Curd Rice Daily: Blog

What amused me the most today was the fact that the usage of mobile applications can get such wild reactions based on the crowd that you use these applications in. So, for example, when you’re waiting for a faculty member to come in & you’re seated in their cabin – sure, you can check WhatsApp. But maybe looking at Instagram and Snapchat is not such an excellent idea.

I feel like I found this amusing for several reasons:

1. I imagined what it would be like to open up a Snap that one of my friends sent me & have my faculty peer over my shoulder to see what this snap was. They’d be extremely confused – because most of my Snapchats I exchange with friends are broadly us making ugly faces at each other with the comment “Ugly”. It’s excellent motivation and support.
2. I imagined adults using photo filters and participating in Snap challenges.

Okay, so maybe just two.

They were amusing nonetheless.

 

A friend today observed that my blog is the most irregular daily blog she has seen. I’m not surprised. I can barely go two days continuously writing. That is going to change. I will prove myself wrong. We’ve still got pretty much 3 months left in the year (wowie, that’s been quick!), which means I’ve got 90 solid days to write my feelings and observations. It also means you’ll be visiting this blog 90 times. That’s amusing to me.

An old classmate shared with me some news today – we found out that our old head chef from school was quitting to set up his own restaurant. I was pretty elated – that man was the sweetest person in the kitchen. At the same time, though, a few stark realities became clear. This change of guard marks another territory in my school that I will no longer be able to identify with. Additionally, damn, was I privileged to attend a school that had a head chef. That had a dining hall (I can’t remember what we called it, to be honest).

School meals were an integral part of my life. I never carried lunch from home – the only thing I packed was snacks. My snacks were not the most exciting. More often that not (every single day), I carried an Apple with some salt and some chaat masala on it. While everyone traded their snacks with each other, my apples went ungrabbed. So I ate them alone. Sometimes grudgingly, but most of the time attempting to make light of the whole situation and sell a piece of apple to someone based on nutritional value.

My biggest fear carrying those apples was that my box would open up and that apple juice would leak into my bag – leaving this horrible stench (my schoolbag had a long tenure and saw plenty others), but more irritatingly, leaving a stain. Why? Salt makes apples sweat.  This is a fact.

Anyway. After snacks, I think we looked forward to lunch because it was respite. We had 45 minutes – and we’d eat in maybe 15 or 20 minutes at most, and much faster once we were in senior secondary, and end up playing on the football field or the basketball court. The coaches would invariably tell us we couldn’t have access to sports equipment during lunch – we’d put up a fight, and ultimately the balance of things would be restored, with us playing and the coaches joining in, sometimes.

The beauty of our dining hall was that people pretty much knew where to sit the minute they walked in – there was this faculty area where you’d see your teachers sharing food and gossip, your middle school area with really, really loud kids, rushing to finish up and go play table tennis, and then the calmer half of senior secondary, which largely just involved a lot of shoving and laughter.

People in school didn’t cut line also. Even when there was ice-cream, or biryani. Or paneer.

I had paneer for 5 years at school once every week, and not once was I tired of it. It took me 3 years to get tired of paneer at college.

Me. Being tired of paneer.

You must surely be able to comprehend what this says about the quality of meals in my school dining hall and my college mess.

I remember this head chef supervising ice-cream distribution and ensuring nobody got a second scoop – just to make sure that everyone had atleast one. But after you became pals with him, you could get extra scoops at the end. Even people who weren’t on the Meal Plan ended up getting scoops.

I didn’t go to the dining hall daily in 12th Grade, because this overwhelming laziness swept me and my friends, and we ended up doing a potluck thing and sharing everything that people had got from home. I probably went there 4 days out of 5, and this head chef would always be there, with his moustache, his chef whites, and his smile.

You wouldn’t be unhappy eating food at the dining hall, and I’m really excited to hear more about this new restaurant he’s opening up, because I’m sure you won’t be unhappy eating there either.

Will happen, happening, happened.

I’m struck by how lyrically emotional this is. I think you might be too. Let me know if you are.

Today, in conversation, someone used the word fascinating to describe one of their batchmates. I hadn’t heard the word fascinating in so long that I chuckled to myself.

When was the last time someone called another person fascinating?

Or something that had taken place fascinating?

To me, fascinating seems to have that air of superiority about it. If I was to create a GIF or a YouTube clip for it, it would be an old English man wearing a tweed jacket puffing out from his cigar looking at the first ever train or something and sighing, “fascinating”.

But my friend, he made it sound so endearing.

That’s when I realized I had forgotten about the word in it’s entirety. I use “interesting” a lot, to describe events and things and people. But not “fascinating”.

This took my brain somewhere else, and I’ve spent the last half an hour thinking about the other words in the dictionary I’ve forgotten because of how much I have ended up repeating words (such that they’ve gotten stuck in my head), and because of how infrequently others use these words.

And now I want to eat a dictionary.

 

Right now, there’s only one thought on my mind.

Will I ever be called to eat food items that are fully paid for and rate them?

In essence, will someone ever ask me to become a food critic and write critical pieces about the quality of food.

Literally, this has taken up so much thinking time. I feel like I could’ve used that time better. In that period, however, I have eaten:

1. Half a box of Fruit Biscuits from Karachi Bakery, in Hyderabad
2. Half a packet of Laung Sev from Lalit Namkeen, in Indore.

I am truly an Indian boy, which is a nice sentiment to feel as I type this message out.

My thoughts stem from the binge-watching I have done of the new Chef’s Table volume, and by how much I watch the Pizza Show. I think these are two ends of the spectrum when it comes to food reviewing. One, high-end with philosophy behind fine-dining, and one, affordable, with philosophy behind some of the most well-recognizable food to mankind.

I would like to be able to insert such philosophical thought into comprehending where food is from, which is why I’m likely to read a lot more books around food in the coming weeks.

But also, I would really like for people to pay for my food and to tell them what is good and what could be more accessible.

Mmmm.

This year I really wanted to write about books a lot more, and I thought if I stopped blogging daily, that I’d somehow manage to spend more time on reading and writing about the things I read.

You know where this is going.

Apart from the initial enthusiasm I had while setting up the website I would chart my reads on, especially because it rhymed (pageswithtejas.wordpress.com), I’ve put out 6 posts in 9 months. They aren’t even that long, nor are they particularly critical.

To say the least, while I am satisfied that it’s something I was able to embark on, it’s not something I read and am impressed by. Which is my goal.

Not too sure how to feel about it all, but I’m sure I want to correct it, so correct it I will. I feel like I dropped the ball on this a little because of my need to “chill” without realising how this was effectively the way I liked to chill.

 

If you haven’t already.

Read this: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/the-never-ending-story-of-the-tiger-woods-comeback/547427/

Then watch this:

 

Feels.

I wish I could eat McDonalds for the first time once more,
And suffer the same terrible throatache I suffered because I drank Coke too quickly with my Happy Meal,
because the Coke had ice in it.

I wish I could eat my first Pizza Hut pizza again,
And marvel at the cheese stretch on their garlic bread,
And the fluffiness of the Pan crust.

Sometimes I wish I was 5,
And capitalism was a foreign concept,
As was obesity,
And fast food was a treat for doing something positive,
Not something I eat regularly to keep my taste buds alive.

 

Sometimes I look at how easily news is forgotten, and I think: if I do something spectacular, how relevant will that be in the society I was born in?

Just think about the news cycle in this year. Think about the kind of coverage the Indian media has done. Think about the multiple times the media as an institution has been attacked, and the kind of reason it’s been attacked for.

And then think about the kind of news that’s been missed out that people perhaps feel agitated about because of how it affected their community. Think about disproportionate coverage.

Think about tragedies that have taken place that haven’t been followed up on, and how quickly these tragedies, which stunned the social conscious, have been blown out the mind by fresh news about sporting achievements largely cricket oriented.

Think about all this, and there’s potentially an issue in the way our media covers things – atleast the way our mass media does.

To that end, a compliment to Reuters, who seem to be following the Myanmar issue and providing updates daily.

 

Because my reading base is largely my family (and I want them to be informed, the same way they want me to be informed):

You know how I recently wrote about being back in my home city? Well, I’m back home today. And my loose use of the word home is because the last 3 days taught me a lot about what “home” is.

I’m super fussy about where I stay when I am in Bangalore, and try to make it a point to visit the house I grew up in every single time I am there. This time, though, I realized, that I had a home where my family was and wherever I was comfortable – and thus, even my aunt and uncle’s house is now, home for me. Over the last few years I’ve been very stubborn and made some terrible logistical calls based on my desire to go “home”. This realization changed that. It also made me  happier to just be in a place with a roof over my head that sheltered people I loved.

And had South Indian food.

I really needed to be off campus. I could repeat this several times and nobody will realize how much I needed to go see Bangalore and smell it’s air and feel the breeze on my face.

I needed to meet some of my friends. Especially those who were leaving, and 3000, who has become an integral part of things I do on the daily. I needed to meet some seniors and catch up with them – only to understand whether this fourth-year phenomenon was common, or something that was affecting me unnaturally.

And I really needed to eat rasam and dosa.

But I’m back home now. I’m back to the comfort of my hostel room – energized and ready to take over Koba from the corner where my bed lies. I’m ready to eat mess food for another month, without complaining, because I know that there is better food around the corner.

 

I think speaking to people who aren’t your age is the greatest way to get some perspective on your own life. People who are older, people who are younger. It’s amazing how much you can learn from them.

Especially those who have seen you across different ages: they’ll notice the smallest of changes, like the bags under your eyes, or the change in your body posture. The difference between conversations, and the way you talk about particular subjects.

There are a lot of ways your mood and your headspace impacts you, but you’ll never fully realize them till somebody points them out (unless you’re very aware of how you’ve changed).

That’s something I realized when I met my high school teachers the other day.