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The trail of incidents that are usually termed horrible on other days but have come to be accepted, tolerated, forgiven and forgotten in the name of the Holi tradition every year.

Dog on bike with two other bikes with people in holi colors

A 25-year-old Hindu man was allegedly strangled to death in Rajasthan’s Dausa district for trying to stop three men from applying colour on him during Holi celebration”. Every year on Holi, we hear news reports of molestation and non-consensual touches. Year after year these stories have become so widespread and familiar that now we have got subconsciously wired to simply ignore them and move on with our lives. “Holi hai!” (It’s Holi!) is a cry that is shouted, and like clockwork, anyone would come, apply colour to you and proceed further to the next person. Implicit in that cry is, all is well, or all goes on Holi. But in recent years, incidents of communal nature have added themselves to the long list of Holi complaints. Protecting law and order is the job of the police. A murder by a murderer can be stopped in two ways: either you control the situation such that the murderer does not get the opportunity to commit the crime, or you do the murder yourself, leaving the murderer no chance in hell to commit the crime himself. In the first act, the police protect the victim from being murdered and in the second, they protect the murderer. This is not to suggest that police forces are superhumans who can foresee all crimes and prevent them from happening. That is understandable. And precisely why, police are generally not blamed for the crime being committed. They are blamed for what they do once the crime has been committed. And what they do after the crime sets the stage for the next crime. Their actions gesture as to whether such crimes are allowed or not. 

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River shore

I too live by the river Our river though is not sacred It is still clean Perhaps it's the fate of sacred rivers to be dirty We too go to our river to swim We don't take dips, we swim and swim till our lungs and legs can no longer hold And we run from our river only when our mothers holler our names There are no flowers floating in our river No oil lamps float in our river too We don't even leave our dead in our river Our river is not sacred like yours We still love our river though It feeds us, it nurtures us

Do you think our river misses being sacred? Do you think your river likes being sacred?

River Shore River and tree

#river #poem #poetry #sacred #ganga #mahakumbh #india

Or How Hindusim Came Into Being; Brief History Of Hindu Religion For Zoomers-n-Boomers Who Refuse To Pick Books

Ayodhya Temple As Of Today. Courtesy: Newslaundry.com Ayodhya Temple As Of Today. Courtesy: Newslaundry.com

I was just on a call with my distant neighbour who after the regular round of questions asked me if I had received the Ram-Mandir-Rice (akshata). For those who haven’t and don’t know about what’s going on, people associated with BJP-RSS have been going door-to-door and distributing some posters related to the new temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh along with some colourful uncooked-unbroken-rice in tiny plastic pack (hardly 20 gram).

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stock image

There are very few things that send me into a quiet rage as much as food dishonesty. Let me demonstrate.

Before I do that, let’s get a few things out of the way. There are no superhumans here. And superman is a figment of imagination. Likewise, not everyone can be a chef and not all chefs can cook all food items. There are as many cuisines and foodstuffs in the world as there are people. So to expect any one person to know every kind of cuisine/food is absolutely silly. And that is why every restaurant comes up with its own menu, a limited set of food items which they promise to serve their guests. So we now have restaurants declaring a set of dishes they promise to serve in the form of a menu and of their own volition. Naturally, this means they have a chef and/or cooks who know what these foodstuffs on their menu are and how they are made, also they know what goes into these items and obviously, they make sure the ingredients required to make these items are available in their inventory. There might be occasions when one might not get certain ingredients owing to any kind of unforeseen external factor related possibly to the market, weather or just some other arbitrary occasion. In such a case, you might not serve dishes which are listed on your menu but whose ingredients you currently do not possess. All this is expected and I completely understand. Whereas to take an order for an item and not serve it, and in its place, serve a different item but call it the requested food item; that's dishonest and pure evil. Imagine a Calcutta biryani minus the humble potato or a Lucknowi biryani without the fragrance/aroma of kewda water. This isn’t a laughing matter. We go to restaurants and pay a certain amount (many a times significantly large sum than what individual ingredients would cost) expecting to eat precisely what we have ordered. That is the basic-of-basic pact between a customer and a food place. Now let me tell you what happened today.

I have been craving an excellent English breakfast all this week. Many moons ago I had one at Glen’s Bakehouse, Bangalore where I have also had it previously. And the soft yet crisp texture and taste of their bread laced with butter still lingers and entices my taste buds even after a month of having it. But I was in Pune now. And as is the norm, I looked at online restaurants/cafes that served English breakfast. I found Cafe Peter. It was closest to me and also had good reviews. Some reviews even mentioned English Breakfast. Exactly what I needed. And so I decided to pay a visit.

For those who aren’t familiar, English Breakfast is a pretty standardized breakfast spread which in a strict sense includes bacon, eggs, sausage, some pudding, baked beans, grilled tomato, fried bread or toast served with jams and butter, tea/coffee and orange juice. The bacon mentioned is a very specific cut of bacon popularly called British back bacon which is sliced carefully such that the final slice of bacon includes the belly and loin in one beautiful piece of meat to create an irresistible and unforgettable bacon-eating experience. When you eat this marvel, the crispness and fatty bit, this combination of the two different pieces of pork, each with its own characteristics, blends in to create bacon heaven. The best I remember from recent memory was at Holiday Inn on Racecourse Road, Bangalore. The sausage mentioned above is also a special British sausage which is not plain meat but contains herbs and spices spluttering taste buds when you chew it in. Now since we are in India where pork is not commonplace, it is understandable again for cafes/restaurants to not serve bacon and, sausage to be of chicken. But the rest of the ingredients are commonplace. I have seen many places skipping juice which is again, not okay but another adjusting factor. And that’s it. Anymore accommodating and it would terribly fail to be the English Breakfast. Now please serve your combination of breakfast but I beg you to not name it English Breakfast.

At Cafe Peter I was served a sandwich (don’t know why), potato fries (again why), half-fried eggs, chicken sausages minus herbs or spices, leaf lettuce (why) with a line of some sauce thrown over it (why why why). That’s it. No grilled tomato, no beans and hear this out, I asked for coffee and I was told that it would be chargeable! English Breakfast without tea/coffee/juice, really? I ordered coffee separately and made a total bill of Rs. 672! For comparison, at Glen’s Bakehouse in Bangalore, you get a proper English Breakfast including a pudding or cake plus your choice of coffee or tea for half of this price. And mind you, Glen’s is a bigger and more popular brand than Cafe Peter. There is no comparison of Cafe Peter with regards to service, ambience or taste with Glen’s. And I’m not saying this because they served a bad breakfast today. Years ago I had loved some lunch at Cafe Peter and I went there today hoping for a similar experience.

I’m not writing this merely because of one experience today but I’m seeing a pattern of these things in Pune. I have by now eaten in multiple cities and while in many of these other cities, it was mostly on limited visits frequenting their well-known restaurants; in Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai owing to long stays I have regularly been out and eating. And from my experience, limited still it may be, you are more likely to be disappointed or frustrated in Pune by your order than in Bangalore or Mumbai. For instance, my only recent complaint to a friend in Bangalore has been how the Galouti kebabs we had weren’t really melt-in-mouth. And these were still soft and tender just not melt-in-mouth like you get in Lucknow. This grievance isn’t a complaint when you think of it but a typical case of me being a snob.

On the other hand restaurants in Pune are high-quality snobs. There is plenty of pretentiousness. They have fancy menus and delicate walls decorated with beautiful flowers and designs but the food they serve on most occasions does not match with food they mention on their menus. And god-save-your-brain-cells if you decide to point out their wrongs. I once explained to a restaurant owner how their dosa batter had gone bad which was causing their dosas to smell terrible and how idlis weren’t supposed to be made with such fine flour as theirs since with the finer flour idlis gain rubber-like texture hinders absorption of sambhar. I was told that they have been making dosa and idlis for so and so years and no one until that day had complained. I wanted to ask, so? But then I quietly walked away. Another day I was at a seafood restaurant which claimed they served Goan food. Their menu mentioned tisrya-sukka. Now tisre is a Konkani word for a specific type of clam which is different from khube which is another kind of clam. Tisre is wide, oval in shape with sharp defining lines on their shells; its flesh has an identifiable orange portion at its edges and most importantly, it tastes superior and costs comparably more than Khube which are close to circular in shape with no lines on their shells or any attractive colours on their flesh. And so restaurants always include tisre sukka (a dry dish having an abundance of tisre clams along with onions and scrapped coconut) in their famed fish thalis. When one of these plates reached my table in Pune I discovered I wasn’t served tisre but khube instead. Since the price was on the higher end, I inquired. I was told that what I had on my plate was what they served as tisre here. How do you argue with such people now?

Compare the above to Bangalore now. Once in the city, I was out for dinner with a Bengali friend who knows his cuisine really well including what goes in it and what does not right to their individual proportions. We were at a hotel buffet where they had a biryani labelled Kolkata Mutton biryani. I found the taste fine. It wasn’t great but still far better than what I had at many other places. We were quietly having our food when a waiter arrived to ask if we were enjoying our meals and if there was anything we would like different. My friend very politely suggested that the biryani was not up to the mark. A vague remark. The waiter nodded, apologized and went away. We got back to our meals. After a few minutes came the chef. He asked what did we not like about biryani. My friend paused and offered him specific details about the dish. What ideally a Bengali biryani contain and what it does not and also which ingredient shadows the other ingredient and such. And at this point, Chef apologised and explained to us how this was not a proper or authentic Kolkata biryani but a milder version of it which they cook for their buffet. He said its ingredients were cooked differently and then plainly mixed as per the demand. He also explained his motivations for this way of cooking. And then requested that we visit again tomorrow for lunch or dinner and he would prepare an authentic Kolkata biryani from the ground up. Do you see what he did here? There are two parts to what he expressed. First, an admission that what was served wasn’t what was claimed and second, this is less important, offering to prepare the accurate dish.

You might be wondering why this matters, why this unpleasant nitpicking?

I had a friend in the Pune office who disliked South Indian food until I took her to a small eatery run by a Tamil couple in Hinjewadi. What she was until then having was a bad kind of dosa and those rubber idlis that seem to be standard at most places in Pune with terrible sambhar and even more awful chutney. I remember my own dislike of Bengali cuisine because the first two times I tasted Bengali food at two distinct establishments that publicised themselves as Bengali places, they served what was a terrible and stereotypical kind of ‘Bengali’ foodstuffs with undesired quantities of mustard. It took a dear friend and umpteen rounds of Bengali places along with thorough descriptions of what was served on the table for me to fall in love with Bengali food. The point is, in most cities, and especially in Pune, with a lot of bravadoes, people serve what can easily be referred to as phoney cuisine. Please note that I'm all for food experimentation, after all, that's how we get new things on the menu. But you cannot advertise Nestle's Maggi and serve Patanjali Noodles – that's just being dishonest and disrespectful of your patron. Or as the angry Scots referred to Trump (who when Brexit was announced congratulated Scots for their wise decision to leave the EU – they had in fact, voted to remain in the EU), these restaurants are being polyester-cockwombles, cock-juggling-thundercunts and rotten-orange-fucknuts!

Thank you for reading till the end. It appears you have as much time on hand as I did writing this. Much appreciated.

P.S. While the above rant is based wholly on my experience, you might experience the cities mentioned differently than I have. But the larger point about some restaurants being dishonest and such treacherous conduct being not okay stands.

#food #dishonesty #restaurants #review #India #Pune #Bangalore

Image courtesy: The Hindu Image courtesy: The Hindu

From what I know and can remember Muslim girls in school (not all but some of them) have been wearing hijab (or headscarf) for ages now. It was just another piece of clothing that never bothered us, to the point that we never even noticed its existence. I even know of girls and even teachers who would arrive at school in niqab (or burqa, black outer clothing like a rain-or-sun-coat) and then they would remove it before entering a classroom. Again, this wasn't a point of conversation or of difference. The only time I have been thinking of these clothing choices and the faces of friends that wore them is now. Now when many schools in Karnataka (and even in Madhya Pradesh, another BJP ruled state) have banned young girls (and even teachers) from covering their hair with a cloth also referred to as 'wearing hijab'. It all started with Hindu kids sloganeering and hooting – all of a sudden – as Muslim kids passed before them. Or running to Muslim kids and shouting – Jai Shri Ram – a war cry of Hindus now. The lord Ram (or simply Ram) of Ramayana, if you have ever read, is a soft-spoken and light-mannered hero of the epic. He does everything in a measured and reserved manner. There is this soft tenderness to his actions and his approach to things. In the whole of epic, there is only once that we see Ram agitated and outraged – when the ocean god does not agree to his demand to make way for him and his army to go to Lanka and rescue his wife. It is this image of Ram that the militant Hindu organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has adopted on their posters and hate paraphernalia, and it is this Ram you see depicted elsewhere by Hindus that subscribe to RSS's worldview. The same is the case with Hanuman (there is no instance in the Ramayana of Hanuman displaying aggression but the monkey-god posters you see everywhere now show him in desperate anger and in all-red). The usual picture of Ram that we saw was of him smiling quietly and standing alongside his wife and his brother while Hanuman stood at his feet. The impression was of a feminine soft-spoken hero, not of a military general. And chant at his temples, say at Mathura and Vrindavan or Ayodhya was 'Siyavar Ramachandra ki Jai' (Victory to the groom of Sita, Ramachandra). He was not the centre of the chant but his wife was; he was invoked through her. That was the Ram from Ramayana, the one I knew until the mobs of RSS-BJP descended on streets, heckled and lynched to death the many Indians with chants of 'Jai Shri Ram'.

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Geelani addressing a rally in Sopore 2012. In Kashmir, even the tallest political leaders have eventually fallen from grace, after compromising on the demand for autonomy. Geelani’s unflinching stance won him a steady mass following across the region, across generations.
Image and caption courtesy of Caravan Magazine Geelani addressing a rally in Sopore 2012. In Kashmir, even the tallest political leaders have eventually fallen from grace, after compromising on the demand for autonomy. Geelani’s unflinching stance won him a steady mass following across the region, across generations. Image and caption courtesy of Caravan Magazine

You have to read stories from Kashmir. We are every day sold this lie by our media and govt that Kashmir is peaceful, its people are happy but not once do we let them speak on camera and voice their opinions. We recently snatched their statehood from them, we divided their state into three parts, we jailed their political leaders and their journalists for no particular crime of theirs. We jailed them simply on the assumption that they might commit crimes. This was imperialism, the kind we fought against when the British were the imperialist forces. And I say we because we voted this govt to power, it's we who find exalted meaning in a piece of cloth, more meaning than lives of thousands of humans we are going to affect, we find collective meaning in a piece of land than people living on it for generations, even long before this piece of land got its present name and form.

We have never let these people speak out and inform us of what they want. Each time they sneak somehow and find a way to speak out, we rush with our pellet guns, army tanks, gunmen and barbed wires to silence them. Then our media overwhelms us with boys throwing stones. But they don't show who they are throwing stones at. It is at gunmen who they see as aliens on their lands.

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Suhail Naqshbandi

I don’t know where to begin, how or even if I should begin on this at all, but here I’m.

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decorative image with faces covered in masks

It is six months since the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was published by Chinese scientists and was available to the world. What has India done since that January should find no excuse in the otherwise legitimate accusation that China did not inform about the novel virus to the world in time or it kept WHO in dark. It is true that China erred and it is also true that there are reasons to scrutinize WHO. But what have we done since it indeed released the information about the virus? For instance, while some countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan had cases of probable infection long before China released the vital information, India registered its first case only in late January, long after China had published genome sequence of the virus and WHO had informed the world about such an outbreak. So unlike those countries, and they have it under control now and cases are breaking new records in India, we cannot blame the outbreak on Chinese malfeasance. Whatever situation we are in today is our own making. While this bit of truth is hard to digest, especially to a large population that has personally attached their egos with the present government, the refusal to acknowledge would move us into a further abyss, further down the rabbit hole.

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large crowd of women beating thalis

Monsoons evaded Maharashtra in 1992. In a country where even today agriculture is largely dependent on rains, this naturally made people distraught then. In this helplessness, blankness, in this void came Maharashtra governor's appeal other rather a dictate. On a particular day at 11 am, people were to collectively pray. Authorities jumped in to enforce the governor's appeal. Directions were announced left, right and centre. And pray people did.

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Karwar's Medical College complex

Misinformation and our inability to think a level down the surface are going to kill us before the virus does. Karwar which recently treated 11 coronavirus patients and discharged them successfully is about to see it manifest before its eyes. Misplaced fear and paranoia spread through news channels and Whatsapp University are consuming us. Would they devour us completely before we wake up remains an open-ended question. Karwar has zero Covid-19 positives. The 11 patients it treated were not from Karwar but many km away from it. If that makes you applause Karwar for its altruism then you must hold your hands some meters apart.

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