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
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.
In fact, if I were to ever write about making money, it wouldn’t be a blog, I think the correct term would be SMS.
I am talking of the other green, the not so pretty green, the green that glints in the eye of a wild bob-cat on heat before it digs its claws into your collar bone. I am talking of the green that would possibly make you do the same thing to Mr. Neighbour when he parked his new
Arnage Coupe in full view of your morning breakfast tea.
I am talking of the most consuming of sins, that sexy little devil called Envy.
I didn’t know envy could be spelt NV. I just thought most of the Yuppies in my colony driving cars beyond their means (but well within their dads’) were proclaiming allegiance to some new sign for victory, or a university, or Che, or a cricket team.
(Wait-a-minute, they didn’t have IPL when you were young Magan! True, I am just trying to feel young; let me.)
Such abbreviation was lost on me. Mind you these were the pre-West Coast Hip-Hop movement days, well before every nonsensical Hindi serial added multiple letters to be balanced albeit perpetual phonetic aberrations.
So much envy in this world, I wonder if we could tap it and use it to power the refrigerator; or the water heater; whichever works. You see, the thing started the TV show with much inspiration, some justified pre-emptive consternation, and bright-eyed aspiration.
Add to that tank-loads of perspiration, it was unbearably hot in Turkey!
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.
Ours was not a tawdry trick to dine in the most expensive, coveted of restaurants. Sure it helped what with reservations backed up for months and us being last-minute arrivals but that was not the essence of our exercise.
We were trying to find veritable and authoritative sources, be it the Scottish kitchens of Tony Singh or the cooking school at Swinton Park.
But somehow people have been dazzled by the interiors of the restaurants I have been filmed in. I mean, it’s either that or my exuberant personality only further enhanced by my shiny wavy hair.
Viewers have fooled themselves into believing that mine is an endeavour of hedonism, to scavenge and comb through every fine-dining West of the Middle. Oh, how mistaken are ye, all of little faith…
And this reductive environment is ideal breeding ground for the green monster. On an average I get three people tell me everyday how they love my show, watch it regularly and then how they are jealous of all the good food I eat.
A usual follow-up is if I require an assistant. I politely ask most to get their legs waxed and get in line. Women too.
While this may sound like an ungrateful rant, it is anything but; I love being told that my show is watched and liked. It is the best thing to hear. Comparatively, I feel way less exquisite after a milk and honey bath.
But nonetheless, even as they praise me with garlands, they sacrifice me at the altar of ignorance – the new proclaimed Hannibal of haute-cuisine.
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.
To help put in context, let me elucidate an average shoot day. Early morning, I do not eat brekkie with the rest of the crew as I may have to eat later.
In fact, I rarely eat with the crew. They starve for days on end while I put away food for an extended and breeding family of human-sized rabbits.
I rarely eat with anyone. I can’t remember when last I had a normal meal with dim lighting and company that sat across me and talked back in words more than, “Roll”, “Cue”, and “Cut!”
I think it would be safe to say that I eat more food in one day than my crew put together. I eat two lunches, which may not be too far spaced in time. They are multiple courses. If, we chance upon some nice little snack along our way, we stop and shoot. I, of course, re-eat.
Most such stops are followed by pre-fixed stops, like, say, a dinner, or two. Fact: Food makes you fat. Combined with alcohol it makes you swell like a human zeppelin. If I keep growing fat and can’t tour any more I may turn magician.
My biggest trick would be to make monumental amounts of food disappear. Like say a Great Wall build of Crispy Peking Duck. Or perhaps, eat a restaurant all the way to bankruptcy and make that disappear!
I am planning on buying shares of Danone Actimel and natural Yoghurt division, not to mention Pudin Hara and Zintac! Nothing else that has happened since Renaissance could make their stock accelerate faster.
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.
It would help if I could actually walk to it. But, for now, I drive to them and tuck in. I am driving my crew to killing for food, driving myself mad with problems of weight-gain and let me assure you that there is nothing as weight-gain in the right places, weight is not that smart.
But most concernedly, I am driving people to envy me because I eat and drink. To be loved because you arouse envy albeit a nice friendly envy – what a delectable dilemma I harbour. Not too keen that waxing appointment now are ya’!?
But I love my life and I love people envying me, in that nice way they do. Keep on doing it and telling me about it whenever you see me; it makes the extra kilos weigh lesser on my conscience.
Which brings us to the unrelated question: As with my receding and thinning hairline, where do I stop using shampoo and start using face wash?
The product is amazing but, quirkily enough, the longer I sat there the more I felt inclined to stick to economy class, or not fly at all.
Next time I will just walk to Europe! Here are a few reasons why:
1. It doesn’t feel like you are flying. The scattered and seemingly-chaotic-at-first seating order confuses you even as you board but the wooden facade just makes the whole place feel like a living room.
It lacks the steely coldness of most business class, instead opting for this rather retro-nouveau look. Like the living room of your parents, except as if they were extremely hip and with it.
2. European carriers had this old school charm where they segregate and distinguish people and serve you according to your origin. We the browns were always lesser people than the Caucasians and were treated so. I think in lesser educated circles it was blatantly termed racism. The intelligentsia knew better, calling it “European Standards”.
Swiss has done away with this, allowing other nationalities to fly as air crew thereby making the experience warm and friendly, speaking many languages, actually caring as if they were an Asian airline.
Whatever happened to that little S&M that we as Indians had come to expect of European carriers? If all we wanted was good service we could have easily flown to Singapore, or Dubai.
3. Business is expensive and that is no genius insight but, I realised, if you book them early and are date flexible, you can get some pretty competitive rates; even enough to match
Emirates and
Qatar.
Air France and
British Airways are comparably mostly much higher. So I can now fly better and also save money. However my accountant seems to disagree.
To him, this could be a major setback to my travel budgets as, according to him, I will be spending more than before on my economy travel. Maybe I should fire him.
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.
5. Now this last one can ruin travel for many others, even on other business classes. Swiss has tied up with
Lantal (that major company making transport interior fabrics) and developed this funky new seat design that
(a) adjusts the firmness of the cushion and
(b) can convert into a fully flat two meter long bed.
Now that is more luxury than any man flinging his body at a speed close to that of sound should be allowed or should expect.
I spent a good part of my flight playing with the firmness-softness buttons. Some other time I spent fiddling with the massage option even though, in the end, I didn’t feel any more relaxed.
Economy, cramped as it is, is boring. Given the lack of general such options, you get driven to sleep out of sheer boredom, even if you have to contort into a special shape to fit the space.
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.
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.
Recently, I shot an episode on wine and beer with Arun Thapar. Sure the man is a walking tome on various subjects but none admittedly liquor-based.
He can light a set and set camera angles to actually prove that there was no ‘Hand of God’ assisting Maradonna.
He can shoot dialogues faster and smarter than a bevy of script-writers who are OD-ing on
Red Bull. But when it comes to wine, he will be the first to admit his sophomoric status.
He sure still knows a lot compared to the average bloke but it was perhaps this very humility that highlighted something very basic and yet very quintessential to me.
This was it: Wine should be way simpler than it mostly is.
I am a wine taster.
I try to less-obfuscate wine but I have never thought of simplifying wine to such an extent as we did during our day-and-a-half of shooting for this show which is article-lessly called “Spirit of Good Times”.
The two missing ‘Thes’ really drive me up the wall!
Less grammatically, Arun was a sheer delight. He was fun, he brought fun and he made it fun for everyone else.
I realised how much of a snob I too was earlier. Nothing that he suggested was blasé or uncomplimentary to wine as such but the thing is I had never thought of similar.
Sure, I have done wine cocktails and even indulged in wine cooking but it was the blatant simplicity that he brought the subject that impressed me.
I am soon starting a wine and beverage institute and shooting with Arun has given me a lot to think about.
That aside, I enjoyed the show. I sure hope you did too, or will when you see it. We did manage to drop the rituals and skip the ceremonies. After a couple of sips, it had only become easier.
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.
But I do recall having an adolescent dream that involved food and experimentation. And that is perhaps what mostly has fuelled my quest for gastronomy and is responsible for my undying temptations to try and tackle the un-tasted, not to mention my expanding girth and ever-widening shadow.
Food is a satisfying pursuit: It refreshes, rejuvenates and relaxes. If you manage to eat the right kind, it also nourishes. Wine is something that makes food whole, that gives food meaning, form and definition.
Without wine, food is rather lacking in dimension and depth. If you wanted visuals it would be much like that scene from Jerry McGuire when Tom Cruise goes back to reclaim his relationship.
You can almost imagine a luscious lamb chop telling a muscled magnum of a Bordeaux, “Shut up, you had me at hello…” Yes, I need to get out more.
So, to add to my initial thought, the biggest thing I have done so far is to dream, and eat and drink.
I have had food brought to life (
PETA, please excuse the sad and incidental pun) at the hands of some of the best names in the culinary world, I have tasted wines and whiskies and beers made in remote corners of the planet by people who just don’t care about
Louis Vuitton or the people who flaunt them and then I have seen things that always bring a smile to my face whenever my entire life flashes before my eyes.
That last one is not always good because it means that I have effectively smiled through earthquakes and minefields.
But, put like that, it doesn’t sound like much of a waste of a life, even though it might sound like one food-rich and alcohol-soaked “wasted” life.
I can live with that. My grand-children may not enjoy the stories as much but just narrating them would rekindle the tastes that I would have enjoyed and they would perhaps still make me drool.
To recount and reminisce about all someone could do and did do for a one square meal, five times a day!
Maybe I could tell them then how I always consider my greatest failure to be my inability to have found someone smarter than me. I may begin to sound batty then but don’t I already? And better yet, I could always claim senility as an excuse then.
But I am not done yet. My fork and knife are far from placed in that parallel position that symbolises the end of a meal.
Other people live their lives like the chapters of a book; mine would be more akin to the various courses of a meal. And I am far from dishing up mains.
So enjoy the starters while you ponder me this, “Are manners and etiquettes free-flow natural form for humans or just an attempt at moralistic suppression of our primal instincts?”
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.
Here are some things that I heard, overheard, directly from lady friends, in conversation or during my stalking sessions, or from now-disillusioned boys who made the mistake of assuming they understood not just their ‘keep’, but the vicious world of vixens in general, linguistically speaking, of course. No man is foolish enough to make a claim like he understands women. We’d sooner risk flying to the moon in a projectile tin bucket.
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.
b.She’s trying to destroy me. We re all allowed our disillusionment of grandeur. Who hasn’t gotten off a plane and taken long confident strides boldly into the arrival area as if the whole city had turned out just to welcome you and cheer you on. No? Ah well, I’m just saying, you know. Anyways, but this one remains a very common thing women say and I just don’t get it.
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.
c.Do you like me or what I represent? This is quite the brain-tease, and again, when I say tease, I mean, “What in the name of blazing mind-fucks was that?” Boys have a tough time parting with the one watch they own, how then are they supposed to manage to find two sides to you, the real and the representative, and then love one, or both, or alternatively? If we want to love two of you, we will clone you. Or imagine a hotter twin using mental snippets from our favourite porn flick. But we will definitely not pretend to love “both” you and the other you when to us they are still the same annoying package.
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.
i.In the beginning you represent heaven. This is when we barely know you; when we believe that our eyes met across the room, much like meek weak prey in the jungle believe that they spotted the predator first even as the paw lands on them, tearing flesh, slicing it open, sending bloodied shreds flying 360. (Note to self: Watch less NatGeo.)
ii.Then, during courtship, when we are still thinking about the various ploys to get in your you-know-what, we think of you as lady-like. We hate the way we love the way you elude us – a sudden friend to meet here, a late-night cancelled last-minute there. We adore how you build up the chase, little realising that it is us who is running out of stamina and will soon be brought in for the final kill.
iii.Then, once the metaphorical honeymoon is over, (which is the only known thing to be quicker than the male orgasm) we see you almost as dictating and unreasonable as feudal lords, but only a bit worse. When I say bit, I mean the distance between two stars so far apart that their lights are yet to grace each other. We realise that the ring on the finger is a noose around our social necks. What was once thought elusive is now directly and confrontationally avoidable. But it’s too late. Like that girl in Aliens, we are being intravenously sapped out of all life and dreams, a Tiki-drink in the hands of some lass with a useless yet attractive straw hat (the drink, not the lady…or maybe the lady).
But that is what you represent. Rather, these are what you represent. don’t get us wrong, we like you at each stage, just that the nature is different. Sometimes it’s how the sunflower likes dawn, or a pig likes a mudbath, and sometimes it’s a bit grim, like how a cancer patient likes Chemo. But it’s all pure liking nevertheless, what changes are the things we like about you. “Change” here is a synonym for reduce. Or imagine; and extrapolate.
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.
I am not a misogynist. I am not even a chauvinist. I am far from either. I can’t afford either. To be one of the two you have to have enough horse power to be able to wade through a sea of women who are parked protesting outside your house, women who burnt their bras in protest to the unnatural but thereby smoked up the air ten times over, never mind the visual pollution caused by sagging chests. You have to be able to drive on through without letting any of them stop you and give you a lecture on correctitude. By now you must be hating me for being the way I am and I agree. If God had a complaint department, I’d be in line well before you registering my self-directed ire.
But it pains me to see women asking for equal rights; I consider them the higher of the species. If anybody should canvass for equality it should be us men. But the truth is we don’t merit it. That’s right. We don’t; we are far less developed. Women are incoherent because they are complex, men, for being incorrigibly simple. Without their presence life wouldn’t just be boring, it would be suicidal. It would cease to be. They are not the spice that flavours our dish, they are the fire that may bring on the heat but they also bring all the elements together and create a new flavourful life…
As for us blokes, here is a list of random things we said. Everything!
You may consider that last one my fine print.
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…?
December 20, 2010 · Posted in
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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.
So we start with one of my favourite chains in the country: Shiro’s. I can’t think of many places in India that (a) get ambience and (b) food right, (c) consistently. Shiro’s is a great example of a homegrown chain (that’s right, the same guys may bring you Hard Rock but thus is entirely their baby) that has managed to break into the nightlife scene in three cities successfully.
Here are my reasons for liking each of them.
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.
2.Shiro’s Bangalore: This one took our Asian food experience a good couple of notches higher. The chefs manning the grills were nothing less than showman, tossing and juggling even as they served up the “Best Fried Rice in the Country”. Even today, one of the few times I exercise my powers of knowing the manager is to wrangle a space at the grill bar to be able to enjoy the sights, smells and sounds. This one has the highest ceiling but it also has the most gifted of outdoor spaces. Tough call then where to sit.
3.Shiro’s Delhi: Call me a sceptic (or a Delhiite) but I think it is a tad dearer than the other two. But the food quality is right up there. The indoor space may not seem all that spacious at first but the way the restaurant converts into a club is something to be seen. Quite an amazing transformation as the walls part to expose the DJ console and a visual “globe” display. Entry is controlled (Delhi after all) and rightly so. Place exudes charm and class for the city’s hot crowd. Speaking of hot, try the Mehtani chicke (I hope I have the spelling correct) at your own peril
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I love all three and going by the trend, the owners are creating more focus on the food than the party. For me this is perhaps the best plan if there ever was. The party set migrates every six months. Foodie come back. Like I do.
So what would I like to see them do? Maybe launch a loyalty card given that now they have a veritable chain of repute and standing (and so many other outlets in their kitty). Not that a visit is rewarding in itself, but loyalty rewarded is future loyalty earned.
Philosophy of marketing aside, as long as they keep churning out the good food and music, they will never run short of people queuing up at the entrance.
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.
The new menu begins with something reminiscent of what Chef Saha revels in; molecular play – A mango spherification. An amusing start. Excites, intrigues and yet doesn’t anywhere near satiate.
Seafood Rings and Chicken Kiev follow next. It may appear a tad bland to some but still packs a wholesome bite. Think of it as the most casual course in an otherwise engineered fine-dining menu.
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.
Green Pea Soup with Green-Pea Gazpacho and Beetroot Foam: Quirky mix of hot and cold of same Flavours. I don’t quite have a reaction as elated as in previous courses to it. Leaves me wondering. I am not a fan for repeats in a menu (2 gazpachos one after another, same flavours served at two temperatures simultaneously) and hence am left feeling a bit lacking here.
Lemon Foam Prawn and Veggie Fettucini: Post that, we are back on track and this is a good refreshing lil’ number. I must mention I feel well fed by now. But I sense I a not exactly close to the end.
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.
Smoked Duck with Poached Pear in Wine: Lovely dish. Worth the build up and the wait. Hearty and wholesome and yet stylish. Well executed. The fact that both me and my friend lapped it up and were mopping the plate with bread should stand out as an obvious sign that the dish went down rather well.
Spanish Vanilla Flan With Churros and Spicy Chocolate. Looks like the start of a whole new level of edible table decoration.
On the whole, the menu is satisfying and showcases the talents of Chef Saha and his team as also the philosophy behind this outlet well. And it always helps that the man in front is the very charming Vishal Nagpal who will anyways make any dish taste slurpa-licious.
Ok so I travel a lot. If I were to use a metaphor I would say that I travel in the manner that a pig who wakes up one day to find angel wings grown out of his back. And so, with little else to enlighten his day he gets out there and flaps away and soon enough, he is away.
This should not be a confusing metaphor as it is simple to see why a pig with wings would know no ends to his joy if he could fly and consequently, he would prefer to be air-borne extensively.
Sure a flying pig would throw another old idiom out of the window but at least we will have ‘a cold day in July to contend with’. As for the pig’s other endowment, well it’s something I am not allowed to discuss here.
But I do not wish a direct comparison to a pig, not at least without the pig’s consent. So I could say “As travelled as lost baggage which was loaded from Delhi for a flight bound to Japan but ended up in France and then it couldn’t be directly routed to its original destination because CDG was on strike.
And hence it was rerouted via Milan where it was first sent from Paris by train and then from there it had to fly on a code-share flight with two changes and one layover en route,” but then that wouldn’t be a metaphor, it would be a simile. It would also be a very stupid simile.
But coming back to the topic, there are things that happen on planes that could take your breath out and away. No, I am not referring to the thin atmospheric pressure at 40,000 feet and I am definitely not in to membership to the Mile High Club. I am talking about plane etiquettes, and the lack of which is best termed as Airplane Antics.
I am providing my explanations but needless to add, they are too Magan-esque, if that is a word. However, if someone can give me solid reasoning for all of these, or any of these, I will die a less confused man, or woman, or both.
The Great Cabin Bag Rush: Since the 18th century Gold Rush, little of such widespread interest and intrigue has happened to keep people’s competitive spirit on the front-row edge. In fact, if Clint Eastwood were any younger, he would possibly do a great Spaghetti Western on the whole jig; or should that be Sambar Western?
It is a time-centric sport, jump up too early and you will be hushed back to your confinement by the evil attendants who may then even belt you up (and no I ain’t talking leather, mister), too late and you will be caught in the Great Beijing Traffic Jam: So it’s actually much like a 100m dash.
The idea is to anticipate the seatbelt sign going off and before the first decibel is emitted from that ‘ping’ alarm the pilot’s sound, you should already have opened the overhead lockers, grabbed your bag and made it to the door.
Extra points if you can displace other stuff and a bonus if the same lands on another’s head. Such excitement, such thrill, such effort and such a sense of accomplishment…and all for the mere price of an economy ticket. Whoever coined the term ‘cheap thrills’ was definitely a frequent flyer.
Seat belt Rebel: I think people who do not wear seat belts are effectively contributing to eradicating disguised unemployment. I mean we all know how little-all there is to do for air service staff. (I know you can’t say hostess anymore but I am clueless as to what is the current politically correct reference.)
So people who do not wear a seat belt (or keep their seats reclined, tables unfastened, screens un-stowed, etc.) are just creating a sense of purpose for these otherwise wasting youngsters who now have the lovely occupying task of ensuring that people who couldn’t comprehend the instructions barked in nine languages don’t go flying like projectile should anything indicative come to pass.
I think removing a seat belt when the seat-belt sign is on is a sort of a high, the kind one gets from flouting the law, when no one’s looking. And nobody should ever give up a chance to sneak one past the legal system, after all, that’s what rules are for right?
But all this James Dean cult-like following escapes me. I had sooner live to tell and cling on to belt and bucket seat till they have to peel me off it and eject me from the craft. Ok, not that bad, but I love exaggeration for effect.
In the meantime, I can’t wait to see a plane come to an abrupt halt and have someone do a horizontal bungee jump, shoot out of his economy seat and be “upgraded” to business, first, or even cockpit, (unwillingly and involuntarily).
The Great Landing Ovation: We are a hardened lot. Little moves us to emotion nowadays. I have seen people walk past a carnage with the same coolness as when they shop for cucumbers. (See, that’s a hidden cross-referenced simile.)
In fact, the only act of trust we now give in to is to hand over our lives into the hands of a person (or two) we have never seen before, except when they overtook us during security check and to let them hurl our bodies trans-continentally at breakneck speeds in a craft that has pretty much worked on the same principle since it was invented almost a 100 years ago.
Now that is more trust than I have in God, or myself. Hence it is perfectly understandable that when a plane hits the tarmac and doesn’t break into an acrobatic spree of somersaults, it is reason enough to clap, sing, revel, praise prophet and pilot, and perhaps even kiss the stewardesses! People would easily give a standing ovation but the darned seat belt sign suggests otherwise.
Mobile phone asphyxiation: Asking a person to switch off his mobile phone is the new social equivalent of public euthanasia; you would sooner switch off the person’s pacemaker, dialysis bag, or life support systems.
Because when you make them switch of their mobiles, it would appear that you kill them not just clinically, but also socially, financially and most of all, excruciatingly.
Culturally, they are anyways dead. And as the plane comes in for a landing people reach out for their phones as if they were oxygen masks being deployed for emergency.
In India people like to check whether their driver has arrived with such a sense of urgency it would seem that their driver was going to bus the plane from the runway to the docking gate. In fact, in my frequent travels I had started imagining that that annoying tune which all Nokia phones play when you switch them on was actually on every aerial company’s soundtrack.
Someone recently spoke of allowing phone usage in-flight. Then someone suggested having a phone zone on the planes to alienate the noise. Dammit! To have a phone zone on a plane would be like having a smoking zone in a restaurant; which, as a good friend quipped, is the equivalent of having a peeing section in a swimming pool!
The Door Sprint: This last one is like a di-athlon. You grab bags and then make a rush for the door as if it were the last iPhone on sale on the planet. Mind you, you may all end up on the same bus to the terminal but the sense of achievement in being the first out off the plane is unparalleled.
To be able to breathe three cubic cm of more local/foreign air than the blokes behind who are still surviving in regenerated plane atmosphere, now that is a privilege that not even Amex Platinum can match. It is, as a rival company would put it, priceless.
So well, that was rather useless rant at airport antics. Yes, it was written while waiting for a flight, in-flight and post flight. Hence the edgy crisp feel. Or maybe it was the aircon. Either ways, I await your reverts.
In fact, on that almost related but cheerier note: Do keep writing in fellas. You are all the strength that will be my deliverance. And maybe, with some luck, they won’t send me back.
But meanwhile, the question for the day remains, how does one tell when the smelly type of cheeses go bad? Hmmm, deep..
This isn’t an article about batteries or charging points so tech geeks, put away that box of tissues and hand lotion. This is about negation. About how negative it is. And how something needs to be done about it.
Now don’t waste a second wondering why that would be a bugging thing in the first place. It was you society dearest that got the ball rolling on this issue. By shunning the very qualifier that existed for certain attributes and qualities in people and non-people, we were left with little but rather vague sounding terms and arm gests that took hours to describe what the previous terms accomplished in a matter of seconds.
Let me explain. The ambiguities of trying to describe a bald man as follicly challenged without using any allusion to the word hair or something that refers to it could quite understandably leave you gasping for words. Similar etiquette and social respect had to be accorded to other people. The result is that nobody can be defective or crazy anymore, they are all special. But how else do you effectively and quickly refer to a fat man sitting across the room without the word tub or lard-bucket. And what self-respecting homo-basher wouldn’t want to call the next limp-wristed queen exactly that!?
If you ask me – even though you aren’t, consider this rhetoric then – there is a certain sense of pride to be had from possessing such marks of obvious identification. Bald, bespectacled and with pierced ears works fine for me, even if so I would so like to suffix Adonis and God-like to that. I don’t need someone getting iffy because they called me bald. In case others hadn’t noticed, I am.
But that isn’t the issue. I am saying it’s OK. I am agreeing, for a change. Be politically correct, all you fucktards! In fact I will join you and add to the pool of already increasing confusions with something that I am surprised still hasn’t rocked the world of literature and language. But then, my contributions couldn’t afford to be any lesser.
I am talking about words that denote the negative: impossible, undoable, undone, unimpressive…you know the road – all of them. In the current context I think they are too negative. They should be toned down a shade to accommodate for some respite. Imagine the impression left on a young impressionable kid who is told that something is impossible. It almost blocks his imagination from ever walking down that road again in the near or even distant future. You’d sooner boot him in the cerebrum or drop him on his head and produce a lesser drastic growth retardation.
And here is my solution.I propose that we replace or prefix, as sounds sensible, the letters ‘um-‘ to connote the negative but with some leeway for free thinking.
So something umpossible would imply a really tough or a hard-to-believe thing, a thing that nobody has achieved or managed to prove till date, or even come close to it, till, one day, God, just to prove that he does exist and doesn’t really need toilet breaks except for that he enjoys the smell of pine products they use in the bathroom, sends us a sign in some form or another – the fastest 100m dash, the greatest medal-winning Olympian, the man who survives without eating – just so to prove that he does what love claims to allegedly do (make the world go round that is) and thereby, by virtue of one eventful showing, shifting the task in question out of the realm of the impossible and into the possible.
So, to keep from being proven wrong in the future by some super form of being, it might be a good idea to call something, simply, umpossible. That would mean it can’t be done so far but hey, who knows!
By that logic things could now be umsightly, umnerving, umcoherent, um-everything basically. Stating or implying the pessimistic and the sceptic but not without some reserve for a reason to root for the home team.
And this is not a tiny movement on a blog. Think of the bigger implications. No more malfunction lawsuits as six sigma becomes a thing of the past. Umtrained would automatically be more qualified to fly than an untrained pilot, thereby taking the numbers of Potential Pilots through the sky, pun intended, thereby leading to reduction of their rather overblown salaries, eventually leading to a reduction in ticket prices. If the plane lands safely somehow, you arrive richer by wealth and preserved in health.
But the biggest implication would be religious. Wait for this, Umbelieveable, in my opinion, could be the one word that unites Catholics and Protestants over the whole saga, right from Annunciation and down to Immaculate Conception and Resurrection.
Let all that sink in. Umconvinced still. Well it is a step up from unconvinced so I will take it as a compliment. Try using it and let me know the results. This is an honest effort at redefining language. I am not trying to be a smart-ass here. Yep, yet another first. Meanwhile, um outta here!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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. 
The Great Cabin Bag Rush: Since the 18th century Gold Rush, little of such widespread interest and intrigue has happened to keep people’s competitive spirit on the front-row edge. In fact, if Clint Eastwood were any younger, he would possibly do a great Spaghetti Western on the whole jig; or should that be Sambar Western?
Mobile phone asphyxiation: Asking a person to switch off his mobile phone is the new social equivalent of public euthanasia; you would sooner switch off the person’s pacemaker, dialysis bag, or life support systems.
If you ask me – even though you aren’t, consider this rhetoric then – there is a certain sense of pride to be had from possessing such marks of obvious identification. Bald, bespectacled and with pierced ears works fine for me, even if so I would so like to suffix Adonis and God-like to that. I don’t need someone getting iffy because they called me bald. In case others hadn’t noticed, I am.
And this is not a tiny movement on a blog. Think of the bigger implications. No more malfunction lawsuits as six sigma becomes a thing of the past. Umtrained would automatically be more qualified to fly than an untrained pilot, thereby taking the numbers of Potential Pilots through the sky, pun intended, thereby leading to reduction of their rather overblown salaries, eventually leading to a reduction in ticket prices. If the plane lands safely somehow, you arrive richer by wealth and preserved in health.
