Chinese’. It was in some way related, I will admit, wandering aimlessly between Beijing and Ludhiana with a gustatory ambivalence that even a TV show host who recently focussed on this aspect of food could not pin down. But we, me and irascible boss, ate it to the last limp twig of red pepper, and enjoyed the freedom to make comments as tasteless as the contents of our plates had been.
I came in late to work today, right in time for the canteen boy to beam happily at me and offer me the day’s menu – fried rice, he listed, and noodle. I have always had a passion for the noodle, from Instant Ramen to carefully handcrafted threads, and I concurred: noodle it would be. I knew what it would be like; I had seen it before and even tasted of it on an earlier occasion. But asking for the whole helping was a new one. It came soon after, gently steaming (which does help make up for a lot of untold and untellable woes), on a large plate. It kept company with a small katori of ‘Vegetable Manchurian’, the chappie said cheerfully, and a large spoon. “Thank heaven for Nina and her gift of a matched set of cutlery!) the noodle was not in the singular in any sense of the word. It lay there along with a number of its kin, all in various lengths and, occasionally, in such close proximity that it adhered firmly in clumps, and it was bathed with a patina of brown – a blend of soy sauce, oil and I-don’t-want-to-know-what-else. It tasted of not much – the starch of the noodle clogged most else out of existence, with the rare tinge of onion and an infrequent hint of pepper adding interest.
But it was the Machurian sauce that put the bite into the bungle. It was redolent with garlic, the flour-based brown gluey semi-liquid studded generously with finely chopped bulb. And the pakora swimming in it, dense and stodgy, held more garlic tenderly in its oddly misshapen mass. Combine the noodle with the sauce and it worked, though perhaps not in any way that the Chinese would recognise, being even a delightful way to soothe a week-frazzled system and a spiky-harassed mind. Comfort food in one of its many avatars, sliding gently down a very sore throat and softly bathing a stressed sinus with a gummy duvet of mildly-flavoured pap. Ideal for a day that wavers between searing hot outside and semi-frozen inside the office. Ideal for nerves that do not want any more edge to an otherwise jagged existence.
That makes it good food, never mind the culinary qualities it may pretend to possess. And never mind its provenance, its constituents or its consistency. As something to fill the stomach and line the mind, it was a perfect lunch.
I came in late to work today, right in time for the canteen boy to beam happily at me and offer me the day’s menu – fried rice, he listed, and noodle. I have always had a passion for the noodle, from Instant Ramen to carefully handcrafted threads, and I concurred: noodle it would be. I knew what it would be like; I had seen it before and even tasted of it on an earlier occasion. But asking for the whole helping was a new one. It came soon after, gently steaming (which does help make up for a lot of untold and untellable woes), on a large plate. It kept company with a small katori of ‘Vegetable Manchurian’, the chappie said cheerfully, and a large spoon. “Thank heaven for Nina and her gift of a matched set of cutlery!) the noodle was not in the singular in any sense of the word. It lay there along with a number of its kin, all in various lengths and, occasionally, in such close proximity that it adhered firmly in clumps, and it was bathed with a patina of brown – a blend of soy sauce, oil and I-don’t-want-to-know-what-else. It tasted of not much – the starch of the noodle clogged most else out of existence, with the rare tinge of onion and an infrequent hint of pepper adding interest.
But it was the Machurian sauce that put the bite into the bungle. It was redolent with garlic, the flour-based brown gluey semi-liquid studded generously with finely chopped bulb. And the pakora swimming in it, dense and stodgy, held more garlic tenderly in its oddly misshapen mass. Combine the noodle with the sauce and it worked, though perhaps not in any way that the Chinese would recognise, being even a delightful way to soothe a week-frazzled system and a spiky-harassed mind. Comfort food in one of its many avatars, sliding gently down a very sore throat and softly bathing a stressed sinus with a gummy duvet of mildly-flavoured pap. Ideal for a day that wavers between searing hot outside and semi-frozen inside the office. Ideal for nerves that do not want any more edge to an otherwise jagged existence.
That makes it good food, never mind the culinary qualities it may pretend to possess. And never mind its provenance, its constituents or its consistency. As something to fill the stomach and line the mind, it was a perfect lunch.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Fast food station
It all happened a very long time ago. I was in college in Mumbai for a short time and made friend with some very interesting women – it was, oddly enough for me, a women’s college – who showed me a very interesting world that was entirely new to an extraordinarily naïve me. They took me shopping in stores that I had never been with my mother; they showed me how to catch a bus in ways that I would never do with my father; and they taught me how to eat what I had never seen before, leave alone ever tasted. It was not that I was such a snob, merely that it was all outside my sphere of experience, for the simple reason that I ate very simple food that was, most often, made in a very simple way at home. Or else, as I have said before, I ate apples and chocolate, among the very simple pleasures of life and food.
These new friends introduced me to street food. That had always been looked at with some disdain in my family, since no one had the time or energy to spend on dealing with a bad tummy, whoever’s it may have been. I was kept firmly far away from anything that was sold by a not-too-salubrious-looking bloke who sat at the corner of the bend in the pavement selling stuff in slim paper cones. I was kept firmly away from anything that seemed to have liquid in it, since you never knew what had been floating in the container and when, if at all, the water it held had been boiled or otherwise disinfected. And I was kept firmly away from any food that was cooked – grilled, toasted or otherwise – on any sort of stove or tawa or grate that did not look like it had been scoured with a stiff steel brush and lots of detergent.
Perhaps the first step came from a vaguely affirmative suggestion from my mother, I can never be sure. We were sitting on the balcony one evening after I had come back from college and idly chatting about who had said what, done what and worn what over the day. And I told her and my father about how the girls went down to the gate of the campus every afternoon to eat the food that the small stalls there sold. There was dosai, I told them with some amazement, and lots of other things that I didn’t know. You should try it one day, Mother said, almost in passing, moving rapidly on to the taste of mutton samosas at the café on Marina Beach in Chennai when she was a collegian. Father must have laughed, as he always did, teasing me and then her about the need to belong and do what our friends did, instead of not being a ‘shoop’ and taking a different road from that the herd travelled. So, the very next day that I was in college (which was, I admit, not as often as it should have been), I went down to the gate with my friends and did the food thing.
It was revelatory. I opted for sev puri, something that sounded right from all the research I had done. And it was well worth the trouble, singed eyebrows notwithstanding. Those were a result of the high chilli level in the various chutneys and sauces that were spooned over the basic recipe. It was exotic, to say the least, for someone who knew her sushi and quenelles, but had no clue where more local delicacies like bhel, pav bhaji and ragda pattice were concerned. It began with a small leaf torn from a writing pad or old school notebook. On it were arranged six small stiff puris, obviously crunchy and deep fried. Then came a layer of crumbled boiled potato, topped with a little finely chopped onion and kothmir. Then a healthy sprinkle of crispy sev, over which was washed a little green chutney (put very little, my friends shrieked, knowing my rather wimpy tastebuds) and a little more brown chutney. Then a little more sev, for garnish, with more coriander leaves. And the paper with its contents were handed to me.
I ate, with a certain amount of exploratory delight and no little wonder. The textures end the tastes were most interesting, almost addictive, even with the overall cloud of fire from the chilli chutney. But the crunch and the softness, the sweet tang and the incendiary, the fresh and the fried, all melded wonderfully in my mouth. Though I ate that only once, and never really met the same sort of thing again (the stuff served up at work is dreadful, stale and dull), I was delighted. Maybe one day we will renew our acquaintance…soon.
These new friends introduced me to street food. That had always been looked at with some disdain in my family, since no one had the time or energy to spend on dealing with a bad tummy, whoever’s it may have been. I was kept firmly far away from anything that was sold by a not-too-salubrious-looking bloke who sat at the corner of the bend in the pavement selling stuff in slim paper cones. I was kept firmly away from anything that seemed to have liquid in it, since you never knew what had been floating in the container and when, if at all, the water it held had been boiled or otherwise disinfected. And I was kept firmly away from any food that was cooked – grilled, toasted or otherwise – on any sort of stove or tawa or grate that did not look like it had been scoured with a stiff steel brush and lots of detergent.
Perhaps the first step came from a vaguely affirmative suggestion from my mother, I can never be sure. We were sitting on the balcony one evening after I had come back from college and idly chatting about who had said what, done what and worn what over the day. And I told her and my father about how the girls went down to the gate of the campus every afternoon to eat the food that the small stalls there sold. There was dosai, I told them with some amazement, and lots of other things that I didn’t know. You should try it one day, Mother said, almost in passing, moving rapidly on to the taste of mutton samosas at the café on Marina Beach in Chennai when she was a collegian. Father must have laughed, as he always did, teasing me and then her about the need to belong and do what our friends did, instead of not being a ‘shoop’ and taking a different road from that the herd travelled. So, the very next day that I was in college (which was, I admit, not as often as it should have been), I went down to the gate with my friends and did the food thing.
It was revelatory. I opted for sev puri, something that sounded right from all the research I had done. And it was well worth the trouble, singed eyebrows notwithstanding. Those were a result of the high chilli level in the various chutneys and sauces that were spooned over the basic recipe. It was exotic, to say the least, for someone who knew her sushi and quenelles, but had no clue where more local delicacies like bhel, pav bhaji and ragda pattice were concerned. It began with a small leaf torn from a writing pad or old school notebook. On it were arranged six small stiff puris, obviously crunchy and deep fried. Then came a layer of crumbled boiled potato, topped with a little finely chopped onion and kothmir. Then a healthy sprinkle of crispy sev, over which was washed a little green chutney (put very little, my friends shrieked, knowing my rather wimpy tastebuds) and a little more brown chutney. Then a little more sev, for garnish, with more coriander leaves. And the paper with its contents were handed to me.
I ate, with a certain amount of exploratory delight and no little wonder. The textures end the tastes were most interesting, almost addictive, even with the overall cloud of fire from the chilli chutney. But the crunch and the softness, the sweet tang and the incendiary, the fresh and the fried, all melded wonderfully in my mouth. Though I ate that only once, and never really met the same sort of thing again (the stuff served up at work is dreadful, stale and dull), I was delighted. Maybe one day we will renew our acquaintance…soon.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Take another puff
No, this one is not about smoking and, a bigger NO, I do not smoke, I do not advocate smoking, I do not particularly approve of smoking and I will never do so (Kiss a smoker even on the cheek and you will see what I mean!). But what I am talking about is puffs, of various grains – corn, wheat, rice, bajri, jowar and so much more that has been used through time to add fibre, bulk and good health to the average diet. And since I am big on fibre and actually genuinely prefer whole wheat to white (it is not just bread, but a state of mind), I am a passionate advocate of things puffed, its integral fibre stretched into gold-brown veins across a cloudy expanse of paler cream or white.
It started very early in my life – a story that is often re-told by Father when he gets sentimental about his little baby (which I was, a long time ago). He laughs when he remembers the way he or my mother gave me a small katori with some puffed wheat in it as I sat on a carefully cleaned floor. Instead of being as sanitarily conscious and healthful, I would proceed to tip the contents of the katori on the floor and then pick up each puffy grain and stuff it into my still-fairly-toothless mouth. It must have tasted better that way, because I certainly preferred eating it off the floor than to be more salubrious and use the container.
Popcorn was another significant chapter in my life, this time when I was a college student. There is a story my family relished – and still does – which was amazingly not apocryphal, but all true and verifiable, strange as it may seem. It was late one evening and there was a movie being watched in a dorm room two floors above where I lived with my roommate of the time, a rather single-minded blonde. She had her sights set on the gentleman in whose room the screening was to be and insisted that I had to go along as chaperon…the first time, at least. Being a civil type and fed up of the incessant badgering that had bombarded me ever since the invitation was first extended, apart from the fact that I was sort-of-friends with the gentleman concerned, I agreed to go. But we had to take something, she insisted, so we took a bag of popcorn into the small kitchen of the dorm and put it into the microwave to start it popping. The instructions read, the buttons pressed, the appropriate sounds heard, we stood there chatting waiting, with the oven door wide open, until the bag could be taken out. I am – or used to be – the happy, exuberant type, who made extravagant gestures. Which I proceeded to do at that very moment. The base of my thumb hit the edge of the microwave oven door. Hard. There was a profound sound. Then a small squeak from me. Then chaos, as my roommate fussed, the other person in the kitchen standing near the sink ran over to see what had happened and we three watched round-eyed and horrified as blood welled out of the gash in my skin. After a little soothing and some sensible advice from the dorm-in-charge, I watched a little of the movie happily hopped up on an astonishingly strong painkiller, clutching a bag of frozen peas to my injured hand, feeling nothing but a wonderfully thick cloud over my mind. At the infirmary the next morning, they discovered that I had cracked a bone in my hand and needed to wear a splint for six weeks if I refused a cast for four. I have not eaten very much popcorn, and never the microwave kind, since then.
These days I look for interesting cereals that I can feed the family with. Small Cat refuses to be distracted from her favourite kitty biscuits and Father prefers a diet low in fibre to one high in the more nutritiously healthful and antioxidant-rich goodies. So whatever puffing is done, is done by me…with great relish and a mind that revels in the virtue of it all!
It started very early in my life – a story that is often re-told by Father when he gets sentimental about his little baby (which I was, a long time ago). He laughs when he remembers the way he or my mother gave me a small katori with some puffed wheat in it as I sat on a carefully cleaned floor. Instead of being as sanitarily conscious and healthful, I would proceed to tip the contents of the katori on the floor and then pick up each puffy grain and stuff it into my still-fairly-toothless mouth. It must have tasted better that way, because I certainly preferred eating it off the floor than to be more salubrious and use the container.
Popcorn was another significant chapter in my life, this time when I was a college student. There is a story my family relished – and still does – which was amazingly not apocryphal, but all true and verifiable, strange as it may seem. It was late one evening and there was a movie being watched in a dorm room two floors above where I lived with my roommate of the time, a rather single-minded blonde. She had her sights set on the gentleman in whose room the screening was to be and insisted that I had to go along as chaperon…the first time, at least. Being a civil type and fed up of the incessant badgering that had bombarded me ever since the invitation was first extended, apart from the fact that I was sort-of-friends with the gentleman concerned, I agreed to go. But we had to take something, she insisted, so we took a bag of popcorn into the small kitchen of the dorm and put it into the microwave to start it popping. The instructions read, the buttons pressed, the appropriate sounds heard, we stood there chatting waiting, with the oven door wide open, until the bag could be taken out. I am – or used to be – the happy, exuberant type, who made extravagant gestures. Which I proceeded to do at that very moment. The base of my thumb hit the edge of the microwave oven door. Hard. There was a profound sound. Then a small squeak from me. Then chaos, as my roommate fussed, the other person in the kitchen standing near the sink ran over to see what had happened and we three watched round-eyed and horrified as blood welled out of the gash in my skin. After a little soothing and some sensible advice from the dorm-in-charge, I watched a little of the movie happily hopped up on an astonishingly strong painkiller, clutching a bag of frozen peas to my injured hand, feeling nothing but a wonderfully thick cloud over my mind. At the infirmary the next morning, they discovered that I had cracked a bone in my hand and needed to wear a splint for six weeks if I refused a cast for four. I have not eaten very much popcorn, and never the microwave kind, since then.
These days I look for interesting cereals that I can feed the family with. Small Cat refuses to be distracted from her favourite kitty biscuits and Father prefers a diet low in fibre to one high in the more nutritiously healthful and antioxidant-rich goodies. So whatever puffing is done, is done by me…with great relish and a mind that revels in the virtue of it all!
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
An apple a day
For many years now, ever since I was in high school, I have eaten an apple a day, usually for lunch, as far as has been possible. Of course, there have been days when apples have not been available, or when there has been other food that grabs my fancy, but the apple tended to feature in some form, at least in thought if not in actually deed. So today, when I took my apple out of my lunch bag, I thought about the times gone by, when an apple was all it took to make a lot of people very happy. Apart from me, that is.
Remember the lady called Eve? She was a bit of a prude…and then she saw an apple. Big, red, rosy and luscious, it called her, lured her, tempted her, pulled her into the circle of sin. And she bit. Literally. That one bite made her want more. And one major part of the ‘more’ was a partner in crime. If it had been anyone else at any other point in time, they may have given up, because the only other person there was in the area – and the world, as it was then, at least as far as Eve knew – was a chap called Adam. The problem was that up to the point in time that we speak of, Eve ‘knew’ Adam only as a buddy, a brother, a companion. But after that little bite of the apple, she wanted to know a lot more. And, once he bit, as was inevitable, Adam changed in status. And Eve found soon after that, as the preachers tell it, that she ‘knew’ Adam in a whole different way. This little bite of healthy fruit led to a lot of problems, from persecution and exile of what may have been the first ever political refugees to the population explosion we are all still trying to deal with today.
That apart, it was the apple that started it all. Through my days of growing up and - we hope - present adulthood, I have met very few people called Adam, the most notable being far younger than I was and almost always, for reasons I never questioned - for thus was the habit of childhood - found under a bed, sofa or suchlike piece of furniture. Perhaps that was why I never could question the whole apple story, even though I firmly believe that it was apocryphal for the most part.
But apples and doctors have been linked in folklore, albeit not really in reality. There is an arbitrary relationship between the two, one being part of the flora and the other, fauna. In my life, the twain have never really met…except in the adage. As for my doctor, she doesn't like fruit!
Remember the lady called Eve? She was a bit of a prude…and then she saw an apple. Big, red, rosy and luscious, it called her, lured her, tempted her, pulled her into the circle of sin. And she bit. Literally. That one bite made her want more. And one major part of the ‘more’ was a partner in crime. If it had been anyone else at any other point in time, they may have given up, because the only other person there was in the area – and the world, as it was then, at least as far as Eve knew – was a chap called Adam. The problem was that up to the point in time that we speak of, Eve ‘knew’ Adam only as a buddy, a brother, a companion. But after that little bite of the apple, she wanted to know a lot more. And, once he bit, as was inevitable, Adam changed in status. And Eve found soon after that, as the preachers tell it, that she ‘knew’ Adam in a whole different way. This little bite of healthy fruit led to a lot of problems, from persecution and exile of what may have been the first ever political refugees to the population explosion we are all still trying to deal with today.
That apart, it was the apple that started it all. Through my days of growing up and - we hope - present adulthood, I have met very few people called Adam, the most notable being far younger than I was and almost always, for reasons I never questioned - for thus was the habit of childhood - found under a bed, sofa or suchlike piece of furniture. Perhaps that was why I never could question the whole apple story, even though I firmly believe that it was apocryphal for the most part.
But apples and doctors have been linked in folklore, albeit not really in reality. There is an arbitrary relationship between the two, one being part of the flora and the other, fauna. In my life, the twain have never really met…except in the adage. As for my doctor, she doesn't like fruit!
Monday, October 15, 2007
Doing it in style
I was out on Saturday with Father and, after a strenuous morning of signing, shopping, socialising and scouting, we found ourselves in one of the better hotels in the city, looking for lunch. And it was to a coffee shop that we had once known well in a slightly different location that we gravitated, knowing that my nose was shiny with sweat and sunburn, that Father’s feet were tired of his formal shoes and we wanted little more than a very large glass of very cold water with which to wash down the morning’s peregrinations. We wandered to a table by the window yet sheltered from the sun and sat down. If there had been a way that I could have put my feet up, I would have, but it was a fancy hotel, the tablecloths were snowy clean and the hostess too immaculately stiffened and neat for me to charm my usual way through it all. So we sat there, gently counting down the seconds until the icy water arrived, smiling rather idiotically albeit fondly at each other.
Then decisions had to be made. What would we eat? Will it be a la carte or the buffet? After all, buffets are notorious for being composed of leftovers, weren’t they? And for afters? Pudding? What would dessert be? We both liked chocolate. But in this heat and with my paranoias about high cholesterol, low salt, high blood pressure, acidity and more, what would be most advisable? The waiter, bless his rounded little face a vaguely ingratiating smile, came over with a suggestion: the buffet, perhaps? We should look, we decided, and walked around the stretch of serving dishes laid out to see what was on offer. And the big platter of smoked salmon, pink, glistening and with absolutely no smell, except the faint tang of the lemon slices in a bowl nearby made my mind up for me. The buffet it would be.
We started at one end, examining all the salads. There was sprouts with slivers of green pepper; there was a heap of chopped apple and walnut, presumably rather deconstructed Waldorf; there was a wonderfully green bowl-full of lettuce, three kinds, separated by colour; there were small individual servings of tabbouleh and humus, chopped veggies and spring onions. There were bread baskets, holding white, dark rye, sundried tomato and olive, masala and multigrain. There was a tray of little martini glasses heaped with shrimp cocktail and a platter with salami, another with turkey close by. And there was that wonderful array of smoked salmon that pulled me into it, sort of like a surrealistic and very hungry Alice in Wonderland. But I looked and saw no trace of the traditional accompaniments – no sour cream, no capers, no sliced pickled onions. But I was happy. I ate bites of nicely buttered coarse grained bread with iceberg lettuce sprinkled with vinaigrette and mouthfuls of the salmon. I could have stopped there…or perhaps after a couple more helpings of the delicious fish.
But life, like the buffet, went on. I continued with a bite of this and a morsel of that. Fish in a sweet-sour brown gravy married happily with stir fried noodles. Chicken tikkas with kasoori methi were delicious when wrapped into a bit of butter-slathered hard roll. And prawn patio worked great with a sago wafer, the bland and the spicy off-setting each other with much joy. The vegetables, I ignored, startling myself by that, since none of them yelled “Eat me!” on the first round and I was by then too full to consider a second sortie. And, besides, dessert demanded attention.
That was a delightful combination, of small helpings that went well together. I slurped myself through a serving of chocolate parfait, carefully scraping off the decorative whipped cream and as carefully scraping every last smear of bittersweet chocolate sauce off the sides of the tall, slim glass. I demolished the passionfruit cheesecake in two not-very-large mouthfuls and I looked rather disdainfully at the tiny square of chocolate-iced cake that called itself a petit four. Our waiter, who was by then alarmingly paternal and beamed at us every time we happened to look up from out plates, offered ice cream and, when we refused both strawberry and banana-caramel, brought us some semi-sweet chocolate instead, earning himself a larger tip and some very positive reviews on the guest comment slip.
We finally staggered out of there, our tummies a little more stretched than they were used to and our smiles connecting one ear to the other. It was not a meal that we make a habit of, being rather more austere in our eating habits, but it was a lunch I certainly enjoyed. The company most of all.
Then decisions had to be made. What would we eat? Will it be a la carte or the buffet? After all, buffets are notorious for being composed of leftovers, weren’t they? And for afters? Pudding? What would dessert be? We both liked chocolate. But in this heat and with my paranoias about high cholesterol, low salt, high blood pressure, acidity and more, what would be most advisable? The waiter, bless his rounded little face a vaguely ingratiating smile, came over with a suggestion: the buffet, perhaps? We should look, we decided, and walked around the stretch of serving dishes laid out to see what was on offer. And the big platter of smoked salmon, pink, glistening and with absolutely no smell, except the faint tang of the lemon slices in a bowl nearby made my mind up for me. The buffet it would be.
We started at one end, examining all the salads. There was sprouts with slivers of green pepper; there was a heap of chopped apple and walnut, presumably rather deconstructed Waldorf; there was a wonderfully green bowl-full of lettuce, three kinds, separated by colour; there were small individual servings of tabbouleh and humus, chopped veggies and spring onions. There were bread baskets, holding white, dark rye, sundried tomato and olive, masala and multigrain. There was a tray of little martini glasses heaped with shrimp cocktail and a platter with salami, another with turkey close by. And there was that wonderful array of smoked salmon that pulled me into it, sort of like a surrealistic and very hungry Alice in Wonderland. But I looked and saw no trace of the traditional accompaniments – no sour cream, no capers, no sliced pickled onions. But I was happy. I ate bites of nicely buttered coarse grained bread with iceberg lettuce sprinkled with vinaigrette and mouthfuls of the salmon. I could have stopped there…or perhaps after a couple more helpings of the delicious fish.
But life, like the buffet, went on. I continued with a bite of this and a morsel of that. Fish in a sweet-sour brown gravy married happily with stir fried noodles. Chicken tikkas with kasoori methi were delicious when wrapped into a bit of butter-slathered hard roll. And prawn patio worked great with a sago wafer, the bland and the spicy off-setting each other with much joy. The vegetables, I ignored, startling myself by that, since none of them yelled “Eat me!” on the first round and I was by then too full to consider a second sortie. And, besides, dessert demanded attention.
That was a delightful combination, of small helpings that went well together. I slurped myself through a serving of chocolate parfait, carefully scraping off the decorative whipped cream and as carefully scraping every last smear of bittersweet chocolate sauce off the sides of the tall, slim glass. I demolished the passionfruit cheesecake in two not-very-large mouthfuls and I looked rather disdainfully at the tiny square of chocolate-iced cake that called itself a petit four. Our waiter, who was by then alarmingly paternal and beamed at us every time we happened to look up from out plates, offered ice cream and, when we refused both strawberry and banana-caramel, brought us some semi-sweet chocolate instead, earning himself a larger tip and some very positive reviews on the guest comment slip.
We finally staggered out of there, our tummies a little more stretched than they were used to and our smiles connecting one ear to the other. It was not a meal that we make a habit of, being rather more austere in our eating habits, but it was a lunch I certainly enjoyed. The company most of all.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Eating grass
The house is a bit of a zoo first thing in the morning, almost before dawn cracks and wakes us all up. The doorbell rings just before six am and the milkman has now learned to leave the packet of milk just outside the door, on the painted marble bench – the first day, he rang the bell five times before I came staggering out to open it, my bare legs wrapped in a towel and my hair flying every which way around my head; that was enough trauma to stop him doing that ever again. Soon after the sound of the front door bell comes the tinkle of another bell – the one that hangs on the collar around Small Cat’s neck. She hops off Father’s bed, where she has slept through most of the night and comes scampering out of his room. Then she stops on the carpet near the dining table, yawns hugely, stretches into some early morning suryanamaskar-akin positions and takes a flying leap over some imaginary hurdle to reach the kitchen door. And there she waits, her at-first-plaintive chirps gradually swelling into astonishingly piercing caterwauls.
Just when I am ready to leap out of bed and grab Small Cat, tucking her under my sheets and going back to sleep for a few precious minutes, Father arrives, muttering protests albeit lovingly. He rolls open the kitchen door and lets Small Cat in, following her to the window, which is also opened, and lifts the little furball up to set her on the wide ‘window seat’ created with a granite slab outside. There she stretches again, yawns, grooms herself briefly and checks that all is well on her little lookout; and then she turns to stare big-eyed at Father (I have seen this happen often, so presume it is a regular sequence of events). That is his cue – and god forbid that he should do anything else! He has to pluck out stalks of wheatgrass that is grown just for Small Cat in four small pots at different stages of development, and feed the green strands to her, preferably one by one, sometimes in a bunch. She will chew so enthusiastically that he is often in danger of losing a little skin from his fingers, and has to push her away so he can get to the grass.
And whenever she feels the need for some comfort or some rest after a particularly rambunctious playtime or is just plain bored of whatever amusement may be available to her at that moment, she trots over to the kitchen window and demands to be lifted up so she can graze. This is such a routine that we often call her ‘our little cow’.
But then, I always say, she has some of my nature. I like things green, vegetable and fibre-rich, as does Small Cat. I believe in whole grains and raw food and, to some extent, so does Small Cat. And, while I do not graze as enthusiastically as she does, we both like the idea of fine dining, each food eaten in its place and at its time. Which makes us not just epicures, but folks with the right snob values.
Just when I am ready to leap out of bed and grab Small Cat, tucking her under my sheets and going back to sleep for a few precious minutes, Father arrives, muttering protests albeit lovingly. He rolls open the kitchen door and lets Small Cat in, following her to the window, which is also opened, and lifts the little furball up to set her on the wide ‘window seat’ created with a granite slab outside. There she stretches again, yawns, grooms herself briefly and checks that all is well on her little lookout; and then she turns to stare big-eyed at Father (I have seen this happen often, so presume it is a regular sequence of events). That is his cue – and god forbid that he should do anything else! He has to pluck out stalks of wheatgrass that is grown just for Small Cat in four small pots at different stages of development, and feed the green strands to her, preferably one by one, sometimes in a bunch. She will chew so enthusiastically that he is often in danger of losing a little skin from his fingers, and has to push her away so he can get to the grass.
And whenever she feels the need for some comfort or some rest after a particularly rambunctious playtime or is just plain bored of whatever amusement may be available to her at that moment, she trots over to the kitchen window and demands to be lifted up so she can graze. This is such a routine that we often call her ‘our little cow’.
But then, I always say, she has some of my nature. I like things green, vegetable and fibre-rich, as does Small Cat. I believe in whole grains and raw food and, to some extent, so does Small Cat. And, while I do not graze as enthusiastically as she does, we both like the idea of fine dining, each food eaten in its place and at its time. Which makes us not just epicures, but folks with the right snob values.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Between the bread
For many years my lunchtime diet consisted primarily of sandwiches. That, and fruit and/or yoghurt. I lived through what seems like a lifetime of sitting in classrooms and working in a newspaper office fuelled by the bread-and-betweens that I concocted in various kitchens, for myself and my former roommate (Karen, who still speaks of my creative expressions in a vaguely awed voice) and a parent or friend or assorted acquaintance or three. And I did pretty well, except that the older I got and the more sandwiches I made and ate (not always the same thing, you will understand) the more picky I got about what I could find to make my culinary synapses happy, or at least cheerful. So now if I am given a ’wich made with mundane white sliced bread and easy-filling, I will more likely than not revolt, objecting occasionally violently to whatever is shown to me under the title of: sandwich.
It started out with no complications. I was able to eat the packaged white bread and enjoy it, especially slathered with butter and anything from sliced cheese to peanut butter to jam to tomatoes to leftover sabji to boiled egg to ham to bologna to – on one memorable occasion – tomato ketchup. And then I saw a film called The Breakfast Club. In it, one of the actors (I think it was Molly Ringwald) smashed handfuls of crunchy potato chips between two slices of soft bread. Watching that segment for the umpteenth time made me wonder what it would be like to bite into that. I tried it. It was heavenly. Delicious. Delightful. Divine. Just plain yummy. And the experiments began.
Soon after that, I was introduced to the wonders of bread that was not white, not sliced and not packaged. It had to be bought at a bakery or made at home, had lots of interesting nuggets of whole grains or nuts and seeds and flavours in it and not only tasted better, but felt better in my mouth, too. Gradually, that genre of bread took over my life. Today, if you ask me to take a bite of plastic-bread, as I call it with characteristic disdain, I shrink, I quail, I plain refuse. Put a slice of plastic cheese between two of these slices and I go pale (or as pale as my nicely tanned skin can possibly get), shudder not too gently and reach blindly for a sharp object with which I can drive whoever is doing the offering away.
To me, a sandwich has STUFF in it. I prefer the three-slice formula, starting with slabs of rough-textured bread, the darker and more fibre-rich, the better. Then I slather on home-made mayonnaise (with the fishes tails, Papa!) and, if I have it, a smear of the mustard that makes your eyes water, your nose sting and your sinuses sing out loud in sharp soprano. Then comes the fun part – pile on the ham, chicken, roast beef, salami or whatever other cold cuts you have. Or, if you are going veggie, heap that bread with pesto and lettuce, hummus and falafel, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, even carrots, potatoes, onions and more. Then gently place another mayo-ed slice of bread on the top, and repeat with other fillings, this time perhaps cheeses and leaves. Put the lid on the whole with the last slice of bread and press down very lightly, just enough to make sure that everything stays together coherently. Slice diagonally with a very sharp knife – this makes sure that you get a cross section of the contents and you get those corners of bread with crust that are especially delicious as they absorb all the juices even as they help keep the sandwich together long enough to be eaten without too much mess.
In all this, perhaps the best sandwich I ever ate was one afternoon in a small town in England. I was strolling through downtown Tunbridge Wells with close family friends when we decided to stop to eat. We sat in a small café with very painful wrought iron furniture (my ankle bones got severely dented on that trip) and ordered sandwiches. Mine were water cress on brown bread. They came, a huge serving, with thinly sliced pumpernickel, a fine shaving of lightly salted butter and a thick layer of leaves, bitter-fresh and crispy clean in taste and texture. As I chewed happily, my back warmed by the sun and my heart by the affection of almost-family, I thought of sandwiches past, present and future. And planned for the execution of many more…
It started out with no complications. I was able to eat the packaged white bread and enjoy it, especially slathered with butter and anything from sliced cheese to peanut butter to jam to tomatoes to leftover sabji to boiled egg to ham to bologna to – on one memorable occasion – tomato ketchup. And then I saw a film called The Breakfast Club. In it, one of the actors (I think it was Molly Ringwald) smashed handfuls of crunchy potato chips between two slices of soft bread. Watching that segment for the umpteenth time made me wonder what it would be like to bite into that. I tried it. It was heavenly. Delicious. Delightful. Divine. Just plain yummy. And the experiments began.
Soon after that, I was introduced to the wonders of bread that was not white, not sliced and not packaged. It had to be bought at a bakery or made at home, had lots of interesting nuggets of whole grains or nuts and seeds and flavours in it and not only tasted better, but felt better in my mouth, too. Gradually, that genre of bread took over my life. Today, if you ask me to take a bite of plastic-bread, as I call it with characteristic disdain, I shrink, I quail, I plain refuse. Put a slice of plastic cheese between two of these slices and I go pale (or as pale as my nicely tanned skin can possibly get), shudder not too gently and reach blindly for a sharp object with which I can drive whoever is doing the offering away.
To me, a sandwich has STUFF in it. I prefer the three-slice formula, starting with slabs of rough-textured bread, the darker and more fibre-rich, the better. Then I slather on home-made mayonnaise (with the fishes tails, Papa!) and, if I have it, a smear of the mustard that makes your eyes water, your nose sting and your sinuses sing out loud in sharp soprano. Then comes the fun part – pile on the ham, chicken, roast beef, salami or whatever other cold cuts you have. Or, if you are going veggie, heap that bread with pesto and lettuce, hummus and falafel, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, even carrots, potatoes, onions and more. Then gently place another mayo-ed slice of bread on the top, and repeat with other fillings, this time perhaps cheeses and leaves. Put the lid on the whole with the last slice of bread and press down very lightly, just enough to make sure that everything stays together coherently. Slice diagonally with a very sharp knife – this makes sure that you get a cross section of the contents and you get those corners of bread with crust that are especially delicious as they absorb all the juices even as they help keep the sandwich together long enough to be eaten without too much mess.
In all this, perhaps the best sandwich I ever ate was one afternoon in a small town in England. I was strolling through downtown Tunbridge Wells with close family friends when we decided to stop to eat. We sat in a small café with very painful wrought iron furniture (my ankle bones got severely dented on that trip) and ordered sandwiches. Mine were water cress on brown bread. They came, a huge serving, with thinly sliced pumpernickel, a fine shaving of lightly salted butter and a thick layer of leaves, bitter-fresh and crispy clean in taste and texture. As I chewed happily, my back warmed by the sun and my heart by the affection of almost-family, I thought of sandwiches past, present and future. And planned for the execution of many more…
Monday, October 08, 2007
Telly talking
I was watching two food shows on television last night and couldn’t help remarking on the contrast between them. There was a locally made effort, with the well-rounded Kunal Vijaykar as the host, noshing on paella and a spinach concoction that he gingerly and very reluctantly forked up. And then there was my favourite foodie, Anthony Bourdain, who did a very uncharacteristic and un-food show, eating but not very much, telling of a trauma that only someone who had been there could have spoken about. while neither was brilliant television, both were remarkable, in opposite directions of opinion…and good taste!
Vijaykar was sniffing around Spanish food with the chef of a well known Mumbai hotel. If I had been the chef, frankly, I would have refused to have him in my kitchen or at my table. He seemed completely inept at talking about the food, totally clueless where the recipe was concerned and amazingly awkward when eating it had to happen. He does that often, making a wonderfully foolish spectacle of himself as he bumbles and blunders through wherever he is and whatever he is eating. It happened in Chettinad, it happened in a tea estate, it happened again this episode. As he watched the paella being made, he remarked less than sensibly about how the seafood was going in, how the rice swelled up and how the dish bubbled (well, maybe not that, but that was the general level of comment). And when he ate it, first sampling the spinach with surprisingly ham-handed stabs of a fork, he did not have the finesse or the spirit of adventure that would make it al seem like great fun! His bites of the paella – with a spoon, no less, assisted with a fork – were tentative and his ensuing remarks moronic, to say the least. And his most serendipitous moment was perhaps when he showed astonishment at the way in which the taste of the seafood had infused into the rice. And the naivete was not spiced by enough charm to make it even semi-appealing.
Sigh. I read the funnies in the papers that we get every day. They were more absorbing.
Later last night I sat through a re-run of No Reservations. It is perhaps one of my favourite shows, where Bourdain travels to wherever and eats whatever in whichever dive he can find, occasionally going for the experience that mandates actually sitting down at a table…’whatever’ being the operative term! I have watched him scarfing down animal innards in China, messing with tacos of various descriptions in Mexico and carefully picking up food with his fingers in India. But yesterday’s episode was very moving and ‘different’. The crew was in Beirut, when the airport was bombed after Lebanese soldiers were kidnapped. And there was chaos, uncertainty and, of course, fear. No one knew when they would get out, no one knew even if they would get out. And Bourdain spoke about not just the situation, but also the insecurity that he and his friends and colleagues were feeling at the time. There was reality television happening, very little food, except at the start and when they got together to muster up a meal or two, and it moved me more than any news report or National Geographic story could. It was all there, all real, all graphic, and all frightening. Which elevated it beyond the usual genre of food shows on television, where someone eats something, cooks something and talks about something with a happy face and a very happy tummy attached.
Compare the two. And you will see who wins. And you will, I am sure, agree with me.
Vijaykar was sniffing around Spanish food with the chef of a well known Mumbai hotel. If I had been the chef, frankly, I would have refused to have him in my kitchen or at my table. He seemed completely inept at talking about the food, totally clueless where the recipe was concerned and amazingly awkward when eating it had to happen. He does that often, making a wonderfully foolish spectacle of himself as he bumbles and blunders through wherever he is and whatever he is eating. It happened in Chettinad, it happened in a tea estate, it happened again this episode. As he watched the paella being made, he remarked less than sensibly about how the seafood was going in, how the rice swelled up and how the dish bubbled (well, maybe not that, but that was the general level of comment). And when he ate it, first sampling the spinach with surprisingly ham-handed stabs of a fork, he did not have the finesse or the spirit of adventure that would make it al seem like great fun! His bites of the paella – with a spoon, no less, assisted with a fork – were tentative and his ensuing remarks moronic, to say the least. And his most serendipitous moment was perhaps when he showed astonishment at the way in which the taste of the seafood had infused into the rice. And the naivete was not spiced by enough charm to make it even semi-appealing.
Sigh. I read the funnies in the papers that we get every day. They were more absorbing.
Later last night I sat through a re-run of No Reservations. It is perhaps one of my favourite shows, where Bourdain travels to wherever and eats whatever in whichever dive he can find, occasionally going for the experience that mandates actually sitting down at a table…’whatever’ being the operative term! I have watched him scarfing down animal innards in China, messing with tacos of various descriptions in Mexico and carefully picking up food with his fingers in India. But yesterday’s episode was very moving and ‘different’. The crew was in Beirut, when the airport was bombed after Lebanese soldiers were kidnapped. And there was chaos, uncertainty and, of course, fear. No one knew when they would get out, no one knew even if they would get out. And Bourdain spoke about not just the situation, but also the insecurity that he and his friends and colleagues were feeling at the time. There was reality television happening, very little food, except at the start and when they got together to muster up a meal or two, and it moved me more than any news report or National Geographic story could. It was all there, all real, all graphic, and all frightening. Which elevated it beyond the usual genre of food shows on television, where someone eats something, cooks something and talks about something with a happy face and a very happy tummy attached.
Compare the two. And you will see who wins. And you will, I am sure, agree with me.
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Right on the money
(While this blog has been converted to one that focusses on food, I did this article for the newspaper I work with and rather liked the way it turned out. As with all newspapers, what you write is not always what gets printed, so this seemed to be a good place to show off all the research that I did for this. So, voila!)
It’s been a rather unsettling time for the art world over the past few months. Even as reports come in of works selling for millions of dollars, it is known that prices of art have been falling – or so it seems. For many, the arena of investment has shifted from contemporary Indian art back to the stock market, where boomtime has encouraged buying. All the while, the fairly restricted and still-elitist circle that buys and sells art has been quietly going through changes – none dramatic, none earthshaking, few even vaguely surprising.
But change, nevertheless. Consider this: At the recent Sotheby’s auction in New York, the sale of contemporary Indian art were on the whole below expectations – of the 114 lots up for bids, only 86 were actually sold, at a total price of about $6.3 million, instead of the high-end figure of $9.4 million originally estimated. Rameshwar Broota’s The Other Space sold for $601,000; an untitled work by Syed Haider Raza commanded $409,000. However, stalwarts like MF Husain are still top-pops – his Pagan Mother sold at a fabulous $658,600 at Sotheby’s. About a year and a half ago, Shibu Natesan’s Existence of Instinct – 1 (2004), fetched £91,000 in an online auction. Paintings by Tyeb Mehta - Falling Figure With Bird (1998), which sold for $1.24 million, and SH Raza’s Tapovan (1972), which brought in $1.47 million - broke records. And a Ram Kumar that sold for about $32,000 in 2003 might have fetched $500,000. Today, prices have dropped perhaps 25 per cent, though exact figures are never spoken, just whispered.
What exactly happened? As Kent Charugundla, owner of the Tamarind Art Gallery in New York says, “The Indian art market is going through a correction now after coming to a point of saturation.” With the Sotheby’s auction, much of the mediocre has been effectively weeded out. Shireen Gandhy of Chemould gallery in Mumbai agrees, “The undersell at Sotheby’s points to the fact that we have overpriced ourselves.” Dadiba Pundole of Mumbai’s Pundole Art Gallery believes that this shakedown is “long overdue. The euphoria seems to have subsided. More than half the people were collecting for the wrong reasons.”
“People have now become far more selective in buying good works. Prices had been driven up by some galleries who were giving works to auction houses and then buying it themselves to establish 'benchmarks',” believes Harsh Goenka, Chairman RPG Enterprises and an avid collector. “A similar trend was when entire exhibitions were supposedly 'sold out' and then some of these works appeared in auctions. This way prices were further driven up and inventories made more valuable. Now, people are aware of such manipulation. As a result, better artists are better rewarded. Manipulation levels are down. So are prices. Christies and Sotheby's are more transparent and fair Therefore there is truer value being discovered."
Contemporary art collector Ashwini Kakkar believes that the inflation of the prices over the last few years was so rapid, “mainly because all the auction houses jumped into the fray about the same time. Also, the number of NRI buyers suddenly increased, as did the homegrown IT millionaires,” all of whom had cash available to make high-end purchases of a commodity that they could “paste on the wall for others to see”. He feels that “The reverse effect happened because there was an oversupply situation. And the government introduced a tax on all transactions related to art, which had a huge dampening effect on prices.”
According to Zara Porter Hill, Head of Indian and South Asian Art at Sotheby's, “Clearly clients are more discerning and spending their money in different ways in the Indian context. They are not just concentrating on buying work by the modern Indian artists. There are new areas showing buoyancy: video, photography and miniature paintings, for instance.” She expects a continued growing of an international group of buyers for contemporary South Asian art – “There is also a growing interest in Anglo-India, which is also undervalued at the moment. These areas should do well mid to long term.”
Dinesh Vazirani of Saffronart feels that the current low period shows a “top end saturation in an existing pool of buyers”. At the same time there has been a slower gestation of new buyers coming in at the top end, he explains, “There is some stability there. In the contemporary section, with younger artists, there is still lots of momentum, with prices still going up.” Much of this comes as a result of these works being placed in international sales, attracting a non-Indian clientele. “In September 2005 the first million dollar painting (Tyeb Mehta’s Mahishasura) was sold. Since then, there have been about 20 more that went at that price.”
Gallery owner Ranjana Steinrucke agrees that the art market is now not as flush with funds as it was even a few months ago. “But it is a soft market situation now, not really a fall per se.” Founder-Chairman of Osian’s Neville Tuli’s opinion is a little different. He explains, “The market is as flush with funds as before, even more so as many more new entrants, but the money has matured.” The market is now “not willing to accept much of the mediocrity that many new players have been sharing with the public”.
This kind of re-evaluation is necessary as a market matures. In addition, the transition from investor to collector is happening on many levels; this needs time. Tuli says, “Given the financial institutions have entered the art market now in a serious manner, the growth and the next boom will be deeper and more sustained.”
In this turmoil, how is the artist who has shot into the limelight doing vis-à-vis sales? Baiju Parthan says without too much worry, “The drop in price is more of a correction. The fall would show up mostly among those whose prices are a bit inflated. A certain amount of collateral damage could happen.”
It’s been a rather unsettling time for the art world over the past few months. Even as reports come in of works selling for millions of dollars, it is known that prices of art have been falling – or so it seems. For many, the arena of investment has shifted from contemporary Indian art back to the stock market, where boomtime has encouraged buying. All the while, the fairly restricted and still-elitist circle that buys and sells art has been quietly going through changes – none dramatic, none earthshaking, few even vaguely surprising.
But change, nevertheless. Consider this: At the recent Sotheby’s auction in New York, the sale of contemporary Indian art were on the whole below expectations – of the 114 lots up for bids, only 86 were actually sold, at a total price of about $6.3 million, instead of the high-end figure of $9.4 million originally estimated. Rameshwar Broota’s The Other Space sold for $601,000; an untitled work by Syed Haider Raza commanded $409,000. However, stalwarts like MF Husain are still top-pops – his Pagan Mother sold at a fabulous $658,600 at Sotheby’s. About a year and a half ago, Shibu Natesan’s Existence of Instinct – 1 (2004), fetched £91,000 in an online auction. Paintings by Tyeb Mehta - Falling Figure With Bird (1998), which sold for $1.24 million, and SH Raza’s Tapovan (1972), which brought in $1.47 million - broke records. And a Ram Kumar that sold for about $32,000 in 2003 might have fetched $500,000. Today, prices have dropped perhaps 25 per cent, though exact figures are never spoken, just whispered.
What exactly happened? As Kent Charugundla, owner of the Tamarind Art Gallery in New York says, “The Indian art market is going through a correction now after coming to a point of saturation.” With the Sotheby’s auction, much of the mediocre has been effectively weeded out. Shireen Gandhy of Chemould gallery in Mumbai agrees, “The undersell at Sotheby’s points to the fact that we have overpriced ourselves.” Dadiba Pundole of Mumbai’s Pundole Art Gallery believes that this shakedown is “long overdue. The euphoria seems to have subsided. More than half the people were collecting for the wrong reasons.”
“People have now become far more selective in buying good works. Prices had been driven up by some galleries who were giving works to auction houses and then buying it themselves to establish 'benchmarks',” believes Harsh Goenka, Chairman RPG Enterprises and an avid collector. “A similar trend was when entire exhibitions were supposedly 'sold out' and then some of these works appeared in auctions. This way prices were further driven up and inventories made more valuable. Now, people are aware of such manipulation. As a result, better artists are better rewarded. Manipulation levels are down. So are prices. Christies and Sotheby's are more transparent and fair Therefore there is truer value being discovered."
Contemporary art collector Ashwini Kakkar believes that the inflation of the prices over the last few years was so rapid, “mainly because all the auction houses jumped into the fray about the same time. Also, the number of NRI buyers suddenly increased, as did the homegrown IT millionaires,” all of whom had cash available to make high-end purchases of a commodity that they could “paste on the wall for others to see”. He feels that “The reverse effect happened because there was an oversupply situation. And the government introduced a tax on all transactions related to art, which had a huge dampening effect on prices.”
According to Zara Porter Hill, Head of Indian and South Asian Art at Sotheby's, “Clearly clients are more discerning and spending their money in different ways in the Indian context. They are not just concentrating on buying work by the modern Indian artists. There are new areas showing buoyancy: video, photography and miniature paintings, for instance.” She expects a continued growing of an international group of buyers for contemporary South Asian art – “There is also a growing interest in Anglo-India, which is also undervalued at the moment. These areas should do well mid to long term.”
Dinesh Vazirani of Saffronart feels that the current low period shows a “top end saturation in an existing pool of buyers”. At the same time there has been a slower gestation of new buyers coming in at the top end, he explains, “There is some stability there. In the contemporary section, with younger artists, there is still lots of momentum, with prices still going up.” Much of this comes as a result of these works being placed in international sales, attracting a non-Indian clientele. “In September 2005 the first million dollar painting (Tyeb Mehta’s Mahishasura) was sold. Since then, there have been about 20 more that went at that price.”
Gallery owner Ranjana Steinrucke agrees that the art market is now not as flush with funds as it was even a few months ago. “But it is a soft market situation now, not really a fall per se.” Founder-Chairman of Osian’s Neville Tuli’s opinion is a little different. He explains, “The market is as flush with funds as before, even more so as many more new entrants, but the money has matured.” The market is now “not willing to accept much of the mediocrity that many new players have been sharing with the public”.
This kind of re-evaluation is necessary as a market matures. In addition, the transition from investor to collector is happening on many levels; this needs time. Tuli says, “Given the financial institutions have entered the art market now in a serious manner, the growth and the next boom will be deeper and more sustained.”
In this turmoil, how is the artist who has shot into the limelight doing vis-à-vis sales? Baiju Parthan says without too much worry, “The drop in price is more of a correction. The fall would show up mostly among those whose prices are a bit inflated. A certain amount of collateral damage could happen.”
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Of kebabs and love
I am not sure when I first met a kebab, but I have my strongest memory of coming across one when I had just moved jobs to Delhi. It was, all said and not done, not a happy meeting, where the kebab was as tired as I was and the waiter holding it on a tarnished tray even more so. It was outdoors, which almost inevitably put the strongest crimp yet in the proceedings, since it was cold and windy and no one had heard of central heating or heavy winterwear. I was not bright enough to remember that Indian homes do not do anything to make guests warm, except perhaps bring out the electric heater just when the visitors’ assorted noses have gone white with incipient chilblains and their fingernails turned a violent blue, deprived of any feeling and all motion. Of course, there is an advantage in this; at this stage of frostbite, you do not taste much and, even if it is dreadful, you eat it, at least to keep warm.
And in this sort of environment, the kebabs circulated. I am convinced, and have often said it in various writings and in stories I tell – not too apocryphally – that those were the same kebabs I had met on various occasions, held out mutely by the same tired waiters at the same tired parties where the same tired people had the same tired conversation. It took some years of looking fearfully and wonderingly at these platters of small sections of very dead (well, actually, I do hope they were) meat with the consistency of rubber and of the temperature of very old and abandoned vulcanised rubber tyres that wandered past me before I came across a kebab that was, in every way, worth knowing.
That was at the home of a dear family friend. His wife had gone off to parts beyond the reach of the sliced onion to visit a son and I was taking the place, temporarily, of a younger friend, a relative almost. We sat in the garden, nicely wrapped in sweaters and warm woolly socks (which you just cannot wear to a terrace party that is going to be featured in the gossip papers the next day, my dear!), a dog breathing heavily and steamily at our feet, chatting about friends, family and folks that should be neither seen nor heard, when he asked me if I would like to eat a kebab. I was unsure, and seemed to communicate that to him, since he laughed and, still chortling into his snow-white beard, vanished kitchenward. He was back in a few minutes, holding a large plate that sent up small spirals of fragrant smoke. There was, I sniffed hard, a gentle acrid pong of fresh-cut onions that lingered. Having given the dog a morsel to keep him distracted from the rest of the offering, my friend set the plate down on the garden table and waved me to attack.
I was rather suspicious, rightfully so, considering my experience until that moment with the ubiquitous kebab in Delhi. I looked warily at the plate. It was loaded with small sections of what seemed to be dark red tubing, sliced onions and fresh coriander leaves scattered over it. Go on, my friend urged, still grinning. I reached out, picked up a fork and stabbed one of the pieces. It was surprisingly soft, but somehow resilient. I brought it to my mouth and felt the heat it gave off. And one nibble later, I was hooked. It was hot and soft and spicy, fragrant and delicious. Add a squeeze of lemon and a slice of onion (come on, who are you planning to kiss anyway, my friend urged) and it becomes a small bite of heaven. Seeing my gustatory delight, my friend made it a point to serve me those kebabs every time I went to visit in cold weather, which is when the kebabs traditionally come out to play.
My friend has gone away to where I hope he gets lots of kebabs even nicer than those he fed me and I left Delhi some years before that. But the taste stays with me, as does the vision of him smiling happily at me in the dim light of the garden, as we both chewed on those morsels of spiced meat and talked about life and living. And in his memory, I eat kebabs today, seeing him again with every bite that I relish.
And in this sort of environment, the kebabs circulated. I am convinced, and have often said it in various writings and in stories I tell – not too apocryphally – that those were the same kebabs I had met on various occasions, held out mutely by the same tired waiters at the same tired parties where the same tired people had the same tired conversation. It took some years of looking fearfully and wonderingly at these platters of small sections of very dead (well, actually, I do hope they were) meat with the consistency of rubber and of the temperature of very old and abandoned vulcanised rubber tyres that wandered past me before I came across a kebab that was, in every way, worth knowing.
That was at the home of a dear family friend. His wife had gone off to parts beyond the reach of the sliced onion to visit a son and I was taking the place, temporarily, of a younger friend, a relative almost. We sat in the garden, nicely wrapped in sweaters and warm woolly socks (which you just cannot wear to a terrace party that is going to be featured in the gossip papers the next day, my dear!), a dog breathing heavily and steamily at our feet, chatting about friends, family and folks that should be neither seen nor heard, when he asked me if I would like to eat a kebab. I was unsure, and seemed to communicate that to him, since he laughed and, still chortling into his snow-white beard, vanished kitchenward. He was back in a few minutes, holding a large plate that sent up small spirals of fragrant smoke. There was, I sniffed hard, a gentle acrid pong of fresh-cut onions that lingered. Having given the dog a morsel to keep him distracted from the rest of the offering, my friend set the plate down on the garden table and waved me to attack.
I was rather suspicious, rightfully so, considering my experience until that moment with the ubiquitous kebab in Delhi. I looked warily at the plate. It was loaded with small sections of what seemed to be dark red tubing, sliced onions and fresh coriander leaves scattered over it. Go on, my friend urged, still grinning. I reached out, picked up a fork and stabbed one of the pieces. It was surprisingly soft, but somehow resilient. I brought it to my mouth and felt the heat it gave off. And one nibble later, I was hooked. It was hot and soft and spicy, fragrant and delicious. Add a squeeze of lemon and a slice of onion (come on, who are you planning to kiss anyway, my friend urged) and it becomes a small bite of heaven. Seeing my gustatory delight, my friend made it a point to serve me those kebabs every time I went to visit in cold weather, which is when the kebabs traditionally come out to play.
My friend has gone away to where I hope he gets lots of kebabs even nicer than those he fed me and I left Delhi some years before that. But the taste stays with me, as does the vision of him smiling happily at me in the dim light of the garden, as we both chewed on those morsels of spiced meat and talked about life and living. And in his memory, I eat kebabs today, seeing him again with every bite that I relish.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Fasting, not feasting
Over the past few days, perhaps a little over a week, my dietary regimen has been rather uncertain, just like my emotions. An upset tummy and a recurrence of that dratted vertigo, with a bloody-minded sense of vengeance, had my doctor ban anything caffeinaceous for a week, except for chocolate, and that only for the sugar and soothe value of it all. No caffeine, try and detox, clean your tummy, drink plenty of water, rest, avoid all your usual running about, let the housework go for a few days, forget stress, stay away from all emotional turmoil and, most of all, eat often but small meals, with more salt that your usual, but not too much, he almost-yelled. I nodded mutely, fighting the wave of sick dizziness that threatened to wash over my unbowed head, and fled back to unscheduled page-making. As a result, I ended up being able to slide into my tightest pants, even though sitting for too long was rather painful and the lack of oxygen made my normally gently tanned face an incipient blue. Pleased as I was with that fact, I spent the day trying not to breathe too much and hoping that it would be over sooner rather than later.
That apart, eating little and hanging about doing not much more than play with Small Cat and read a lot was a good deal as far as I was concerned. Eat light was the easy part. I was not especially hungry. Too many emotional ups and downs, too much stress, too much disturbance of normal routine, too much food that was not on my usual menu, too much nervous energy and way too much angst, worry and associated stress. So anything that went in wanted to come out. Which meant lots of water, lots of yoghurt and no tea, no coffee - which I had got into the horrible habit of slugging down as soon as I got to work – and no limbu paani, which I like. I sat in my large chair, idly scratching Small Cat’s ears and watched her go into tiny paroxysm of delight, occasionally grabbing my fingers for a gentle bite.
Detox is a much abused word these days. I believe in it, yes, but not the way the magazines suggest. I detox by cleansing the mind as well as the tummy, drinking lots of water, nibbling at only what the mouth craves, eating only what the tummy wants and doing only what the energy stores allow. For me, it was all about a little dahi, an occasional spoonful of veggies and regular doses of sugar, like it or not. Gradually, the floatiness faded, the sickness retreated and the headache went back to wherever it had come from. I chased Small Cat from room to room and we wrestled and giggled, occasionally stopping for a warm hug and a little coochie-cooing over a handful (mine) or cat-biscuits (hers). As my mind calmed, so did the body. And by Monday, as I slid into my snug trousers, I was ready to tackle everything from the irascible boss to making pages and finding writers for stories that were always just that little too late.
That apart, eating little and hanging about doing not much more than play with Small Cat and read a lot was a good deal as far as I was concerned. Eat light was the easy part. I was not especially hungry. Too many emotional ups and downs, too much stress, too much disturbance of normal routine, too much food that was not on my usual menu, too much nervous energy and way too much angst, worry and associated stress. So anything that went in wanted to come out. Which meant lots of water, lots of yoghurt and no tea, no coffee - which I had got into the horrible habit of slugging down as soon as I got to work – and no limbu paani, which I like. I sat in my large chair, idly scratching Small Cat’s ears and watched her go into tiny paroxysm of delight, occasionally grabbing my fingers for a gentle bite.
Detox is a much abused word these days. I believe in it, yes, but not the way the magazines suggest. I detox by cleansing the mind as well as the tummy, drinking lots of water, nibbling at only what the mouth craves, eating only what the tummy wants and doing only what the energy stores allow. For me, it was all about a little dahi, an occasional spoonful of veggies and regular doses of sugar, like it or not. Gradually, the floatiness faded, the sickness retreated and the headache went back to wherever it had come from. I chased Small Cat from room to room and we wrestled and giggled, occasionally stopping for a warm hug and a little coochie-cooing over a handful (mine) or cat-biscuits (hers). As my mind calmed, so did the body. And by Monday, as I slid into my snug trousers, I was ready to tackle everything from the irascible boss to making pages and finding writers for stories that were always just that little too late.
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