Dahi Vada for the Soul

This edition of Dahi Vada for the Soul is for those souls like me who are displaced from their home and then are in an effort to fill their lives with activities that will make them feel at home in the present circumstances. In fact, I was strongly debating whether I should call this edition Batata Vada for the Soul, but then, my experiences with the same have not been so great!

So, this weekend, I spoke with my ma, and out of nowhere, the topic of Dahi Vada came up. Now, come to think of it, nothing in our conversation warranted the mention of Dahi Vada, but as they say, moms truly know what “food for thought” to feed their kids. J So armed with my mom’s recipe, I started on one of my… umm… for a lack of better word, let’s just call them “culinary expeditions”. You know, they really do merit that phrase because their chronicles are filled with exploding pressure cookers, melting stirrers, scores of cuts on the fingers with knives, blood spurting from my hands when I ‘accidentally’ tried to open a tin can, yells of “we need a medic!”, blaring fire alarms in the kitchen when I forgot to turn off the stove, but most of the times ending in a satisfying well earned meal relished in the ruins of a kitchen surrounded by mound of pots and pans and a smoke filled apartment.

So, this time, I was attempting something a lot more close to my heart. That fabulous dish invented in India – Dahi Vada. The recipe was quite simple actually. Just soak the ‘Urad’ dal for a couple o’ hours, then drain the water, add things you like in it, grind it all and fry! (Needless to say, quoting this recipe on your website which get you tons of hate mail J) And of course, the dahi was the simplest part of it all: the beat the dahi, add awesome stuff like masala, sugar et al, and that’s it! No room for exploding cookers, melting pots mayhem. J

So off I went, merrily along with my recipe in my mind. I soaked the dal, drained it all, added ‘raapchik’ things like ginger-garlic paste, ‘kothimbir’(cilantro), ‘mirchi’ (hot pepper) etc and then grinded it all to a paste in the blender. And then that’s when I realized. In all my excitement, I had ground the paste a little too much and now it was quite soft. There was no way, I felt, that it would hold on its own, in the hot oil in the frying pan. The mood in the kitchen changed very suddenly. The buoyant, adventuresome mood quickly changed to something that can only be described by the sound you make when you hit such situations: “Uh-oh!” or rather more accurately: “Oh crap!”

Several wild ideas popped into my mind as to how we can save the situation. My roommate ‘You-Know-Who’ J too started looking around for something to thicken the paste. Options from nowhere came to my mind. Like chana peeth or besan used in making bhajis. I thought, why not? - that thing sure does help the kaanda and batata hold its own in the oil, may be it can help my poor little vada today. Rice flour, thaalipeeth flour, rava, extra daal several such options popped into my head. None of them gave me the courage to try it out. Then, I started pondering on the ideas to remove water from this paste so as to make it drier and thus butch up the hardness so that it can stick together in the oil. So things like, “let’s bake this dude, that’ll suck out some water!” “or may be I can blow dry it, we have a table fan somewhere don’t we?” J But then, I dreaded making things worse and images of vada paste blown all over the kitchen and removing a charcoal looking paste from the oven came to my mind. So I dropped the idea. Internet too wasn’t offering any great help. Apparently Google doesn’t give any helpful insights when you search “how to dry dahi vada” or “how to thicken dahi vada” L L. It wasn’t possible to call home, since it was 6 o’ clock in the morning on a Sunday, and my mom would have killed me if I had woken her up to ask “Ma, how do you thicken vadas” J So then, with sheer guts I entered the kitchen. You-Know-Who then told me: “Arre, itna effort maaraa hai, to ek vada aisehi fry karke dekh… fight martey hai, nahi hua to apna Dominos hai na speed dial pe”

So then, with You-Know-Who holding the karchhi and I holding the pot of paste, we approached the hot oil. With hope in my eyes and prayer on my lips, I released the first little ball of paste into the oil…. It sizzled…. It crackled…. It turned a little brown… and yes! Yes! Yes! It held! My sweet little balls of vada held their own against the might of the sizzling hot oil! I remember actually letting out a shout of triumph at that moment. My Dahi Vadas were on their way to be dressed in sweet-spicy Dahi and becoming a mouth watering dish!

As I sat that evening thoroughly relishing my preparation, it occurred to me to write this blog in the style of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books. This Dahi Vada was just like a Chicken Soup to my soul. I was damn proud to be able to make a dish I had always dreamt of attempting, but at some level, it gave me a satisfaction of being closer to home. I was experiencing a queer satisfaction that was far greater than what I should normally have had from just making a dish. I realize now, that at some level, I was that much closer to my home, and it made me very happy that I had achieved that. Sometimes in life, we do certain things that, unknown to us, signify something altogether deep to our heart.

Go on, make your own "Dahi Vada". J

जगणं

जगणं म्हणजे आणखी काय असतं?
मखमली गवतातुन कध्ही
तर कध्ही खाच-खळग्यातुन जायचं असतं
आहो प्रेमाच्या सावलितुन कध्ही
तर कध्ही उना-पावसातुन जायचं असतं

जगणं म्हणजे आणखी काय असतं?
बदलत्या काळानुसार
स्वताहाला बदलायचं असतं
नाही पटल्या काही गोष्टी तरी
वाईट वाटुन घ्यायचं नसतं

जगणं म्हणजे आणखी काय असतं?
सुखाबरोबर थोडं
दुःख देखील पचवायचं असतं
काळाच्या कलेनं घेऊन
ध्येय साध्य करायचं असतं

जगणं म्हणजे आणखी काय असतं?
होतिल हातून चुका म्हणून
प्रयत्नांना थाम्बवायचं नसतं
कष्टांच्या सामर्थ्यावर तर
आयुष्य उभारायचं असतं

जगणं म्हणजे आणखी काय असतं ?
आयुष्याच्या सार्वट गाडीला कध्ही
वंगण नाही म्हणून कुरकुरायचं नसतं
ओढून खेचुन या गाडीला कध्ही
तर कध्ही आत बसून जायचं असतं

जगणं म्हणजे आणखी काय असतं?
स्वप्नं पूर्तिची आशा धरुन
पऊल आपण उचलायचं असतं
भंग झालं स्वप्नं तरी
पऊल मागे घ्यायचं नसतं

जगणं म्हणजे आणखी काय असतं?
येतील त्या घटनांना
सामोरं जायचं असतं
"जगणं म्हणजे नक्की काय असतं?"
हे विचारायचं नसतं

जगणं म्हणजे आणखी काय असतं?
जगणं म्हणजे आणखी कही नसतं

The Chronicles of India: Multiplying by Zero - Part I

It is a given and understood rule of nature that growth in its very nature means loss of the old and arrival of the new. Yet each time this metamorphosis happens in any system, it always faces inertia – it is as if the dead hand of Newton (remember his law of inertia) is dealing the cards!

In my last post, I spoke about my experiences during my stay in India. This post too, is about those experiences, but from a whole different perspective. Now that I look back upon it, as I returned to India this year, there was one significant difference than my previous visits. It was that I was going back after working in the United States for a year. What I mean by this is that I had had time to think about certain concepts and my outlook towards life, society and ethics had undergone a change. After experiencing India for about a month, I now realize that it has undergone a change as well. The reality was different than my expectation. I do not wish to say that the reality was bad, but that it was unexpected. It wasn’t sad but it was, nevertheless, disconcerting.

Let me go back a little in time. In the summer of 1991, India achieved one important milestone. Many people of my age, who were just 9-10 year old children, may have missed the full import of it, but it was the biggest revolution that happened in India after independence - an economic revolution. After the political independence in 1947, we got economic independence in 1991 when the government decentralized several economic sectors, thus opening up the market to free enterprise and growth.

Luckily for India, around this time, the global economic trend moved towards information and knowledge technology sectors, something that India was strong in and eager to deliver. With that turn of fortune, India prospered – and prospered like nothing we had seen before. Within a few years, India’s very own Silicon Valley sprung up. The young 22-something generation was getting lapped up by these IT companies like hot cakes. Salaries shot through the roof. A plethora of products from FMCGs to cars flooded the market. You could literally smell the perfume of ‘free growth’ in the Indian air. Trade, manufacturing, marketing, services, entertainment, and tourism – the whole gamut of a nation’s activities had found a thus far unseen space for expansion.

We are not the first country to undergo the present phase of growth. Before us, all the developed countries of our time have gone through it. America underwent this phase at the beginning of the industrial revolution. You’d be surprised to know how conservative and traditional America once was. However, as its economy grew and its society became modern, the American society changed. As the industrial revolution unfolded in America, hundreds of factories, manufacturing units and companies of all sorts sprung up all across the length and breadth of the country. Young men and women started finding jobs anywhere across the country. Families who had hitherto lived together in one family house were now faced with the prospect of seeing their next generation leave that home for a job which was hundreds of miles away. It was a career move for the children of the house, and family ties couldn’t hold them back anymore. It quickly became the norm that the children of the house would leave the old family home after education and go far and away due to their jobs. Later, as the universities opened up all across the nation, children got admissions in universities anywhere across the country, and in a few years, it became the norm to send your child out of the house at 18 years of age to a university, after which, they would get jobs once again away from home.

Now replace the word ‘America’ by ‘India’ in the above paragraph and you will have read the present and future course of the Indian society. In our case, it’s the IT revolution instead of the industrial one in America and Europe. Today we see graduates leaving home soon after graduation to work in a company hundreds of miles away from home. Just as it was in the turn-of-the-century America, it has now become the norm in India to leave the family home for a job. The already diminished Indian family is now becoming truly nuclear. The children now work so far away from home and have become so involved in their own world that they see their own parents only occasionally and at times a visit to their homes is only during Diwali. In present day America too, it’s the same. This is the first price that India is paying to continue on the journey of growth. I do not wish to say that this is bad, but only wish to remark that this is a consequence.

Ever since independence, Indians have shown a high appetite for modernism. Even in the early dawn of our independence, you could see the people in the cities trying to hastily imbibe modern way of life. Village folk who moved into cities shed their dhotis for trousers and rock and roll gained popularity. This is a good trend. With growth and independence, a nation must unshackle itself from the regulations and institutions of the past and look for opportunities to become modern. With this aforementioned ‘economic deliverance’ however, this appetite reached a tempo like none other.

With all the gusto for growth, a new concept had come in through the door. It is called “disposable income”. It was a totally new concept to a nation where billions were (and still are) below poverty line for four decades after independence. Till now, the term ‘income’ had meant a means for survival and something to be zealously saved in our father’s generation. Our parents saved and saved so that their children could attain higher education. It was the primary factor in explaining why our generation had the highest percentage of a middle class than ever before.

And now, we had disposable income - income that the youth did not know what to do with. And this according to me was a big departure from the past. Now that the young men and women in India do not live with their families, the degree of freedom that they have is very large. With the money that they earn, they do not have to take care of the family expenses. And this money is finding its way into the pool labeled ‘disposable income’.

The Chronicles of India: Multiplying by Zero - Part II

As I said before, India always had a big hunger for modernism. In the last decade of the 20^th century, we discovered that we had a rapacious hunger for ‘westernism’. Now, I do not in any way wish to give the term ‘westernism’ a bad connotation. But I certainly do wish to differentiate it from ‘modernism’.

With the former social migration of youth away from home, and the latter concept of disposable income, the one big difference I saw in today’s India, was that the young people are literally choosing to dispose off their income. Partying, clubbing and pubbing are fast becoming the activities of the youth. Discotheques, bars and lounges are now the haunts of many Indians. The young men and women have started positively disliking staying at home. Although it is amazing fun to go with your friends to the local restaurant for a filling yet simple dinner, we now see the young crowd choosing to spend two or three thousand rupees for dinner on a regular basis every alternate day of the week at some hip expensive restaurant. Many young people, who thought ten times before spending money when they were in college, now do not think even twice before blowing hundreds of thousands of rupees in a week. We are all trying to be modern but disappointingly losing sight of the goal. Yes, Americans too enjoy partying and clubbing, but the mature American youth will still today be seen saving money from the first job to buy their own car and apartment. How many from today’s Indian youth think of saving for their house or their car? There is a disconcerting lack of direction that I saw in today’s young India.

During this same time, many like me who left the shores of India after graduation seem to have gone to the other end of the spectrum. We were faced with a stark lack of money and a high constraint environment when we came to the United States. While balancing our relentless pressure of studies along with the added pressure of making ends meet by working crazy hours at 7 dollars an hour on the campus job, we have learnt the art of saving. Every month, in spite of our best efforts, we saved not more than 10 or 20 dollars. That money was saved over the semester to buy a calling card to call home or for one movie at the end of the term with roommates. So much so that, saving has become second nature to us now. Although I don’t have to think ten times before going to a restaurant now, I still make it a point to carry a lunch box and cook dinner at home, save for an occasional day. As a result, I found myself to be a misfit on certain occasions in the changing environment of India. It is like we have been in a cocoon for the past three years thus keeping ourselves intact as we were in college and then thrown back into a changed atmosphere.

Why is that we must always assimilate the easy and eventually useless aspects of the western civilization? After living for three years in the United States, I have come to understand at least a part of the real American. It is not the one they show in movies and which people all over the world are copying. If you want to be modern, why not try imbibing the strong love for rule and law which the West has? Americans will not bribe a police officer, they will not throw trash on the street, they will not break lanes while driving, they will not honk like buffoons and create a chaos on the roads with senseless driving, they will not ride their motorbikes between two car lanes and cause disorder on the streets, they will not jay walk, they will not go partying on a weekday, they will not consider any work as low, they will invest in the internet and computers to make their country a most modern nation, they will not create any caste and creed based reservation, they will ensure that their surroundings are clean with no room for mosquitoes and diseases, they will not pollute their air with such amazing disregard as Indians do. But these things, an Indian will not imbibe. What we will imbibe is the outer shell of fun and enjoyment that erodes our identity.

As I spent my days in India this time, I pondered on the question that can we not have an India, which is modern, but which has held on to those values that define its identity? The answer is yes, but the path is difficult. But it is a path I believe that we must take, for it would be a shame to lose our identity in the pursuit of modernism.

They say, each nation has this moment - the moment when a whole country feels, breathes and grows as a single entity. Our India too had this moment in the last decade of the 20^th century. Money is a powerful thing, and India has finally found the most powerful tool in the world to establish itself once and for all as a global force. But, this same powerful tool, like most others of its kind, is a double edged sword. Money is a tricky thing. It can take you up, and it can take you down as well. It would be a shame to lose ourselves in the world’s crowds. Not now, not after being the oldest developed civilization in the world, not after fighting a hundred year old war of independence – we must not lose our identity. In Nehru’s words, “the soul of a nation, long suppressed, has finally found utterance.” We must keep our tryst with destiny.