What’s in a name (…or label)?
What is indeed in a name, for that we call a rose, by any other name would still get a sexual harassment case slapped on us. In short, it’s a dog lick dog world out there and… wait, sorry, wrong testimony.
So, back to wines and labels…
Douro Boys, Douro, & the Wines, Portugal Jan 2012
Douro river flowing through the vineyards
Portugal is a country that, to us has connections with Goa. They made some beautiful churches, and supposedly left behind certain traditions, including one around the Port wine. For a history of Port refer to another blog, or just view it somewhere online, but suffice to say that while Port was a wine destined for transport, the Goan Port is only meant to make one journey: to the deepest darkest abysses of a dustbin! To truly understand this country and its wine, nothing short of a visit will suffice. Sure you could attend some tastings, as so did I, but unless one has seen first-hand the slopes and gauged their steepness while trying to climb or descend one, one can never entirely comprehend the scale of difficulty that is involved in making wines here.
Up Jacob’s Creek with a Paddle
Sydney: Australian for Wow!
I love Australia. I love their accent, their sense of humour, their beautiful country, the lovely wines…in fact, the only thing I feel I am not too particularly fond of is that it is worlds away from where I stay. But, that apart, they are one of the most affable lot around. Sure they can get a bit naughty but hey, it’s only cricket…
Jacob’s Creek St Hugo Vertical Tasting
Fastest customs and immigrations ever!
Coonawarra is a town with a population of 30 people, give or take a few. When we landed there on this remote air strip, we immediately swelled the population by a factor of three! Even with the neighbouring towns, the number of people can’t exceed 5000, (and yet, they had this superb restaurant, Fodder, which I suggest you must try, for the food but also for its very extensive international wine list.) And the defunct railway station is a picture postcard from the last century!
Alight here for red wine
Koh Samui – On the Go
This is God showing off...
Writing about a resort while you are there is a bit rigged: it is bound to be good, even if they spill a whole tray of assorted coloured tidbits on you. Not that this happened; just merely citing for sake of an exaggerated example.
The flowers are there to light up the runway path...aah!
This “rigging” starts at the airport itself which is itself more of a resort. The landing is akin to an
Even planes dream of coming here for a break
autumn leaf gently floating to the ground to find a resting place among the other leaves, in the shade. Think of it as a touchdown into nature – like a Willy Wonka airline with an Eco-quotient. Read more
Bangkok Quicktime
Here is an on-the-go scribble on Bangkok. I have to admit that the city has a way of growing on you. i enjoy it a lot more with each visit. Singapore, one of my favourite haunts, serves up everything exact and precise. You feel safe, almost inoculated. Bangkok, like a well-fed Sardarji,loves to flaunt its underbelly. It thrives on its eclectic mix, the good with the garish, the Egyptian cotton-lined to the remotely dangerous, the lemongrass scented to the Bird’s Eye implanted, the straight with the tut, the ladyboys, the straight cross-dressers, and the much simpler to understand, regular homosexuals. If you wish to enjoy Bangkok, you have to learn to let your sensibilities be a bit more fluid, more accommodating, for Bangkok will push them to the limits, from food to design to orientation, and in the end, it is how you bounce back, more learned or more disgusted, that will shape the experience to come. Read more
Khao Gaggan
With a name like Magan, my parents had set me up to be the punchline of the most ridiculous joke ever to happen to anyone living or braindead: that lame advert about some vegetable oil (this was before the era of Omega-3s et al) where the tagline went… waitaminute! Why am I even bothering. Suffice to say that, the word Magan always evokes Gagan followed by the “joke”. Going to a restaurant called Gaggan (Praise the Lord for the extra ‘n’) would then be too quirky, even for me. Read more
Triviality of Detail
If you can tell, I am feeling a bit Bond, James Bond. If he can have a movie called the Quantum of Solace then I jolly well am justified writing a blog entry titled such.
But it is true folks, life is about the bigger picture, not the 300mm zoom version shot from a voyeuristic angle that you often get to see, although, I admit, that is not a bad angle to see things.
Annyhoos…Enough deep talk; let’s get shallow…today I am in the mood to administer a little get-to-know-me true-false quiz-format kinda’ entry. It is my (vain) attempt at trying to make my mundane details sound intriguingly exciting! Here goes… Read more
Getting the Green
No, this isn’t about my pay-packet, or my earnings from other sources (let’s just call it dealing, I mean trading); both are currently suffering like just about every species of flora planted along a busy inter-state.
Our idea was to do a good TV show and you are the best judge as to how far we have reached our target; make that ‘how closely’. We intended to cover local eating habits, cultures and customs, dishes and delicacies, no matter where they were to be found.
I am reminded of the king who wanted the best clothes in the kingdom and the people told him he was actually prancing about in the buff. While I am not in a position as sensitive as skivvies, I do feel the urge to clarify that I am just a guy doing his job.
So, that is my life; envious still? It ain’t about fancy restaurants. It is about food, about authentic and good food from places sinister and not so sinister, and how far a true gourmand would go to find it all.
Shopping Should Be A Singular Activity
Men Don’t Take No For An Answer
Five Reasons to NOT fly Business
I recently flew with the renewed Swiss International Airlines and was fortunate enough to be on their very new Business Class.
4. Business class gives you meal options, something that is never good. The only option with food that my mom gave me was, take it or leave it, and if you took it and then left it, you always got scolded. With food choices I can never decide what I want yet I always end up munching. And when you have meals from Hiltl, that famous Swiss vegetarian paradise, (think of it as a really upmarket Udipi, or Shiv Sagar, or Rajdhani, but really seriously upmarket) few people can say no, or leave anything on the plate. This is when it dawned on me why business class seats are wider and bigger – because only fat people fly in them! The kind who order and finish their food every time. The more I fly then, the more I could risk my fitness and supple catlike nimble agilities.
The Humble Opinion
The most ridiculous inherent contradiction that was ever uttered by any sane (or at least under influence) human being was along the lines of this: In my humble opinion…
An opinion can’t be humble…just like an elephant can’t fit in the backseat of a Tata Nano, not even if he folds his legs. An opinion is your take on the world or the things in it, how then can it be humble. Sure it can be presented with humility but that too has the paradoxical putridity of how humble can a 100-carat diamond present be…
In short, opinions are sharp, big and defined…they may need refinement and could even lack precision but a good one should be as friendly as a nuclear missile. That’s how you tell a good opinion.
Sure you invite the tag opinionated but that’s not all a bad thing – you get used to living alone eventually.
My show has always been about an opinion. If you notice, the camera never goes off between the time the dish is brought and I take my first bite and comment. It is perhaps the only thing that manages to intrigue on the show.
Else, I have been accused of killing food twice – once when it is being prepared and once when I dead-pan comment on it. I could use more emotion I am told but, in my defence, I am not allowed to drink on the job. Waitaminute…aargh!!!
Back to the point, the intrigue of the show hangs on what comes out of my mouth once I bite into something – the intrigue of the immediate. Not what I will blurt post three bites, two takes and five make-up jobs later (although there are none, can’t you tell!?).
The idea was always to play on spontaneity and speedy suspense. Now I am opinionated. I am as opinionated as any Indian who likes his political drama interspersed with a few innings of cricket. I have a take on everything – from movies to the people who go to watch them, from food to drink to lack of them – I am so opinionated that I find myself judging my own self and I find it hard to be living with me all the time.
Trouble is, in spite of my opinions I hardly seem to improve…Thing is, like all of us, I have a vision of life, the world and everything in-between and when things appear different, it sparks an opinion. The chicken-egg here is how did I come to have that opinion in the first place?
Well, I sure wasn’t born with it, it evolved. Through my experiences and exposures, it came to be. And it is never complete, it is always evolving. And it is so for all of us, opinion grows and matures even when we refuse to.
So, if you ever have an opinion, splash it. The caveat is, bring it when you are asked for it: Free anything is worth what you pay for it, a free lunch costs even more. Through my blogs, I invite and solicit opinion.
I like to be told how I am faring, how I can improve. It is my way of bouncing a hundred tiny graphite balls off my blank canvas and hoping a meaningful sketch evolves from it. Usually, it does.
Recently someone left a comment on my previous blog, “Of Crime and…” and it made me think. I like my meat au bleu and unknowingly I seem to have pushed it upon others.
The idea wasn’t as much to thrust as to let people know what I feel and it could be the popular accepted opinion in certain parts of the world. But, I guess, in my zeal to outlaw over-cooked meats, I think I have irked a few.
In my defence, first, the science – the more you cook meat, the more the proteins coagulate, the juices escape and the meat becomes chewier, tougher. It is incorrect to think that raw meat is chewier.
Learning from the Outside
You know the guy who said, “Child is the Father of Man”, probably did so after a game of marbles. Not that William Wordsworth was any ace at the game but it must have been something so simple and yet so enormously humbling.
Less grammatically, Arun was a sheer delight. He was fun, he brought fun and he made it fun for everyone else.
A Life Well Wasted
My life is not exactly a tale to recount to grandchildren by the fireplace: the biggest thing I have done yet is to dream. More lately I have dreamt of amassing wealth beyond the dreams of avarice or at least my boastful circle of acquaintances and that fantasising in itself has kept me Prozac-like happy in my shell.
I don’t know whatever exactly happened to dreams of being a pilot and a fireman? Nobody really wants to be a money-making machine as a kid; oh no, our dreams are way more colourful as children.
That last one is not always good because it means that I have effectively smiled through earthquakes and minefields.
She Said He Said
Women are not like wine. They don’t necessarily improve on ageing and are far more complex when young. When I say complex I mean it as a euphemism for mind-numbingly distorted to the point of infinitely twisted. They say things that make no sense in any context, or universe, and yet we men persevere to try and understand. It would be simpler to read bird droppings and find a conclusive repetitive pattern predicting the end of the world. Not saying that it hasn’t been done (both the women-deciphering and the bird-poop predictions) but with little success at either end. But at least with pigeon poo-poo, you know you are dealing with turd whereas with girls, the splatter comes so disguised that it becomes hard to point out when exactly are they smearing your face in it.
a.It never works out. This was said to me recently by a friend whom I offered a cup of coffee. I had to clarify that my honest intent was a certainly and surely coffee and I wasn’t using decaf as a disguise for holy matrimony, or something similarly vulgar. One has studied about 17th century verbose English usage in parlance but to utilise language of such heavy implications to decline just a jolt of java seemed a tad strong, even to me, someone who can down Ristrettos like Tequila shots at a Mexican wedding, or funeral, I forget which.
Every time I hear a friend talking about someone at work trying to ‘destroy’ her I have visions of tiny Battle-ship (the board game) -like panels with one player announcing positions and the opponent responding with “HIT”, or “MISS”, or “SUNK”. How else do you destroy someone? Do you hire hit-men? Do you bribe their psychiatrists? Do you sleep with their bosses? Their maids and drivers too, and also offer them a higher salary with ESOPs? How, and especially if you don’t own those ultra-cool laser guns, do you really destroy someone? I don’t know but girls destroy girls all the time. Going by famous Rule 34, I am sure we have some Google-worthy episodes to catch on the fly of women destroying women.
Allow me to clarify, to us ladies, you do represent many things, but not at the same time; depending on what stage of courtship we are at, the form and essence of the representation changes.
d.I think I need time off from boys. If life were a blue collar job then I would imagine the need to take time off every now and then. I would understand if we employed women laboriously and painfully and hence their application for leave every year to visit their subterranean lairs were justified. But it isn’t so. Women have to tolerate men as much as the latter survive the former. We don’t ask for time off from women. Oh no sir, we face our fears head-on. If we can bungee-jump without gauging the height and crosschecking the cord-length before-hand, we are ready for marriage. But women, they need time off. I wonder what they do during that period of recess. Normally it involves sitting around and chatting with other similar spirits of Satan, discussing shopping, or boys! It also often involves eating, copiously. And this is what I call falling off the wagon! For, you see, when women take time off, they put weight on. And no boy ever fantasised about being with someone he couldn’t entirely hug, or lift. If we wish to be emasculated we will bring our mothers to all our parties and delve deeper into our Oedipus Complexes. I always panic that one day if I am with a girl and she passes out, I should be able to haul her to the car. My whole idea of macho rests on this one tenterhook and yet I wish I never have to find out. At any given rate, the way the number of eligible women that I can survive continues to diminish, being lost to other guys, followed by marriage and subsequent divorce and an eventual settling of eternal distrust in men in general, and then this whole time-off thing, I don’t think I need to work my biceps up just yet. Rather, I’ll join a mental asylum and get worked up about just how easy it was to convince ‘em for a fling and yet how tough it remained to find lasting commitment.
2010 Highlights
If this were a news magazine, or news anything, none of this would matter. But conversely, in my world, the G8 doesn’t matter. Not directly anyways. You have to be infinitesimally insignificant or immensely important to not be affected. I have my own visions of grandeur which announce me my own self-proclaimed ruler of all things Magan. Outside of that, nothing really exists. Which explains why nobody comments on my blog, or even visits it for that matter.
1.Fantastic Food: I visited private kitchens in Hong Kong, super restaurants in Singapore, and some great little joints in Tuscany, Turin, Bordeaux, Paris, and London. I think food worldwide is going back to basics. Simplicity is the new complex. How to make food with local ingredients, retain flavours and yet make it look sexy and chic, that was the stress at most of these places. Even in India, most restaurants are trying to look inwards to glorify lost cuisines and blurred recipes. The closing of El Buli will only further the idea that the anti-molecular people were trying to propagate: food must be filling and not decorative. Well, personally, I still lament the closing of an institution but I do look forward to making a precision landing at Noma sometime 2011.
2.Great Wines: Wines are always great and it was good to see India take its head out (from a certain part of its own archaic anatomy where it was long stuck) and make some wines that could actually stand their own on foreign soils. I wrote the chapter on Indian wines for a book called The Wine Opus and I promise you guys, dear readers, that I never felt queasy about saying what I have said in that book. I didn’t have to lie about the quality of the wines and I wrote with utter honesty. The fact that no Nashik farmers’ association is staging a protest outside my house and also the observation that I haven’t seen any cheap-mock papier-mâché effigies of my Adonis-like self being burnt anywhere, then, I think further highlights that they didn’t quite mind what I wrote. Outside of India, I drank some great wines from Bordeaux, Tuscany, and Piedmont. Once again, I stress the need for us to relearn the basics. There are no points for forgetting where we come from: snazzy styles of wines to suit the international palate were forgetful; classic wines that respect the local traditions and Terroir are the ones that stood out memorably.
3.Super Shopping: Singapore and Hong Kong are dangerous places, especially if you are the kind who thinks that one can never possess enough shoes, or that a hundred jackets are a hundred jackets too less, or that the only way to desist from shopping is to shop it all out of your system. In short, if you are anything like me, the kind who could, in one single outing, equal the defence budget of a modest land-locked non-neutral nation, then you better stay as far away from Singapore and Hong Kong as you can. I am sure airlines flying to-and-fro make a bundle on just the excess baggage charge. No wonder HK further simplifies check-ins by having city terminals so you don’t have to lug your planetary luggage too far. London is good too, but only in the post-NY sales. But then you better work-out for an entire month before to have the strength and stamina to endure a day or two of the urban jungle, to navigate piles and piles of palpitating paranoid people in order to reach the mountainous masses of marked-off market-goods.
4.Best virtue of 2010: Humility, and no small thanks to the recession. It was terrible! Nothing has had more humbling an experience on us hedonists than the ugly R-thing. We all had to learn to drink only one bottle of Champagne before breakfast, and not squirm if it happened to be a non-vintage. Some of the more unfortunate amongst us were so strained that they had to resort to drinking the poorer vintages of Bordeaux. Those who just couldn’t bear the thought of this kept decanting it into empty bottles of ’82 only if so to try and fool their own wiser selves ever so momentarily. We stored the Caviar from parties by collecting the leftover into little Tupperware. Parties were just not the same with a quintet downsized to a quartet. Oh the pallor of it all! I sure hope that we don’t have another such again. It was almost painful to see the high-flying people using their frequent flyer miles to upgrade themselves, trying to hide their faces as they slipped their coach class tickets across the counter along with their G2000 loyalty cards.
5.Second best virtue: Patience. The one thing that CWG taught us is sportsmanship. We are a lot cooler now when someone overtakes us, stops, bashes our windscreen in, and makes off with our belongings, missus and all. We are mildly perturbed at best. We have tolerance levels that the Ashoka the Great or the Lord Buddha himself would be impressed by. If we managed to stay in the city when it underwent the most extensive repairs since the Pandavas settled here first, if we can breathe more dust in a day than there is in all the mines of Chile, then we can take anything in our stride. Sure we still honk and flip the bird but that is just an innate need to have our patience acknowledged. Time may be relative but the 0.05 seconds between when a red light turns green and the people in the front move is an absolute eternity and it is acceptable in all galaxy systems for people pulled up behind them to wake them from nanosecond nap with horrendous honking to rattle even hell. Outside of that, we are fairly patient.
So what was the worst thing about 2010? I don’t know. I don’t know where to start either. Everything is horrible when it is happening, but nothing is that bad in retrospect. Not to me at least. I guess I am used to being the butt of most of God’s gags. If they are that. Else, I am the wrong punchline in a misplaced joke! This entry started sober but somewhere along my sensibilities were asphyxiated by the sheer lack of inner guiding reason and I went into a spiral of senselessness. I tried reading this from the top again but it made no sense to me. Have I actually grown dumber even as I wrote this? Or has smartness descended upon me to further spotlight my previous lack of intelligence. I don’t know. I will never know. That’s all I know. But aren’t you glad that the year, this piece, and my momentary broken-chain-of-thought is over…?
Shiro Mania
Consider this a first in a series of many to come. Not food reviews, or place reviews, or anything that can be bought with product or money. Rather, my personal experiences of meals shared around the city/country/globe. Much more fluid that even a regular blog. Live pictures and the likes: spotting good food and earmarking it for the gastronomically inclined.
1.Shiro’s Mumbai: the mothership; gave us a taste of space in an otherwise cramped city. Loved it for the ambience (first one as it was) and some lovely cocktails. The food was good but never as important.
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New Caperberry Menu
Caperberry is one restaurant that I have rated somewhere among the highest consistently over multiple visits and meals. They have a certain passion and precision which ensures that standards of food and service are considerably higher than competing culinary parlours and, more importantly, maintained.
Pan-Seared Foie Gras (Goose Liver) with Gazpacho: this was most unusual so far. Sceptical I was – why pair a greasy meaty liver with a cold soup I asked myself? – but the mix somehow works. Almond and garlic gazpacho serves as a mild cut to the seared fg. Very enjoyable. Done to perfection. That means, you will like it at first bite.
Melon Sorbet: Finally, a natural tasting sorbet! Most indian gelaterias churn out a sorbet as if from a lab and with subtle flavours like melon, this is only worsened. Chef Saha has some neat trick here. Try the sorbet on its own, even outside the menu if you can. You can’t but help feel it is something that is tasty and yet healthily refreshing.
Spanish Vanilla Flan With Churros and Spicy Chocolate. Looks like the start of a whole new level of edible table decoration. 
30+1 Learnings
So another year has gone by and I seem to have gotten nowhere in particular. The joy is there but distant, like the revelry of a passing procession in the distance. An odd sense of calm has replaced whatever occupied me earlier. More than any accolade, I now merely want to earn my wrinkles well. Something made me jot down a few observations. For over 10,000 days lived, I feel I haven’t taken enough notes or notice. For what they are worth, here they are. Read more
