Yellow and Green

I remember summer vacations in  my maternal grandparents' home at Sripuram, in the Madras of yore.  Early mornings were quiet, interrupted by bird calls at the mango tree and around the coconut palms. The women in the house bustled around, cooking the first full course  meal of the day. By nine am we all sat down to a splendid repast, that even the gods had partaken of. There was abundant hot rice, a little paruppu( thick cooked dal) and ghee,  followed by sambaar, rasam and two kinds of vegetables.   This would be enhanced by pickles and appalams(papads) and  followed by curd  . Some mornings we would have buttermilk and  vadaams(fryums) and fresh  thayir pachdis, (vegetables grated or ground into curd) but invariably there would be a dry vegetable; potatoes or finely chopped beans garnished with coconut. However,  greens were mandatory consumption in the daily routine.

Somedays it was ara-keerai or spinach leaves cooked alone into a thoran, or with  moong and arhar lentils. Other days it could be amaranth, red or green. There was also the paruppu-keerai that is called kulfa in North India that paati made, often with moong dal. One of us would be handed a small bowl of steamed kulfa and moong that we quickly ground on the stone-grinder in the backyard, while she tempered a hot oil garnish of  whole red chilly, mustard seeds , urad and asafoetida. The kulfa had a gooey texture and the raw leaves had a slight sour taste, " Remember to eat a portion of greens everyday," Paati would instruct us, while we hurried in and out of the kitchen carrying out the odd chore.

 This was an instruction that we took seriously, since she was a culinary expert extraordinary. It is over fourteen years since she died and well over twenty-five since she dispensed with daily cooking, but  I can never pass a line-up of greens without  stopping to gaze at the fresh green leaves tied into compact bundles. I also end up buying them, experimenting with  varieties like arugula and bok-choy which were outside of Paati's repertoire.

 Last week at the local friday bazaar I stopped in front of a large pile of greens and found kulfa, which comes in quietly and leaves with out much fanfare and bought some. I tried to recreate the version my grandmother used to make, and also experimented with a new tamarind version, Both versions were consumed by the family with varying degrees of acceptance.  In the middle of my reminiscence about the  smells and flavours emanating from my grandmother's kitchen, my next door neighbor telephoned. She turns out great food and in the early years she made her own ketchup and jams, bottles and bottles of them, to say nothing of endless pickles, kanji and cake.

She had called however to discuss kulfa, which she too had picked up from the local market. She confided that this was something her mother used to  make with bengal gram dal all through her childhood and she had  wanted to run the idea by me before recreating it after many years. Her mother had died a few years ago, and  she  too was cooking up a storm of memories. We have shared the odd culinary experience and encouraged each other through the odd  cooking experiment for over a decade now. I egged her on to make the chana dal  kulfa version and she promised to bring me some later in the day, when she was done.

The moong dal version  is very light with the coconut and toasted black gram garnish adding  to the subtle  summer-is-in-the-air flavour. It would please  Shikha Sharma both  for freshness and lightness of taste while it would be therapeutic for all those with weak stomachs. The tamarind version is a great pick-me-up and goes rather well with both rice and dosas. It can be easily  modified into  kulfa sambaar if pigeon pea lentils (arhar dal)  and whole little onions were added to it.  Chopped kulfa leaves and stems  added  to adais(thick lentil dosas) make them delectable.  I tried out  the chana-kulfa that Rita brought me with both rice and chapppatis. This is a dish, worthy of a permanent  seat at any wedding repast. It is rich, creamy and aromatic and could even double up as a  winter broth.

Holy Intoxication

Holi arrived in  late March  in the middle of the week  and was almost overlooked by the pleasant  weather which showed little signs of  allowing the hot season to take over. Mornings remain cool and nippy even a week after and late night weather continues to remains pleasant.  The change in climatic conditions in the last few years has resulted in everyone relying entirely on the moon based Indian calendar  to quickly tabulate the specific day for revelry. Oddly, as we grow older, festivals usher in nuances that we never attributed to them  at a callow age. This year, a friend's father who  had been admitted to the ICU, passed away on  the morning of Holi. This was a festival he loved  and he had lived a glorious life, both private and public and was dearly loved, valued, revered and mourned. We  went to pay our respects, driving through the still sleepy streets of  New Delhi in the direction of the ridge.

There wasn't much traffic and we paused at the  check posts put in place by the Delhi Police who peered alertly  into car windows which slowed down,  checking for possible  criminals.  This is a drill we are familiar with and in recent times, apologies  printed on the yellow barriers assuage  the less patient among us by explaining that although these metal barriers slow us down they are for our  general safety.
 In the week preceding Diwali, we had been flagged down by the  cops while returning home late in the night. One cop on duty  asked  for the driver's window to be lowered down. The spouse did the needful and the cop  put in his head, moving his face so close to the spouse's mouth, that all of us constrainedly speculated  as to whether the cop had designs upon him. Fortunately, that was not the case. Sniffing pointedly, the cop drew back his head from the car window and  waved us away. Relieved, the spouse exclaimed that he had aced the breathalyzer test and  been certified  as NDUI ( not driving under intoxication)

So this time when the cops flagged down the car in front of us, smiling warmly at us as we waited in the wings, we thought we knew what was in store. However, we had  underestimated the improvisational  skills that our cops multi-task with, in lieu of material resources.
 This cop  thrust his cupped left palm  in front of the mouth of the man in the driving seat and asked him to breathe into it. The man, perhaps another veteran, complied. The cop withdrew his hand, now  a portable  fist, brought it towards his nose and  inhaled deeply of the trapped air.  The breathalyzer check had been completed, the driver was NDUI and therefore dismissed. Grinning at us, who  were witness to  this first sighting, he proceeded to wave us away cheerily without subjecting us to this novel technique of assessment. Possibly our incredulous expression confirmed to him that we were definitively  NDUI !

Island Worship?

At Ross Island,  we wandered past derelict and abandoned rooms and buildings, whose brickwork was now superimposed by large tree roots and stems  that had now  taken over. It was awe-inspiring, especially because  the wind roared and the sea splashed all around the tiny island, and every space that men had tried to claim for themselves seemed to have been taken back, bit by bit, but firmly by nature. There were peacocks and deer on the island whom we met in the course of our rambling walk all over the island. There were beautiful views of the sea from various vantage points, old japanese bunkers, a lily overgrown pond and a cemetery.

 We came upon the entrance to an old Presbytarian church whose plinths had been brought in from Europe to provide a sturdy exterior.The church was now  in disuse and testimonial to an older time when men who had travelled afar from home needed sustenance from a faith that they brought along  to the Indian shores. So many highlanders must have felt thankful for the prayer and strength this building had once provided. Strength that had perhaps provided them with hazy outlines of codes and governance. This particular   presbyterain chapel is  in ruins and  has been around for a long enough time.....but in mainland Port Blair there are other churches, and temples, where worship and prayer are a daily occurrence.


In the heart of Aberdeen Market, back on the mainland  an intriguing sign announces the   Police  Gurudwara.  Next to it is another sign saying Police   Temple.  Ram Biswas whose father is from Bengal and whose mother is from Andaman tells us that there is a Masjid too  and drives us  to another lane parallel to the market road, where we get to view three well maintained structures, a gurudwara, a temple and a mosque, amicably situated next to each other. The gurudwara and the mosque are shining white while the upper structure of the temple is a  brightly painted mosaic of colours.  Has  co-existence  been given concrete impetus by the  State  Police? Possibly a good thing to do, in the peacetime in  quiet and tranquil Andaman since faith continues to move boulders by inches  despite all of Marx's announcements to the contrary.

Island Notes

MONDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2012

The Andaman Islands provide breathtaking sea-views, and are home to fascinating flora and
fauna.

Coconuts and palms abound. Along beaches where there are residual mangroves, enormous tree
trunks taper triangularly to great heights. The picture above is of one such tree which grows on
Mundapahad beach.There are several trees on Mundapahad and all along the drive to Chiditop
which have the outline of stretched out icsoceles triangles. This is some evolution skill that the
trees seem to have carried forward from their mangrove pasts. Even the triangulating trunks
communicate a sense of swirling woods.
The picture below is of giant tree long uprooted by a storm that lies on the Mundapahad beach.

There are fascinating creatures on sea and on land . We stayed at a resort called Megapode
Nest. "Megapode" apparently means large feet in greek and is a fowl sized bird that inhabits the
Nicobar islands. Allowing its egg to incubate in the heat of rotting vegetation and earth , the adult
megapode lets the young chick fend for itself from the moment of birth. The craftsmen at Chatam
Mill had fashioned wooden models of the megapode and its chick, which was the only three
dimensional view that was afforded at Port Blair.

Andaman's chosen animal is the Dugong , otherwise known as sea cow. This is a large aquatic
mammal that is apparently herbivorous. Its bulk and eating habits probably contribute to its popular
name.
We also saw a specimen of the coconut crab at the aquarium, the size of a large crouching cat.
Apparently,the coconut crab, the largest among crabs, lives on land and climbs coconut trees to
extricate the fruit, rip apart the fibrous shell, make a hole to drink coconut water and eat the flesh.
It is also called the robber crab and is among the lesser known of the crab species.

3 comments:
Susan Visvanathan December 31, 2012 at 4:31 AM
Great pictures, Ratna, glad the colours were so amazing, given the drabness of Delhi fog, when
sun gives us a sudden halo of surreal light
Reply
srivatsa December 31, 2012 at 5:14 AM
Beautiful!
Reply
Ritu January 1, 2013 at 3:53 AM
Reallylovely pictures and veryinteresting trivia. :

Burmeen Pakoras

What do vegetarians do when they visit places where  people  draw a great deal  of their sustenance from the sea? This is not really much of a dilemma when there is an abundance of vegetables and fruit, even though sea food is referred to rather appropriately, as fruit from the sea. Goa allowed us to experiment with abundant  fresh pineapple, breadfruit and delicious perada , a hardened version of guava jelly cut into barfi like pieces.

At Port Blair, we discovered Burmeen pakodas. The name seemed intriguing  and as it was listed under vegetarian snacks, we ordered a plate at the Megapode Nest while we  nursed chilled beers and stared into the turquoise and teal  blue waters. Burmeen pakoras turned out to be julien cut vegetables such as carrot, potato and cauliflower, which were dipped in chickpea batter and deep fried with a smatering of fennel seed or saunf for that distinctive flavour. It  established a  connect with the geography and the history,  because Burma itself is not very far away from Port Blair, hence Burmeen pakoras,  must have evolved from  older and  linked food cultures that wafted along  the coasts.?

There is something about  salt  water and air that sets up a yearning for pakoras, so the following day after a long bout in the water, while we idled at North Bay island and waited for our boat to come back for us, we were struck by pakora-lust yet again. We wandered into a small  enclosure with several stalls selling odds and ends  and  stopped to order tea at a make shift  tea stall. It was late afternoon, so seeing a huge mound of still warm pakodas, we  ordered some. Jasmine, who wo-manned   the stall  plied us with a  newspaper cone full and plenty of  hot sweet tea to wash down the pakoras with.
Soaking up the warm tropical December sun, our bellies full of pakoras and tea, we chatted with her. She was from Kerala and  kept a stall at North Bay during the tourist season. Her husband worked  on North Bay itself, so she could add a little money  to the household by selling tea, biscuits, chips, and cool drinks.
The weather is very nice, Jasmine confided, but vegetables are very costly. Most of it seemed to come from the mainland, from Calcutta. Only  green and yellow tender coconuts, small  local mangoes and spice grew in abundance. On our third day as well we stopped for tea, this time near  Chiditop and partook of  giant green batter dipped  chillies and smaller vegetable pakoras.

We met a lot of people in Port Blair from Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala whose  migrant parents had put down roots on the islands.  There were plenty of shops run by moms at walking distance from the Megapode where several salt and sweet snacks and groceries and provisions were being sold. The Megapode Nest  itself served a selection of meals that  spoke of links  between the north and the south of India, with the occasional gobhi manchurian disguised as fritters. Breakfast comprised  iddlis , chutney, sambaar and oothaapam, and bread, jam,  tiny bananas and eggs. Lentils brown or  yellow, chappatis, rice, and vegetables were around for lunch and dinner., along with a selection of mutton, chicken or fish. Dessert was custard,  gulab jamuns, rasgollas in condensed milk and delicious sevaian and rice kheers.

Also memorable were the kulfis that were sold by solo entrepreneurs at tourist spots all over the islands. These were delicious milk lollies, taken out from the deep recesses of a large earthenware jar. When you ordered one, a  stick was inserted into the tiny plastic container in which the lolly was frozen.  Effortlessly extricated from its mould and   handed over,it  filled the mouth with the  cool, sweet,  cardamom- flavoured secrets of milk and memories of an older time.

The most seamless assimilation of the old and the new, which one member of the scuba diving team  brought to my attention was the logo of (AFC)Andaman Fried Chicken, which occupies pride of place  in Port Blair. A grinning chicken dominates the logo in red and white atop imposing glass exteriors. The chicken, remarked the young man, was rather upbeat about its place in the food consumption chain, unlike its melancholy cousin from the KFC chain.

Delhi University: The Spectacle of the Carnival

It is second semester, fourth semester and sixth semester time at Delhi University. Currently, in the three year semesterized program three years are divided into six portions and these sections of time  are being used up by the first year, second year and third year students of the university. We have had six weeks of teaching, with the occasional holiday thrown in. Actually the national holidays have been rather disciplined announcing themselves around weekends and allowing us to teach.

Now the fun and games have begun. Teaching was thin  in the middle of last week, during the two day bandh, since many students were apprehensive about reaching Sri Venkateswara from distant destinations. Plus, the cultural festival season was on and students had begun the week by rehearsing for various co-curricular activities and staying away from class-rooms. Our vice-chancellor who is bringing about far-reaching changes in higher education which he thinks is some sort of Saturday Club engaged in productive welfare activities and entertainment,  decided to shut down teaching in the university  to propel the  three day North Campus Venture "Antardhvani" to take place.

Before the official shut down, co-ordinators and stall adorners  worked overtime to collect materials to take to the North Campus to display best practice in each college for which  cash awards were being dangled.
To begin with, I am all for cultural activities.  Our country boasts of an extraordinarily rich tradition of music, dance, art and theatre which has classical origins and has gone on to become very inventive. Singing, dancing, artwork, sports, theatre are very exciting activities and more eyeball grabbing than the comparatively less prosaic activity of teaching and learning in the classroom. Given the terrible rooms we teach in, and the absence of any facilities that could add to our teaching skills, the North Campus  certainly provides  happier hunting grounds.

 Yet, has the Vice chancellor brought culture to the heathen and Manna to the  thirsty as the promos suggest?  The students who excelled in all the co-curricular activities they brought to the antardhvani platform have done so because their natal families worked very hard to help them attain such skill and talent. The university had very little to do with their grooming.  Neither did the state. The state doesn't even want to take responsibility for education. Why would it foster  co-curricular activity? The ground reality is that most of these young people do not have rooms  or auditoriums in  colleges where they could practice their skills or share their interests. Despite this, year after year, in the then easily identifiable second term, every college in Delhi university hosted three day festivals  to showcase culture and there was a separate day earmarked for sports. Inter college and intra college exchanges flourished on these occasions.

 These  festivals continue in every college at Delhi University as do smaller two day festivals held by every single department in every college. Perhaps, our vice-chancellor has not found time to do the math, since simple addition would have  enabled him to compute without too much effort the number of teaching days lost per college. Had he been aware of this  low-tech solution, he might have hesitated to add more non-teaching days to the university's already bowdlerized academic calendar.

Delhi University's Annual Flower Show has also  been around for a very long time. In regular years, a half day holiday  enabled interested  teachers and students at the end of a working morning to  look at extraordinary flower displays and  horticultural excellence. Now our vice- chancellor aims to set our sights higher. He has introduced awards to colleges on the basis of excellent practice.  Exactly how will the college with  excellent practice be selected?  And exactly why should undergraduate colleges "compete" for this selection? Do we not have enough of this at the stage of secondary education where a few elite institutions battle it out ?

 Currently, qualified teachers  teach identical syllabi in every discipline  across all colleges in Delhi University. It is shameful then to set up a jostling for excellent practice awards in say, architecture, when St Stephens has had  close to a hundred years of sprawling acreage to build on, as opposed to Sri Venkateswara which struggles with a mere 16 acres, thirty odd years and stringent building bylaws? Not that the other categories are more actionable.  Instead of this divide and rule and carrot and stick policy adopted to wage fractious skirmishes between colleges, it would have been well worth everyone's time if the university had addressed the infrastructural needs of each college.  To get there, however, the very idea needs to be under consideration. My antar dhwani tells me that it is not the purpose of either education or culture  to exacerbate differences and that vice-chancellors as mentors should be  providing level playing fields for every undergraduate institution.

 Also, introducing  an institution which is nowhere in the vicinity through a stall is what academic fairs set up by foreign universities do, maybe because they feel that interpersonal contact is well worth it, even  in  days of satellite transmission. This reductive practice cannot work for Delhi University's undergraduate colleges, which can be visited by aspiring students from Delhi schools, on any working day. As a matter of fact we are reeling under student over subscription. We are not really in a position to solicit students, unlike the stall owners in international academic fairs.

 No wait! This is  a rather thankless response to all the largess the university is offering us, is it not? How remiss of me to be complaining about  inadequate classrooms and tutorial rooms and overcrowding and absence of infrastructure. How hard the vice chancellor is working at creating a classless society. First he introduced the idea of a meta university where students would spend their time commuting from one university to another.The next stroke of  brilliance was  to  transmit one knowledgeable lecture to every citadel of higher education via satellite.   We need to think out of the box and stop complaining about posts falling vacant in the university.The Knowledge Revolution is  in process. After all, the industrial revolution merely  ensured that one  machine could do the work of many men.  Our vice chancellor has ably demonstrated that one lecture by one mind  can substitute  or replace 500, maybe 5000 minds  at the same time. This will definitely take the work pressure off all of us and adequately bring down student teacher  ratios.

How thoughtless of me to forget that  from now on  daily work  will  only involve  hand-wrestling with a dozen colleagues over a solitary department  laptop,  equipped not with audiovisual aids to enhance teaching, but  with downloaded software  for punching in  soft-copy attendance for a class of eighty students or more. Should technology fail, backup exists  in the form of loose attendance sheets, so that project monthly upload may be upheld, since that is the singular duty  expected of college teachers.  After all, we are probably the only university in the world where five percent  of the marks in every paper in every discipline  are tabulated on  the basis of classroom attendance percentages.  So when we are done with double verification of attendance in one classroom, it will be time to go to the next.!

Those who  haven't received laptops must not despair. Exactly what are young and energetic Ad-Hocs around for?  There is no plan to regularize their jobs since satellite transmissions will be the order of the day.With no permanent jobs on the anvil, they might as well as earn their pay  by working as Attendance-Punching-Teaching-Assistants to Associate Professors. Why should such a facility only be available to university teachers in America, especially when we are the ones with  the numbers?  Of course, even this small task at hand will be taken away from the Ad-Hocs when five years from now the MA is whittled down to one year instead of two. Then all our mighty University Dons, who left their undergraduate institutions behind for even more higher learning, will probably be sent back  to their colleges, because MA teaching would have halved? Then  attendance punching  duties will be the sole responsibility of permanent faculty in colleges, while the prodigal dons ( who anyway don't take attendance) will provide inspirational teaching. By then maybe each one of us will have our very own attendance laptop? Meanwhile, here is to a brand new university whose only casualties will be teachers and learners.

Anchored Islands

Visited  Port Blair last week . Island hopped on middling boats and walked alongside stunning unspoilt beaches at Corbyn's Cove and  Mundapahad.  Viewed  stunning sunrises and spectacular sunsets, and a sea awash in turquoise and thick dense blue gray water that quickly turns blue black as soon as the sun disappears.

There is  a lot  to do at the islands: stroll, sit out at various edges, scuba dive, snorkel and sea walk, or enjoy a variety of water sports such as scooter, banana  and sofa rides.The scuba diving and the sea walking extend  into the heart of the ocean. A whole new world awaits the enthusiastic traveler and  it is an extraordinary experience, to glide over coral reefs and gaze at anemone clusters , watch myriad coloured fish in innumerable shapes and sizes swim past and  marvel at the amazing ecosystems sustained by the coral reefs.  The body becomes weightless and all one has is a discerning eye that is  entranced by this dazzling new world . One meets sea cucumbers and sea-urchins, anemones with velvety underskirts, giant clams that signal that they are not part of the inanimate sea by the zigzag edges separating their bivalve shells.

 Equipped with life jacket, wetsuit, goggles, mask and oxygen tank, it is easy to forget  air-breathing antecedents that  involve  a pair of legs slowly  plodding their way  on earth surfaces.

 Once the sea adventure is  over, it is time to  be awed again by the tangle of sun, earth, water and wind. People at Port Blair are helpful and warm. The views from the Ross and North Bay Islands are restful and incredible. 

 This idyllic group of islands are nautical miles away from our borders. There is an abundance of flora and fauna  and  Chatham saw mill remains even today, the largest wood mill in Asia with its  store of  tree logs.  The anthropological museum  provides information on the extant  tribes  among the several islands that form part of the Andaman Nicobar group.   In the colonial past, political prisoners were housed  first on Viper island  and subsequently incarcerated in  the cellular jail at Port Blair. The Cellular Jail hosts a sound and light show on its premises that recalls and reiterates our hard won independence. Countless Indians from all over the country gave up their lives or struggled in harsh everyday situations, years at a stretch  clamoring for  independence.  A trip to  these islands enables us to  renew and recharge  memories of  our nation's history.  Despite the checkered history  chartered out by violent men and by the imperious  forces of nature,  a  finely balanced co-existence punctuates each day at Port Blair.