Calvin it is

Was having a bad day when I saw this posted on Bhavana’s timeline. Couldn’t stop laughing. Sharing it here.

Calvin

 

K for Kheer

sevaiyan_kheer garnished with Cashews and raisins

Indian food is incomplete without desserts. We( at least most of us) just keep finding an excuse to eat sweets. One of the quick, easiest and tasty desserts is sevaiyan ka kheer. Also known as shavige payasa (ಶಾವಗೆ ಪಾಯಸ) in Kannada or Payasam in South India. Posting a recipe here.

Ingredients:

1 cup of broken vermicelli/ Sevaiyan
4 cups of milk
1/2 cup sugar
Ghee for frying
Raisins, Dry roasted cashews, finely powdered cardamom/Elaichi – for garnishing

Preparation:

• Heat the ghee in a heavy bottomed non-stick pan over medium heat. Add sevaiyan and fry till golden brown.
• Pour milk and add sugar while stirring continuously and bring it to boil.
• Cook for about 15-20 minutes or until the milk is slightly thickened.
• Take it down from the gas, add the cashews, raisins and the cardamom powder

Serve it hot in a nice glass bowl

This dish can be made with a variety of ingredients in a variety of ways. I have posted the sevaiyan one coz that is what we frequently prepare at home.

The other types being Rice kheer( also very common) or with Apple, Badam, Carrots, fruits, coconut,khus khus(poppy seeds)… and the list goes on. This can be prepared on the gas as well as in the microwave. Also, the sugar can be substituted(esp for diabetics) by honey, sweeteners, jaggery,… You could also use condensed milk instead of milk. The garnishing can be done with almond and pistachios as well. In parts of Eastern India, saffron is also used. Even the serving  method can differ. It can be had hot or cold. You can have it your seviyan floating in milk or let it soak all the milk and have it dry topped with dry grated coconut or variety of other Indian spices. You can also add rose essence if serving chilled for a nice taste. In short, use your creativity

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J for Janapada

Janapada/Jaanapada ( ಜಾನಪದ) is folk in Kannada. Posting a video of Kannada Folk Dance “Ghallu Ghallenuta” performed on Indian Independence Day celebrations in Perth. There is some background noise but you will still enjoy the performance.

Hope you like it

Join the ABC Wednesday challenge here

English Memsaab

Major languages of India. Image courtesy: mapsofIndia.com

Staying away from your home and hometown teaches you a lot! One such important lesson is communicating in sign language or broken sentences in an unknown language to get your point across to the other person. Esp. in a country like India where language changes every few hundred kilometres. If I take just one example of Karnataka state, the languages spoken are mainly Kannada, Tulu and Konkani ( later two by minority population mostly in coastal Karnataka).  Even the Kannada spoken is not similar throughout the state and dialects are so different that people find it difficult to understand each other at times. Again the Konkani and Tulu are spoken differently by different sects who speak the language. As a country we have so many languages and dialects that WordPress dictionary shows them as spelling errors as I type most of the names here.

I remember, having to ask directions in Trivandrum, where people understood English but the problem was they couldn’t get the way we pronounced the names of the places and ended up giving wrong directions and sending us, at times, in the exact opposite direction of where we intended to go. We would finally manage to get hold of one person who spoke and understood ‘our English’.  It is one of those unfortunate moments when you thank the British for having ruled us (at least they have given us a common language:English)

Now I stay in Bangalore, which is the capital city of Karnataka. My mother tongue being Kannada, I thought, now I am done with broken communication but life has other plans. My PG owner is a Tamil native and hence most of the cooks who come to our PG to cook are from small distant villages in Tamil Nadu and know only Tamil. If you happen to drop by on one of the weekday mornings into our PG, you will notice an earthling v/s alien like situation. Two people blabbering away at each other and looking at each other in wonder. And they part ways again talking, this time to themselves. One of these people is our cook and other could be any of the other inmates.

Fortunately we have a couple of girls who speak Tamil, who come to our rescue once in a while. On one such occasions our cook exclaimed to my other PG-mate(in Tamil of course) while pointing at me, “How is this girl going to manage after marriage, She doesn’t know Tamil, does she intend to speak in English with her husband and in-laws?” I have faced “What is this girl going to do after marriage?!” many a times before but this time it was for an entirely different new reason. The innocent gal doesn’t even know other languages are spoken in India or that B’lore is in Karnataka whose official language is Kannada or that so many non-kannadigas also stay here and it is ok to be so.  She has also taken upon herself the responsibility of teaching the poor me some Tamil and kindly extended the invitation to attend her brother’s marriage in her home town.

Yesterday, was the icing on the cake. She told me another assumption she had made about me and another friend of mine. That initially she thought we were ‘foreigners’ I couldn’t respond coz I was busy laughing.

Of all the confused identities this one takes the crown!  :D

One and one are sometimes eleven

I was tagged by Bikram to answer the eleven questions and tag people in turn. Hence this post.

The Rules first:
1. You must post the rules.
2. Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post and then create eleven new questions to ask the people you’ve tagged.
3. Tag eleven people and link to them on your post.
4. Let them know you’ve tagged them!

Here are my Bikram’s questions

1. What is it that you love to do, most, and would rather spend your time doing it?
I love reading and watching good movies. Give me chance and I will spend an entire lifetime reading books and watching movies.

2.What do you think others think of you?
Hmmm. I am not sure but two things that people invariably say about me: intelligent and silent.

3.Where do you see yourself end the next 10 years?
John Lennon said “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans”.

4. What is one quality of yours you admire the most?
I think optimism. I am an incorrigible optimist. Though I do get cynical at times but it doesn’t take long to recover from those cynical bouts.

5. Have you played a trick on someone that went bad, What is it?
Way back in school, one evening at my friend’s place, I was planning to scare a friend of mine in which I succeeded but as a side effect her Mom also got really scared. If I wasn’t in her good books I guess she would have thrown me out of her house

6.Who would you say made you who you are today (other than your parents, if that is what you would answer ).
I believe we are a sum of all of our combined experiences in life. I’d say a lot of people have a contribution to who I am today but yes a major share does go to my Parents.

I was lucky to have some wonderful teachers, friends and some amazing bunch of people around me during my growing years. I so miss them. Staying away from home and not being in touch with many of these people makes me sad.

7. What gives you joy?
Hmmm… listening to that wonderful song that makes you lose yourself, Paani puri, travel to a place that I have never been before, a surprise gift, a surprise phone call, sitting on the sea-shore and listening to the waves hit the shore and all those little things that make you realise life is beautiful.

8.Who is your favourite hero and Why?
Shahrukh Khan. I like his larger than life image on-screen and his quick-wittedness off-screen. Also, the fact that he is a family man.

9.Why do you blog?
It started as an experiment, a place to rant, continued as a time pass. I kept going for the love of writing and sharing my thoughts. When I was demotivated the fact that my blog is read and people commented and kept coming back made me come back too. Once I discovered the real power of blogging and made some wonderful friends through it, I fell in love with it and haven’t looked back since then.

10.Do you believe in love stories , if yes why?
YES. They are one of the things that make life beautiful

11.Tell us an incident that you remember always.
The first time I made a friend who stayed on as my best friend and we remained so for many years to come. It was our second day at school(kindergarten) and in the tiffin break while I was trying to open my tiffin box it fell down. This girl from the same class came forward, put half of her tiffin in the lid of her tiffin box and offered it to me. I smiled and took it. I don’t even remember if we exchanged names but that marked the beginning of wonderful journey and the happy times we shared later.

Here are my questions:

1. Given a chance, which is the one movie character you would like to play?

2. If you were an animal who do you think you’d be and why? (Humans are animals too but you can’t use that as an answer)

3. A genie appears in front of you and grants you three wishes what would you ask for? (You can’t ask for more wishes for a wish)

4. If your life were a song, what would the title be?

5. Which one would you rather have beauty, brains or strength?

6. Do you think it is the man who should be paying on a date?

7. Do you believe in ‘Love at first sight’?

8. Name one movie you really hated.

9. Name one house-hold chore you really hate

10. What is your most treasured possession?

11. One thing about yourself that many people don’t know

Now the tagging part. Trying to find eleven people who haven’t been tagged

Bhavana
Pallavi
Tangyorangesour
Saumya
Harshad
Felix
Mayur
Patty
Michael
Sherry

And the list is not exhaustive. Anyone can pick the tag. Do pick the tag if you liked the questions.  :D

Phew! this was tougher than what I thought

I for Image

woman looking at herself in the mirror

Image: I am talking about the image one has of others and oneself.

The idea for this post came across when I saw beautiful palace pics on Sherry’s(Travel Spirit) post Palace Splendor. I commented that the pics took me to a different era, a time when the kings and queens reigned. She responded “Cool era…but I wouldn’t want to wear the whale bone corsets…ouch!”. Gosh! why would anyone wear such a thing, I thought. But lot of women did.

This is just one instance where women willingly go through pain to fit into the society’s image of a perfect female. This society image includes body image and as well as other behavioral image.Every culture and period of history has had its own standards of “an ideal female” and women from generations have fallen for it. Why even the modern “free” woman also wears painful heels in spite of their well-known ill effects. And anorexic models are the new role models.

While practices like foot binding and corsets are old and abandoned, others like breast ironing are very much alive. Around the same time as corsets, some women also got their ribs surgically removed to get a narrow waist. Fainting was a virtue, it showed a woman is delicate. In fact, I had read somewhere that there were also Charm classes which taught women to faint in a “lady-like” manner.

Sigh! I am so glad I am born in an era and in a culture where no such cruel practices exist( biases do exist but none so harmful/cruel). But at the same time it is also true that we live in an age with instant access to mass media. Hence we are constantly fed with ideas of modern ideal beauty and attitude. Never has history seen such a monumental rise of beauty products, surgical beauty treatments, personality development classes or self-help books. Add to it, technology has helped us to touch up these images to take them to a new unattainable level..

Humans are conditioned to believe ‘what is beautiful is good’. While it is a research proven fact that attractive people(which mostly means good-looking or the current idea of good-looking) have an advantage over the others in the society, why is it that women are more concerned about looks as compared to men. The reasons are again historic. Women had to compete to marry the most eligible man. A woman’s strength was(may be still is) her beauty. Women had no way of supporting themselves, and hence marrying the right man meant a lot. For a man his defining qualities may be good-looking, earning well, very strong or much more but a woman’s identity is tightly tied to her beauty/looks.

Well times have changed and women are more independent now and define their own rules. While both sexes are equal offenders, most guys I have met are pretty open to many ideas of beauty, it is us girls who judge themselves and other girls by these strict set of parameters. Time we stood up for ourselves and choose a happy and healthy life instead struggling to cope to somebody else’s standards. Let’s create an image where a healthy and happy woman is the ideal one.

Though I am posting it later, I am writing it on International Women’s Day and nothing better than one of my friend’s FB status to conclude the post, “You are sexy, strong and fearless and you know it!!! Happy Women’s Day all you lovely ladies!! ♥ ♥ keep rocking!!”

Join the ABC Wednesday challenge here .

Que Sera Sera

Doris Day

Beautiful Earth

I saw this beautiful pic on FB page of Rare and Uncommon Photos. The details about the image here:

The photograph was taken by the crew on board the Columbia during its last mission, on a cloudless day. The picture is of Europe and Africa when the sun is setting. Half of the picture is in night. The bright dots you see are the cities’ lights.
The top part of Africa is the Sahara Desert. Note that the lights are already on in Holland , Paris , and Barcelona,and that’s it’s still daylight in Dublin, London, Lisbon , and Madrid. The sun is still shining on the Strait of Gibraltar . The Mediterranean Sea is already in darkness.
In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean you can see the Azores Islands;  below them to the right are the Madeira Islands ; a bit below are the Canary Islands; and further South, close to the farthest western point
of Africa, are the Cape Verde Islands.

Day_and_Night from Space Shuttle Columbia on it's last mission. Photo Courtesy: Rare and Uncommon Photos FB page

Not sure if this is indeed taken by Columbia’s last flight but the photo sure aroused my curiosity and I searched for more authentic sources. Boy I was in for a treat! Posting a few of these wonderful pics I collected from various sources; all of them in turn credit their source to NASA.

Space shuttle Endeavour's open payload bay in a picture taken in December 1998

The NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette against a backdrop of the sun on Tuesday, May 12, 2009, as viewed from Florida, U.S. Image Courtesy: NASA/Denverpost.com

The video is called “All Alone in the night”. It is a time lapse footage of the Earth as seen from the ISS. This video on YouTube is uploaded by BitMeizer. Images from http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ and Music: ‘Freedom Fighters’ by Two Steps from Hell. One hell of a video.

The next one shows our beautiful Earth.
 

H for Hope

H

Happy Holi to everyone and yes Happy Woman’s Day too.

Both of them on the same day, March 8th 2012 reminded me of my last year’s post on Holi’s history. Which reminded me of the ABC Wednesday that I left halfway last time. I thought why not start it again. So I checked the website and guess what it is again time for H this week and today is indeed Wednesday. So I gatecrash.

Hmm what do I write about? Starting from H? and then I realize all the important things in life do start with h: happiness, heaven, hell, home, human, heart, heavy, hug, holy….

One such word is “Hope”. “Hope is a good thing, May be the best of things, and no good thing ever dies”, said Andy in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption”. For me these are tough times and all I am feeling now are hurt and heavy. Hell it is not, but neither does it feel like heaven. Hope is what keeps me going. Hope holds you and helps you get through trying times.

But someone else(Robert Ingersoll) said, “Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity”.  Well, I am just hoping hope wins, comes out truthful, this time and every other time.

Hail Hope!

This post is written for ABC Wednesday. Also, hoping moderators don’t mind people joining halfway through the challenge.

Coorg – 2

View from Talakaveri temple

Continued from earlier post – Coorg – 1 .

One of the places you shouldn’t miss if you go to Coorg is Tala-Kaveri, which is the origin of river Cauvery (Kaveri ). There is a temple built at the source where you can get a pooja done and also a place where you can throw a coin and wish. But the best thing about the place is the natural beauty. The silence, the air, the greenery is breath-taking. I just didn’t want to leave the place.

Paputtu - a Coorgi dish. Since I lost my phone with the pic, have taken it from the Internet.

We couldn’t visit Bhagamandala (one of our friends is apparently too cool for visiting a temple). It is again a temple, built at the confluence of river Kaveri and it’s two tributaries : Kanika and Sujyoti ( joins from underground). It is considered sacred because of the triveni sangam  and the temple is a blend of Malayalee and Nepali architecture. I had visited Coorg, may be around 13-14 years back and I think it is this place where we could stand at the point of tributaries meeting and you could keep one feet in cold water and other in slightly warmer water. Two sources meeting at the single point and still retaining their thermal identity. Is that even possible? Don’t know but I clearly remember that amazing feeling.

Inside Golden Temple

Talking of temples, another one you shouldn’t miss is the Golden temple in Kushal Nagar(an hour away from Madikeri). It is a Buddhist temple along with the Nyingmapa Tibetan Monastery. The beautiful array of colours leaves you dazzled. We also spotted this cute white duck at the temple premises and some rabbits with pink eyes too. Also the shopping complex offers you a wide range of Tibetan goods.

White Duck @ the temple complex premises

The most recent addition to the tourist attractions of Coorg is the Dubare Elephant Camp. The place also offers river-rafting but then we again had no time coz some people had more important things to do than have fun at a trip.

crying elephant

Anyway, if you go at the right timing, you also get to give the elephants a bath(at a price of course). I think it is between 9-10 in the morning and 4-5 in the evening. We had to take a boat to reach the place. You also get a chance to feed the elephant and ride on the elephant. We reached at an odd time so all we got to do was see the elephants and talk to them(yeah I did).  I felt bad for them. I even saw one crying. Wish I could do something for them.

That brings an end my Coorg saga.  :)

I also know of Nisargadhama in Madikeri which is known to be good place to visit but we didn’t go as we didn’t have enough time. I just remember a tree house @ the place from my trip to Coorg way back when I was in school.

Golden Temple Premises

Also, from one of the posts, I came to know of the museums in the city of Madikeri, which one can visit.

With Balaram

Soaked in the colours of Golden Temple

Hope you enjoyed reading this