I really don’t mind doing a language exchange with people who want to learn Hindi. At the very least, you could learn a few useful phrases for when you’re traveling in India, and I will not forget them.

Sad state of affairs, especially because I used to be a Hindi topper in school (if any school buddies are reading this, remember you have no right to dispute anything on this blog.. I know too many of your dark secrets. grrr..)

Both P and I have noticed a sharp decline in our usage of Hindi in the last year or so but the beast has been rearing its ugly fangs once too often in the last month. We’ve always been more comfortable conversing in english, reserving our depleting hindi vocabulary for rainy moments, i.e. when we need to communicate secretly in the presence of non-Hindi speakers. But then, you can easily get away with speedy Hinglish too.

So now we’re left groping for words, words which once came so, so naturally to us. Just last night, as we walked out of the club after a good 40 lengths or more, we were struck by the stillness of the air. The sun seemed to have sapped all the energy from everyone – the alley was quiet where there are usually kids running around, men playing cards, and pigs snorting in anticipation of imminent slaughter. An old woman was squatting – still in her conical hat – leaning her frail body against the wall – not even flashing the customary Vietnamese smile as walked past her.

Yeah, everything was still.

And I started to say something to the effect in Hindi.

sab kuch kitna sthar… sthal… ugh, kitna sthir hai.

Well, that’s still a comparatively difficult word – sthir.

‘How about I try to say, nothing’s moving at all?’ I thought to myself.

And I found myself racking my brains for the Hindi word for movement. It finally came to me.. kuch bhi hil nahi raha hai.

Perhaps it’s just because we talk in English much more now, not just with each other but with everyone else, whereas in the States, there weren’t so many others to talk to anyway. So we’d keep switching between English and Hindi, but with so many friends here, we’re bound to talk more in English all the time. It’s only when we’re alone that we banter in hindi at all, and that too, not very often.

And so I’m left wondering how I’m gonna keep my Hindi language skills intact. Any suggestions?

Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients –

2 big, fat eggplants
500 gm Yogurt
Mint/Basil leaves
Salt, Sugar to taste

Method –

1. Make deep slits in the eggplants with a knife. Roast the eggplants until the skin is charred through and the you can smell goodness.
2. Leave to cool. This will take at least half hour.
3. Peel the skin off the eggplants. Slice them in two and deseed without losing any flesh.
4. Dump the yogurt in a large cotton cloth to drain out the liquid. You should have creamy yogurt that is difficult to scrape off the cloth. (I just used a new men’s handkerchief to strain the yogurt; it worked alright)
5. Blend the eggplant, yogurt, and a 4-5 sprigs of basil/mint.
6. Add a pinch of sugar and salt to taste.
7. Serve with olive oil pooled in the middle. Sprinkle chopped basil (just a little bit) or some red chilli powder to add some color.

It should be heavenly with steamed vegetables, pita bread, tandoori roti, nan, and even toast.

Give it shot.

And if there have been no updates since, it’s because life been a long series of habitual nothingness.

In the time since the road trip, mid-Nov through mid-Jan, P and I were in India… chilling our butts off, if there is such an expression.

It was sort of sad leaving the States, leaving the life we had established for ourselves – a life that was just the two of us. It had nothing to do with leaving ‘the States’, which to most Indians at least, is like committing monetary suicide.

It was about leaving the home we had pieced together with curtains and cushions and vases and Ikea goodies. It was about the $60 bed we loved so much and were so proud of. It was about the $4k car that we pinched pennies to pay off. It was about the experience of driving away for weekends, driving to SF after a boring two weeks in San Jose, it was craving Indian kebab and heading to Zafran every few days. It was about having Smithwicks on tap at O’Flaherty and requesting pecans in every salad. It was about dropping Pratik to work and meeting him for lunch and then picking him up in the evening. Well, it was a weeny bit of a heartbreak leaving our lives and knowing that we will probably not return to it.

And, there were the butterflies, Vietnamese butterflies, in my tummy. We realized when we moved to the States that moving to a new country was not as easy as it sounds. There’s a ton of stuff that one must unlearn and a ton more to relearn.

Anyway, with so much going on in my little brain, I really lost it at the driver in the car behind us in the parking lot at Ahmedabad airport. Baba came to pick us up and he had barely backed out from his parking spot when the driver behind us began honking at us. I turned around sharply and showed him the middle finger, and launched into a series of expletives. Pratik, being Pratik, told me to calm down… (as he continued to do through the rest of the India trip).

But really, I think there are some things people need to learn in life – like not honking the house, rather street, down, and not breaking the queue. Gosh, I lost my temper at a jackass who totally ignored the fact that Pratik and I were in line at a movie ticket counter. I really gave it to him, the obnoxious bastard. I should have punched him hard actually, to make sure he remembered never to go out of turn ever again in his life. He did offer an apology at the end (of a very loud tirade where I asked him whether he ever went to school and learned waiting in line.. haha), but a very ‘I’m a dude; you’re just another angry young woman.. shut the hell up,’ kinda apology.

UGh, Men.

A lot of Pratik’s school friends were in Ahmedabad when we were there, so we had a lot of rocking parties. One that stands out in memory is the one when Nupur puked all over the bathroom, Varun slapped me, Janak kissed me several times, Diya fretted over Janak, Varun launched into a monologue of some very serious expletives, Vikram tried to be the Maj. Vikram and control the outlaws, Gunjan wagged his tongue at every camera in sight, and everyone hugged everyone else like there was no tomorrow. That, incidentally, was also the first day I made Babganoush, and it was a huge huge hit. TO see my super simple Babaganoush recipe, click here. Twas a lot of fun.

Calcutta was great too. It was the last of the big Indian cities that I had not seen. A lot of people had warned about the craziness of the city, the population, the over-Bangaliness and all the rest, but honestly, I really liked the place. It is overpopulated but where in India is it not. The city is crazy.. but that goes with its history. It’s not Chandigarh which had an architectural plan before the first brick was laid. This is a city where the tram line runs in the middle of a busy road, and people must run to the very middle to get on the tram. It’s a city where the Metro is worse than the Mumbai locals, and the taxi drivers go to sleep in the middle of green signals at traffic intersections.

It’s nuts, but the city is cheap, the food is f-ing fantastic, and there’s culture, there’s life. It’s not a hostile city, and more people could communicate in English than in Delhi. P and I explored more Calcutta in a month than my parents did in 6 months. By the end of our trip, I was taking my mom out to show her the various markets I had discovered.

It was really much colder in Calcutta than I had expected it to be, and much of my nights were spent acclimatizing to the cold conditions (after Ahmedabad, and a warm summer in SJ).

Can’t remember anything else of particular interest that happened in the two months we were in India. Will update with another post when I do remember something.

http://www.oprah.com/media/20091021-tows-stine-home-tour

Oprah toured this totally-enviable home in Copenhagen. I think this woman must be rich to afford such a wonderful home. And I love how clutter-free it is. I’m sure all those anti-clutter and home-organizing bloggers and flockr groups will inundate this woman with requests to feature her home in their virtual space.

For starters, I’m going to get that green into Pratik’s bedroom in Ahmedabad. He has these pale green walls all around right now. And truth to tell, I find it very tame. This time, we’re throwing some color on those walls!! Haha.. here’s a look at his room right now..

Do you see what I mean? I don’t know why I look so scared in this pic, I don’t ususally do. I love the best in Pratik’s home. It’s low, and classy. We need more space in that room too. Gonna spend some time working at it, this time around. Dang, wish we had Ikea in India

Indian media is as far from emerging from the stone age as it could possibly be. And I am not just talking about the quality of stories on India TV and Aaj Tak. Really, there’s very little the Indian media seems to be learning from the doom in the West. If I may proclaim so, the recession has hit the traditional media industry the hardest of all. It’s not mere budget cuts that are affecting media persons.

The media in the West is turning over and d.y.i.n.g. Newspapers, TV channels and radio are laying off journalists left, right and center. News spaces are shrinking as advertising disappears.

So what are the smarty pants up to? Hell, they’re moving operations online. Last week, Seattle Post-Intelligencer switched off its printers and moved all editorial to the web. With the PI gone, Seattle is on its way to becoming the first newspaper-less city in the world (of course there are the backyards of Africa and Asia where people have never seen newspapers but who cares about them anyway).

Bearing the Indian cross (aargh, swastik) in Amreeka is hard enough without realizing how far behind all Indian infrastructure is.

My ire stems from the lack of RSS 2.0 feeds on the websites of prominent Indian media websites. Maybe it is and maybe it is not something to rant about but I’m ranting about it anyway.

So this is how it all started..

I am seriously getting involved with Twitter, in a way that I did not think I ever would. I love getting updates about things that interest me. I have always sucked at online research so it’s great that I can rely on other people’s suggestions of the best place to read about things I want to. Apart from everything else, I also want to get my news from Twitter. All of my news. Not just nytimes, not just Indian Express.. I want all the news feeds I like combined into one smart Twitter feed so I can keep up to date with the latest Indian news and not have to go to each website separately.

So I started looking for something like it. What I found was mostly individual news sites’ Twitter accounts, like NDTV’s and IBN’s. Well, that’s really alright. But I wanted something personalized – I don’t particularly look forward to getting all the crap that the Indian media passes off as ‘BREAKING NEWS’ . I am looking for the real stuff.

So I decided to create a twitter feed of my own.. and IndiaNewsaholic was born, circa 2009.  Now, I started visiting the individual news sites to select the content I wanted in my RSS feed. What would you think? The organizations would make it easy for people to get RSS feeds, right? Wrong.

Most sites did not have RSS 2.0 which meant I could not feed them into IndiaNewsaholic. I know they had RSS 1.0 but for heaven’s sake, upgrade! I need you in twitter, not some godforsaken RSS 1.0 tolerant reader!

Stone age, I told ya..

Can you sense my waning interest? BBye.

People argue passionately that Delhi is characterized by contradictions of wealth. But to me, the supreme contradiction lies in the seasons that inevitably become the subject of frustrated conversations.

Summer for the sweaty millions is torturous anywhere in India but Delhi has the most sweltering summer of all.

Hordes of people scramble for every patch of sinewy shade. The parched lips of child beggars open in an eternal cry for ‘paisa’. The rich cool themselves in their air-conditioned cars and air-conditioned homes and air-conditioned restaurants. Groups of lanky teenagers in unbuttoned shirts whistle at girls passing by; the girls gaze downwards, pulling their prickly synthetic dupattas closer to their bare necks. Couples crouch behind bushes in the overgrown gardens of Humayun’s tomb (a UNESCO World Heritage Center), touching urgently, knowing the only spies here are the pitiable eunuchs begging for money. At night, the newly weds throng to India Gate to cool themselves with neon ice-lollies and gaze at the shimmering lights of Rashtrapati Bhavan (the President’s mansion).

For eight months from March to October, Delhi’s heat swells like a pregnant belly, settles heavily on every beaded brow, rises in a mirage from gray concrete until one day, in mid-December, I wake up to a fogged morning.

From my third floor balcony, the fog has obscured my neighbors – the laundry man who shacks in the alley behind your house, the sweeper who lives with his six kids next to the laundry man, the newspaper boy who lives with his alcoholic father next to the sweeper, the cook who supplies tiffins to students and working women and lives next to the newspaper boy – but I know they are there, like every other morning, squatting beside the drain and brushing their teeth with twigs of the neem tree.

Out on the roads, it’s a battle against the bitter, biting wind. Groups of homeless men, women and children crowd close to a fire made on the sidewalks and under flyovers. The blur of the embers is faintly visible through the fog but on deserted wintry streets, its hard to miss. Cars drive in first gear, unable to see the rear bumper of the car in front. The chill swirls around groups of women huddled in homes and temples, chanting hymns and songs late into the night, invoking Durga, the Goddess of strength. The rich drive to the nearest momos’ shop for steaming momos served with red, hot sauce right in their cars.

The winter is also the wedding season because the outrageous amounts of food made for guests does not rot easily. The glittering jewelery and heavily sequined dresses keep both men and women warm, as does the feverish dancing and singing.

Every Delhiite worth his salt will argue feverishly over where to get the crispiest, the yummiest chaat, the most intoxicating hukka joint, the best cocktails, the most original trinkets, the widest collection of used books, the softest pashmina shawls, the heaviest embroideries. You know a Delhiite by how fiercely s/he argues. I think it’s the seasons and the spices that bring out the passion among Delhiites. That’s saadi Dilli.

And then I came here. To work, finally. Done with studying for a bit. Time to do something I loved doing. Letting my curiosity loose. Sniffing out stories by the wayside, in anesthetized hospital corridors, in flooded villages and barren ones.

Stuck on my Scooty in the middle of a pothole in knee-deep rainwater, propping my laptop on the footpath so it doesn’t get wetter than it already had, hoping desperately there wouldn’t be any more onlookers than there already were, dragging my Scooty to a less-flooded spot on the road, and bruising my leg hoping to kick it start in time for the next apointment – oh, I loved every minute of my job as a reporter. It was the fulfillment of a dream to work the way I did – zooming through the city all day, writing stories in the evenings, and crashing as soon as I hit the bed. This is what I had wanted, what I enjoyed best.

And now I am going to leave my job, my daily dose of adrenaline. I don’t have to, it’s my choice. Because making a home has always been a dream too, as much as doing a kick-ass job was. And now is the time I want to make a home.
Of course, I will take another job when I shift to Bangalore but I know it will not be the same. It can’t be. Nothing can match the independence I have now, even the independence to not work so much if I don’t feel like it.
I just hope I can come back to it someday soon…