Going Green against all odds !!!!

Cricketing whites a mobile billboard…

Being a passionate cricket fan of the good old version and not the IPL wham bam types, I sat down to watch the Irani Trophy match between Rest of India and Delhi live on TV (not before inviting the wrath and cold looks from the missus) over the weekend.

Watching our cricketers in the so called ‘whites’ during even a domestic tournament like Irani Trophy stumped me. A close look at one of them, showed the who’s who of the corporate world strategically embossed, painted, stitched all over the body, except you know where. There were days when the likes of Gavaskars, Amarnaths and Kapil Devs would walk in for a tournament as trivial as the Buchi Babu Trophy in pristine whites and mind you, when they were representing only their employers and not even the country.

Cricket is probably the only sport that has inspired some high quality poetry & prose over the years and to think that people like Sir Neville Cardus wrote on Cricket and Classical Music is itself a testimony to the grace and charm associated with the game, the players, the attire and the rules of the game.

Moving on from Cricket to Boxing. We are masters at deifying sportsperson in India, the ‘Ring to the Ramp’ was the mantra last week for our bronze medallist boxer, Vijender Singh who was seen walking the ramp and strutting his stuff to the tunes of Singh is King and later went on to address the media and talk about everything but boxing. Im sure this is the last we have heard of this guy. It’s not his fault, it has been our undoing. When such a heady mix of celebrity status is thrust on a young mind and shoulders it’s more difficult to stay balanced than a rain of left hooks, counter punches and jabs…

A sibling walk makes headlines....

Events as trivial as a noon walk by siblings, in this case a brother and sister makes headlines.

It was a day, when Indian journalism showed signs of the paparazzi culture of the west. The siblings were of course from the first family of Indian politics, but does that warrant an intrusion into the privacy and cover a luxury (in our case a routine) of a walk down Lodhi Road.

Captions like ‘Gandhis out for a walk’ and ‘A Family that walks together stays together’ were immediately flashed across different Medias. The interpretations / speculations from the visuals shot from more than a 100M away gave enough fodder for the newsmongers for a couple of days. Rahul looked disturbed was one version and the other said Priyanka was seen advising Rahul on important issues. For all you know they must have just discussed a book or a movie in open air.

But stuffs like ‘Now playing… Rahul and Priyanka out for a Walk’ was quiet disturbing…The spontaneity with which the media covered the walk was as though it was an arranged press conference. The very fact that a decision between 2 siblings to go for a walk reached the eyes and ears of the media calls for a serious breach of security.

Lehman to Layman

It was blood bath on the world financial markets, the bear ran amuck on some of the big names in the financial world, Merril Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG ...(and I just hope its not so on and so worth)…these were reputed names that spelt trust, integrity and long-term stability, and above all these were the very institutions until not so long ago were doling out dream jobs to the B School grads, offering them pay-packets in which the young grads counted the zeroes as I counted stars. The week that went by has seen one of them going bust, one on the verge of going bust and one went on sale, call it what ever u want euphemistically Mergers, Acquisitions, Consolidation, Correction…it all just boils down to in ‘layman’s’ terms…. a major screw up.
The debates on print and visual media were centred on collapse of these big names, some blame it on personal greed of a handful, some on mismanagement, and some simply accuse the American way of handling their economy as the reason for the biggest financial crisis in recent times.
Im neither a financially savvy economist nor do I have stakes in those big names but for a layman like me Lehman going bust is absolutely incomprehensible. Im sure some of my financially astute readers might help me understand this.
Only a couple of weeks ago an insurance / investment agent was trying to sell me a product and in the process went on to assure me that the product was backed by one of the biggest names in Insurance and I was nodding approvingly, when I heard AIG, little did I know then that exactly a fortnight later even 89 Billion USD would not be enough to bail them out …
I guess its time to dust those good old State Cooperative Bank passbooks and renew our post office savings accounts. For those familiar with the TNSC Bank (Tamil Nadu State Cooperative)... jog your memory down to their advert / logo …It used to show a tiny sparrow feeding its lil ones, symbol of some modest aspirations and integrity, we have come a long way since then… the tiny sparrows have been upstaged by the Vultures and Eagles of greed…

A Russo-Chettinad cuisine...

What else would you name the collaboration that went into the making of an Aachi-Kozhi-Stroganoff …this is one of the dishes I had at a small joint overlooking the Elliot’s Beach in Besant Nagar during my last visit to Chennai.
One can trace the origins of Stroganoff to the Stroganov family of Russia supposedly the pioneers of this dish, a Russian dish of sautéed pieces of beef served with sour cream…now comes the most interesting twist…a chettinadan maternal twist… prefix Stroganoff with Aachi, (the Chettinadan mother) and hit the desi psyche hard with the motherly/home cooked food funda …and add generous helpings of spice to turn the sour cream in sautéed beef, in our case chicken strips, to a spicy one …and u have a Aachi Kozhi(Chicken)Stroganoff. A truly multinational dish atleast as far as the name goes…and ironically this sounds similar to the other famous Russian import the AK 47 just that, in this case it is AK (Aachi Kozhi) Stroganoff…I’m not pulling a fast one on u guys … u can check out a pic of the menu shot with my phone a la paparazzi style. Apologies for the poor clarity…

Onam 2008

This weekend was the Onam weekend. In fact I got the hang of Onam only after I came to the Middle East (cos there are more malayalees here than back home in Kerala). We were invited to 2 Onam dinners and the missus cooked one of her own on Friday afternoon.

The Onam sadhya (the feast for the rich and the poor alike) basically is a vegan’s delight, all the lans, the yals, the sherries will make an annual appearance on this day. No clue yet…. the native Malayalam speaker must have figured it out by now…the kallans, ollans , aviyals, poriyals, and the errisherries and pullisherries make their annual appearance.

Well I’ll try & get u the nearest English translation for the non-Malayalee readers of mine.

Errisherrie = Well done mashed yellow pumpkin in thick coconut sauce with a dab of mustard seeds.
Pullisherrie = diluted sour yoghurt discoloured with a lil turmeric and large pieces of white pumpkin / cucumber.
Ollan: - white pumpkin and black eyed bean in white coconut sauce.
Kallan: - Yellow pumpkin curry with a consistency lil more than the ollan
Aviyal: - a general cocktail of all left over veggies which u kind of hated when u were young, but the ones which ur friendly neighbourhood doc advises u to have after 35 …again with some grated coconut.
Poriyal: no cocktail of veggies this time just cabbage or beans with some grated coconut served dry.
Payasam : Vermicilli Milk pudding.

Oh Oh … this grated coconut and the malayalees…

All this with some accompaniments of the likes of the Injee pulli (Sourrrrr ginger), Upperry (banana fries, the Kerala equivalent of French fries) and some Sharkaraverrattti …(Sweetened & hardened banana pieces) ..that I believe was the king of tongue twisters… try saying it once again and I bet ur tongue would be twisted for life.

All this served with some nice Palaghatan Matta (Locally Genetically modified rice which is sold at a premium in the Middle East) on a banana leaf which you end up buying from a Nepali vendor (what an irony, a Malayalee having to negotiate for banana leaves with a Nepali) for a fortune. I guess this is what the HR babes & blokes in this part of the world call experience of working in a multi cultural environment.

However the essence & the joy of Onam lies in cooking up all this at home, by the lady of the house ably supported by man who ends up chopping / sautéing / tasting in-between the 'smallings' (a gud ol keralite slang for the act of drinking a measure which is a lil more than a peg). The men donning a mundu, (though the hemlines of the mundu keep rising depending on the number of 'smalls' one has had) and colourful silk shirts/jubbas (south Indian equivalent of a kurta) and the women in a ‘set’… a half white sari & blouse with zari work on the pallu.

The rich and the poor, the IT and the non IT folks... celebrate Onam with the same fervour.

I have managed to upload a couple of pics of Onam in Doha. The Onam sadhya spread, one of the family and finally one of a friend who managed to pose for a photograph (all rights reserved) to represent a global image of a perfect Malayalee on an Onam eve with a ‘small’ in hand.

(Need to inform people at Microsoft to include Onam in the spell check list of MS Word cos it always returns Oman for Onam).

Man playing God yet again….but will this be the last time…

At least after the first day of the so called earth shattering experiment you are still around to read this blog, guess it wasn’t literally earth shattering after all. Revisiting the big bang and the search for the 'God particle' is on…As I write this, protons are zipping around happily inside a collider tunnel oblivious to the fact that mankind is actually dreading at the prospect of one of them misbehaving.
Well for lesser mortals like me it’s just another experiment. The only coincidence was that a tremor of 6.2 hit Bandar Abbas, Iran. I’m sure a statement would soon be released by the President of Iran, that the quake was a result of the experiment and sabotage by the western powers.
Cloning was the other experiment where man played God, luckily that so far has been limited to Dolly the sheep. Just hope cloned Pamela Andersons don’t appear overnight… it will be one ‘TWO’ many.
Personally I’m a strong proponent of DON’T MESS WITH NATURE…that’s the reason why I don’t even dye/color my strands of grey even after repeated threats from the missus.

36 – 28 – 32

These are no vital statistics of a super model... no way …these were the vital statistics of the Middle East, a lovely lady alluring u to the land of yellow and black gold, a land of dreams, promising a great future ahead…For all my confused readers these are just the key figures one ends up following during ones life in the Middle East. Wondering what they are???? Here you go.

On the 6th of September 1996 …

36 Rupees made a $
28 $ cld buy you a barrel of Oil
32 Dirhams was the price of a gram of gold.

A dozen years back on the 6th of September 1996 the fateful day on which I set foot on the sands of Arabia thinking that the greener pastures lay here… how dumb of me, greener pastures in a desert !!! I was probably looking for an oasis. It was exactly the same time the pastures in India began to look fertile… I kinda missed it by about six months…

Like ooll other malayalees I simbbly & blindddly folloooowed the Gulf dream.A dream that empowered you to shift from a 4 Figure salary to a 5 Figure salary overnight...by sheer virtue of the exchange rates and nothing more...

For a person whose only idea of a skyscraper was the 14 Storey LIC building on Mount Road in Madras, here I was, all awed at the 32 storey World Trade Centre building in Dubai. Today its dwarfed amongst its newer and much taller cousins like the Emirates Towers, Dusit and the likes and the relatively new and still growing Burj Dubai already at 688 M.

Just as the buildings grew taller and the cityscapes saw a sea of change propelled by the petro dollar, so has the vital statistics of the alluring lady of the Middle East been disfigured ...and it reads something like this today …. 45 – 106 –99… (Use the same correlation as above). How ugly and unattractive the Middle East has become 12 years on…

A tribute to someone who walked with me all these years…

This week saw the passing away of an icon whose family name is a household name in India. Mr.Thomas Bata, the Czech shoe mogul died on the 1st of September at the age of 93 … (never knew Bata was of Czech origin until today) and this blog is a tribute to him. Bata… those four letters was a brand, a generic and above all the only footwear the people of my generation and above knew and wore. The bright red neon with that curvy font that has never changed over the years is a sign board that does not slip your eye which ever city you are in.
It was a ritual, days before schools reopened to visit a Bata store back home, and buy a pair of normal black shoes which would have lasted longer had not your feet grown further and u didn’t try to emulate a Maradona playing football, with a ball ¼th the size of a football. In spite of all this, it would still last a couple of monsoons before it would go under the neighbourhood cobbler’s knife and needle to keep them running and kicking for a few more months. Their price tags always ended in a...99 or a dot 95 paisa from which evolved the infamous ‘Bata rate’ for anything that had price tag that ended with 99 or a 95 Paisa.
Bubblegummers, North Star, Power, Marie Claire were some of their labels, Marie Claire was the one that drew the women to a Bata shop which until then for them was a shoe shop (not a footwear retailing outlet as it is called today) that sold boring black boys shoes. North Star was the Reebok or the Nike of those days and Power was for the middle class morning walker. These were before the entry of the big names in footwear retailing and also before the arrival of Nikes, Reeboks and the likes… From an ordinary black shoe to a Nike + Ipod Sports kit…owe it to the pioneering efforts of this family which started taking care of your feet since 1894…

Class of ’88 Rendez Vous…

Its almost a week since this event took place, I am miles away since then, but the day remains fresh and keeps coming to my mind as Wordsworth describes the Daffodils ''….In vacant or in pensive mood they flash upon the inward eye…''.The memories of that day continue to flash upon the inward eye.

A group of 26 of us class mates / bench mates for 10 Years at Christ Church Anglo Indian School met up after 2 decades…for the first reunion of the Class of 88 ….it’s a special feeling to meet up with friends with whom you began your scholastic pursuit, Friends with whom you literally learnt the A, B, C’s of life’s initial years. The friends who were with you during those most fragile but moulding years in a life span, Childhood and Adolescence.

So, we were all assembled at the picturesque Sea Crest at the MGM resort on ECR by 11.30 AM, with almost every one having You-have-changed-a-lot conversations. Some grey, some looked like they had worked long hours to hide their silver strands, Some receding hairline, some with no hairlines, The girls were all gracefully ageing women with different surnames from what we knew, the childhood giggles and loud laughs were replaced with very dignified smiles and not so noisy chuckles… wasn’t those close-up ad types though.

Each one had to talk about his / her crush in school though nothing worth mentioning came out of this much awaited session and after which we went on to share what we did since we last met, our family, kids etc etc…

We had a round of Dumb Charades in which we cracked some of the not so dumb movie names which we would have dreaded to even utter when we were in school, like Basic Instinct and Avaluday Ravugal…Faheem kinda did his best at being dumb but all of us were dumber that we cldnt crack it, or was it the other way round, we were less dumb than him and hence cldnt crack it.

Finally we helped ourselves to the memorabilia of the day, a nice mug with all our names printed on it, and on returning to Doha I reverently unpacked it and placed it in the front room.

A special mention should go in here to the people who made it possible, Chocks, Venket, Faheem, Pamela, Glady and thanks to all those who made it to the event.