Don't call me a feminist!

How many articles have we read about the role of women in a particular field?
Every morning as I walk to work, I listen to SBS radio, a radio station that is in liaison with the BBC World service. Every other day, I get a lecture on the 'role of women' in some male dominated aspect of work. Today, however, I am going to lecture you on something else. I am going to list the funniest women I have come across in the field of entertainment.
Not getting into the details of why women are not routinely known for being funny, I am going to start with Alice Tinker.
Emma Chambers plays the dopey Alice Tinker in BBC's Vicar of Dibley . Although her character in the show is peripheral, she personifies Alice. The show itself, is a far cry from the popular American sitcoms. It is about a woman Vicar, Geraldine Granger, who is sent to the small, country parish of Dibley. Unlike the chiseled leads in other shows, Ms.Granger is blissfully obese. The other characters in this show are equally "imperfect" in their own way, but that only adds charm if anything to the whole story. I think if I had to pick one example of Alice's goofy humor, it would be this.
Another funny woman, I came across in Australia is Kitty Flanagan . She is a regular on a T.V. show on the national network. She always manages to get everyone in splits. Kitty is the perfect example of how a just a little bit of wit can make someone bypass all the usual rules of getting noticed.
The crown, however, goes to Sofia Vergara of Modern Family . She plays Gloria in the show. For the first few episodes you are just wowed by the sheer oomph she adds to the show. If the entertainment industry is a medium of objectifying sexuality, Sofia is a solid example of how that is done. But the one thing bigger than her breasts, is of course, her sense of humor and comic timing. :) Her Colombian accent adds to the hilarity of her lines. Towards the end of the show, you realize that she is a completely clued up, sensitive and bright bimbo. Something you would not expect first time you see her. I could not find the funnier parts of the show on Youtube, but here's a teaser. You don't have to worry about losing interest. ;)
These three women have made me laugh a good deal in the past few years. Feel free to add your favorite funny women to this database too!
Cheers!

The degree of Indian-ness

This , and related discussion on my buzz prompted this post.

I have nothing against people questioning their own identity. I do that many times. I think it is a sign of a healthy, functioning mind. However, when it comes to being Indian, there is no single rule that can define us all. Living away from home, I actually go through a series of panic attacks every time I have to go back home for a holiday. I attribute that fear to the fact that I am not yet strong enough to handle this culture switch gracefully. The discussion on buzz reminded me of a first hand 'Indian experience' I went through about two years ago.

I was supposed to be in India for six weeks in December 2008. As soon as I made my travel arrangements, I went out with my Australian and other international friends to celebrate. We were sitting in a gloomy bar, on a weekday afternoon, with the fresh memories of experimental failures haunting us. All of a sudden someone suggested that they should meet me in India for a back-packing trip!

I was not exactly supportive of this idea in the beginning. However, they talked me into it. All along at the back of my mind, I was worried to the core. I did not want them to be overwhelmed. I knew them all well and knew they had open minds. However, accompanying someone on a low budget trip around Rajasthan, was not exactly, my cup of tea. I had never done anything low-budget in my life in India. I had never traveled around on my own, around my own country. I had seen everything from the point of view of a spoilt tourist. Apart from that, the people I was supposedly going to escort had never been to India before. Their ideas about what goes on in India ranged from riding on an elephant to one's own wedding, to a land where everyone does Yoga on those silly, non-slipping Yoga mats!

The idea made me admire their courage (or ignorance) and the skeptic in me eventually unruffled her feathers. I spent a week in Pune before my gang of friends arrived in Mumbai from Goa. Since they were all using "Lonely Planet" as their travel Bible, they chose places recommended by the book. When I got into a taxi in Mumbai, the driver was a bit surprised when I told him to take me to a hotel close to cafe Leopold. He quizzed me about what a normal looking Indian girl is going to do in this firangi ghetto. I had to explain to him how I was showing around my Australian friends (actually by this time, two people from Holland had joined us too since they were friends of a friend I met in Australia, who was also in the group). This explanation was then stuck with me for the rest of the two weeks. I had to explain to every second person on the train, restaurant, hotel, rikshaw etc., what I was doing with these bunch of goras. We got bored of the same story so two days into it, we started making up stories just to see how our interrogators react. In one of them, I was married to one of the guys in the group. I made up some very creative Bollywoody answers to the questions related to the whole 'how-did-your-parents-take-it? question. Mumbai was extremely overwhelming for all of them. The sheer density of population on the streets was enough to make them claustrophobic. On top of that, a few of them got taken for a ride by beggars and taxi drivers. Overall the reaction was tepid, just as I had expected. Since all of us were committed to making it a fun experience, everyone was trying to look at the brighter side. There were plenty. Just walking down the streets of South Mumbai was enough to cheer everyone up. We had the much awaited "Mumbai-local" ride. Although it was not the cleanest places to be, everyone had to admit that the number of people it dutifully transports, ranging from women with huge, open baskets of fish to working class people, would put any transport system under stress.

The day we left for Jaipur, the Taj was bombed by terrorists. Some of my friends panicked and considered going back. But all roads back home went through Mumbai. So we decided to stay in Rajasthan and continue with our trip. By this time, they swore that it would have made no difference had they been traveling with an Italian or a Spanish girl instead of me. I was as clueless just about everything as them. The only advantage being, I could bargain in Hindi (they accepted this only because they did not know how Marathi my Hindi really is). We had to constantly keep accounts, haggle, wait for rooms to be cleaned, then wait again because they were not 'clean enough'. It was one of the most stressful times of my life, especially with the additional fear of more terror attacks. By this time, the colors of Rajasthan, the cheap, yummy vegetarian food, bangles, skirts with mirrors etc., had infused the much needed enjoyment in our journey.

Every person we met, however inquisitive about our personal lives had an air of harmless curiosity about them. Initially, even walking down the street with my friends was stressful. But when you come out of your own awkwardness and face people with the same honesty that you face yourself with, everyone joins in. We went to a really old Meera temple in Jaipur. At first, the priest gave me the look that seemed to say, "I hope you know what you are doing". Each one of my friends, then asked him questions about the temple, its architecture, about Meera, Lord Krishna and I was translating it for all of them. In the end, he called me back just as I was about to leave the temple and handed me a laddoo. As a gift for showing people around who are not from my culture. He only had one request, "Just the way you are showing them a slice of our culture, also explain to them the importance of being vegetarian". I was really touched by the way he put it.

The philosophy of this travel group was very simple. Eat everything, walk a lot, talk to as many people as you can and respect the local customs. We hardly ate any meat in Jaipur. We were eating hot street food only. One day, when we were in Ajmer, one of the guys in the group started craving meat. Since we did not want to take any chances, we went to a fairly expensive restaurant (from the Lonely Planet list) and paid Rs.500 for a single portion of continental chicken. That night, he became violently ill. We were living in a simple hotel called the Haveli Inn, in Ajmer. I woke up the owners who lived downstairs. The next morning, we had to take him to the local government hospital. This was my first time in a public hospital. I thought this is going to be one of the biggest points on their 'bad sides of India' list. The room was humble, but spotless. He was given intra-venous medicines all day and all night. All of that, including the rent for the room came to only Rs.2500. The actual medicines cost lesser than the chicken that had made him sick. The owners of the hotel sent their domestic help with bland, Indian, sick-man's food that was just what he needed. His firang charm made sure that he always had company in the hospital. With all the nurses asking him questions about his personal life. :)

He walked out feeling as strong as he was before. All of them took a list of medicines that the hospital needed frequently for treating kids with diarrhea, since that was the most common cause of hospitalization amongst kids living in poor neighborhoods. My friends bought a stock of those for people who might not have enough money to afford the medicines (and the fact that there are people who cannot afford it says a lot about where we are going). This was the only exception to an otherwise low-budget trip. They only kept enough cash to get by until they reached Nepal, donating the rest to the hospital. Without any intervention on my part, they were given receipts of all the donations and informed where they were going to be used. The hospital turned out to be the highest point of appreciation.

When I returned to Brisbane, we had a beer over our experiences. Although India seemed overwhelming at times, most of my friends were sure they were going to go back for a slightly upgraded holiday. Some were enticed by their visits to Yoga schools while others were floored by the beauty of the Himalayas. All of them chirped in unison that they definitely wanted to go back to Goa.

That trip was an lesson in many ways. Firstly, it was a lesson in honesty, where even though people look at you funny, you go ahead and do what you have set out for yourself. To be able to accept that your country is not perfect. To be able to present to people India, in her real form and let them make their own judgement. In the end, the message that I really wanted to put across got through. Without my having to spell it out. India doesn't care if you are a proud Indian! And Indians don't either. If you attract enough attention, they would give you a few curious looks. If you are dupe-worthy and look loaded, they would dupe you without any of their thirty three billion gods stopping them. Most of them are just looking for simple survival. In a deluge of people wanting to replace their place in this world. The country herself seems to me like this complacent mother cat. Watching a new batch of kittens amuse themselves as she lies down for rest. She does not care if you are proud to be a part of her litter. As long as you get your mouse and get by, all is well. :)

Think before you blink!

I recently collected some karma points by being an experimental subject. Every now and then, graduate students get these near desperate emails in their inbox. Some psychology or optometry student wants them to be their experimental subject. Whenever I have time, I try and take part in these kind of experiments. Sometimes, for the students because they are good friends. At others, because I am interested in the experiment.
I find the role of being a "subject" oddly relaxing. :)
For one, you have to be a complete lab-rat. Without unnecessarily opining on what they are trying to do. Apart from that, it gives you an insight into how many factors control a single experiment - something that I myself have trouble monitoring, especially in the scary forests of organic chemistry.
These experiments were carried out using a range of contact lenses. As a "healthy" subject I was required to have no acquaintance with the usage of any kind of contact lenses. I had to go through a routine visual acquity test (I aced it, btw) and then I wore a pair of contacts. The movement of my eyes was filmed in an upward and a downward gaze. We started with soft, silicon lenses and ended with hard, poly (methyl metacrylate) ones. I was not told exactly what she was trying to find out. So during filming, I was asked to count from zero onwards until she asked me to stop. I did exactly what I was told. At the end of each session, my cornea was desensitized using aneasthetic eye drops. The numb cornea was then filmed for the same duration.
The moment she told me to stop, I stopped counting.
After all the tests were over, I rated the lenses according to the level of comfort. Just before I left, she confessed that she was getting inconsistent data.
She told me that she was monitoring the blinking patterns of her subjects. Even after desensitizing the cornea, she was getting inconsistent blinking patterns. Which made me pause for thought. I realized then that I was mechanically counting numbers without trying to control the thoughts in my head. All these years that I have been successfully using my eyes, I have realized that thinking affects blinking. I blink more when I think. To study my physical blinking pattern, I think the experimentor would need to numb my mind more than my cornea. When I told her this, she said,"I asked you to count! So that I keep you in the experiment."
And count I did! With an avalanche of thoughts going on in my mind at the same time. Those ten minutes of filming were like a gold mine of time! I organized so many experiments, wrote so many new posts, planned and scrapped so many dinner menus in those ten minutes!
A little bit of Googling led me to this . I should have probably offered a repeat analysis. I took the easy way out, by not doing so.
Next time, I will think before I blink! =)

About fears..

Sometimes, accepting that you cannot handle a situation is more of a grown-up thing to do, than getting into it and being "grown-up" about it.
When in doubt, growing up is a better state of being than being grown up.
I don't know how long I will take to grow up with some aspects of my mind. But I think I have been a grown up about a lot of things since I was a kid. :)

Sometimes, when you are really angry, you can hear a voice inside that say,
"Calm down. This is not you. This is your jealousy talking". Initially I used to feel really mad at that voice. The basic question being, "How can I be jealous?".
Or sometimes when you get slapped in the face (figuratively), you mope about it as if the whole world is being unfair. Then this voice says, "I hope you know it, this is not you, this is your ego".

I know that I don't like swimming in the sea. It has been my problem since I was a little baby. I used to get moody on the beach and then start sobbing. I took swimming lessons. I love swimming in lakes and ponds. Or even a finite waterfall. I still can't handle the ocean. I have rationalized it so many times.
Maybe it is the vastness. The limitlessness that makes you feel insignificant.
Maybe it is the uncertainty.
You know you are not going to drown.
Why can't you just assume it is a vast lake and it ends on the other side of the horizon!
Nothing works.

Then I accept that some things just cannot be rationalized.
Growing up is not really doing everything without fear. It is knowing your fears better and better every day. :)

Big Bollywood Bubble

Although I am not much of a Sci-fi geek, I believe that human beings are capable of living many realities simultaneously. There is an evolutionary trend which, when observed in retrospect, makes one think that people tend to arrive at the same conclusions using different roads. Alternatively, people also come to accept their own realities using different vehicles. If we take an imaginary picture of human beings on the Earth living their own realities, it would look like a model for some sort of a meta-physical string theory. Where people exist on all levels of emotional, economic,moral,cultural and psychological dimensions. One of these dimensions is Bollywood.

The reason for this long, winding introduction is the fact that I am trying to copy Raj.
Bollywood is a bubble. For people who enjoy being a part of it as a viewer, actor, director, underworld venture capitalist etc., it is a reality. Once you step out of it however, you cannot go back to it. I am very sure of the last statement. Whoever thinks that they can step in and out of the Bollywood bubble are most certainly still in it.
When I was a kid, about ten years old, I loved Sunday mornings for a number of reasons. The most important being a television program called "Rangoli". They used to telecast Bollywood songs from movies across the decades. One day, we had a self-proclaimed disciplinarian over for an early morning breakfast on a Sunday. When I stepped out of my room for my dose of early morning show, I was rudely denied access to it! I wasn't by any stretch of imagination an ego-less ten year old. If anything I had more of it then that I have now. It has taken sixteen years of ego-bashing to bring me to my current level of impudence.

I was caught unprepared. I gathered myself quickly and asked him why I cannot watch it. In reply, he asked me a few questions.
"Do you think, before they conceived you, your mom and dad ran around trees like the people in these songs do?"
"How do I know? I wasn't there. I don't care if they did!!"
"Would you like to see them dance around trees like that in real life? Would you like it if say, we go out for a picnic and all of a sudden, your mom and dad start dancing?"
"No." (Actually I was quite sure of that)
"That's why you cannot watch it. Because it is not going to change your reality for you. It is just going to take you away from it."

That exactly is my point. I am amazed at the sheer power of this mechanism called Bollywood, to turn a mind-numbing number of people away from reality. To an extent where it has become a new dimension in the different realities we can exist in!
With an annual turnover of $750 million, the employment it generates is a definitely valid and happy reality. The movies however remain as unreal and melodramatic as ever. An average Bollywood movie has survived on the girl-meets-boy-falls-in-love theme for too long. In recent years, there have been shorter experimental takes. However, big production houses still go for the traditional song and dance route. I realized how badly I was engulfed when I did not watch Bollywood movies for about eighteen months. After this de-toxifying hiatus, I had the terrible misfortune of watching Rab ne bana di jodi. That killed any "regrowth" of the Bollywood weed in my head. About a year later, I saw Love Aaj Kal which made me confirm that I should come out of the closet about Bollywood soon.

The more I get drawn away from the Karan Johar factory, the better I appreciate real cinema in India. Smita Patil in Bhoomika, Naseeruddin Shah in Masoom and Nandita Das in Fire. Masoom is one of those movies that makes me cry every time I watch it. The anguish of a betrayed wife, the guilt of the betraying husband and the chemistry between them that almost ruins a perfect family, has been portrayed with great care by Shekhar Kapur. And although it has songs, they merge with the movie almost impalpably. Prabhat theatre has produced some of the most meaningful Marathi cinema. Kunku is one such movie that is close to my heart. It brings forth the honest, angry and revolutionary rebellion of a young bride married to a very old man.
Some movies however, have to be appreciated for the music only. Guide is one such movie. I cannot, for the life of me, get over the songs and the lyrics of Guide. All the Guru Dutt movies have beautiful soundtracks. He was a person who was truly 'ahead of his times'. Some of the Marathi films like Honaji Bala, Ram Shastri and in recent times Natrang have music that has set its own unattainable benchmark.

What I don't understand is why do we still have to rely on the same routine if so much of an experimental cinema already exists in India? Why do Indian people prefer 'impractical' love to a nice and acceptable reality? Do we really, still, need the bubble?

Sugar- A bittersweet history

I bought this book from the legendary Citylights book shop in San Francisco.True to the history of the bookshop, this book entertains you to the core in spite of its rather scholarly structure. The writer, Elizabeth Abbot is the former Dean of Women Trinity College, University of Toronto. She explains the evolution of sugar production along with the anthropological milestones it achieved on its way. In today's world, where sugar has already caused enough havoc, it is amusing to read about the initial reactions to the sweetener. It was a regular custom at Royal gatherings to make plates and spoons out of sugar and eat the cutlery when the dinner was over. To regale the grand audience, sometimes sculptures were made out of sugar. Sugar sculpture was a booming business in the early eighteenth century. Hollow sculptures were built around live doves and frogs. When the guests ate enough of the sculpture, the helpless birds flew out for their lives and the frogs jumped at the ladies' elaborate dressing gowns. Crazy as it may sound, in today's health and safety obsessed world, it was a big part of entertaining guests for rich people.
During the industrial revolution, sugar fueled the workers in factories in the form of tea breaks. The concept of high tea evolved during this time, when working women could not organize elaborate meals for the family.
This is just one face of sugar-evolution. It has a more serious and almost literally, dark face. Sugar Industry started slave trade across Africa. African slaves were sent to all the European colonies to work in cane fields. Abbot describes the plight of sugar slaves in well referenced, yet immensely moving descriptions. Although blacks were considered totally inferior to the whites, white men did not hesitate to devour their women. After a few generations of inter-racial mixing, the masters devised, like the writer puts it 'bizarre and complex' ways to categorize the offspring.
The offspring of a black and white was a mulatto. The offspring of a mulatto and a black was a sambo; the offspring of a sambo and a black was a black. The offspring of a mulatto and a white was a quadroon; the offspring of a quadroon and a white was a mustee; the offspring of a white and a mustee was a musteephino; the offspring of a musteephino and a white was a quintroon and the offspring of a quintroon and a white was an octoroon. Most of the last two classifications were 'white' enough to pass off as whites and therefore were considered whites!
Brazilian, French and Spanish sugar colonies had racial distinctions with as many as 128 permutations of mixes between native and white, native and black and native and mestizos (people of mixed European and native ancestry).
Skin color dictated the amount of back-breaking labor the slaves were 'destined' to perform. Slaves with a lighter skin tone were given domestic duties. As the skin tone got darker and darker the jobs went further away into the hot cane fields. This also lead to an establishment of hierarchy between the slaves which served the master's ultimate objective of keeping the slaves divided.
As the French chefs were inventing their irresistible chocolate mousse, slaves in Haiti and Jamaica were taking whiplashes on empty stomachs. Ironically, just like her creators, even sugar was subjected to color discrimination. Initially it came in a brown loaf, just like bread, as it was coated with molasses. However, towards the end of the eighteenth century sugar refining became just as lucrative as sugar plantation. The colonizers started shipping raw sugar back to the refineries in Europe in order to keep a monopoly in making the finest white sugar.
As the British strong hold in cane sugar manufacturing increased, Napoleon commissioned his scholars to discover ways of making sugar from sugar beet. Beet sugar is still produced in parts of Europe with climate that is unfavorable for sugarcane. Sugar trade played an important part in post-war treaties.
As the men and women in England began to realize the abject exploitation behind their cups of tea, an abolition movement was started. This motivated the British to move bases to East India (or India). The East Indian sugar was free of exploitation as it was not made by slaves.

Before I read this book, I had never thought of globalization in this perspective. Sugar trade put Africans in Louisiana and Florida, Indians in Fiji and South Africa and led to so much of mixing of races even in a time where it was completely against the social structure. And as sugar refining met international standards with the help of scientific commissions like ICUMSA, the minds and motives behind the commodity also underwent great refinement. My mother works as a referee to ICUMSA. It is not unusual now for black, brown, white, male and female sugar scientists to sit together at a table and exchange methods. However, if we look back to the times when it all started, this day feels like some sort of a Divine intervention!

Fusion Food

I have had ample moments of "stupid enlightenment". It is when you arrive at a certain thought or a phrase on your own, only to find out later (courtesy-Google), that it has been arrived at and published decades before you were even conceived. "Fusion Food" is one such phrase. My usual way to unwind after work is call my mom. I give her an account of my extremely banal life by adding some spice to it. Not the dishonest kind though. I believe that you can only fit your curves the way you want. You have no moral right to create new data points. Anyway, I should get to the point before the nerd in me comes to life.
Owing to my obvious aversion towards talking about work, I end up giving my mom accounts of my culinary adventures. She has made herself a place in her circle with her empirically established epicurean tastes and likes to pass judgment, for no reason, on the food others cook. Since I volunteer to place my neck between the blades of her guillotine, I end up enjoying her judgments to a great extent.
What I like about her judgment is that she ends up anthropomorphizing all the ingredients.
"What did you cook for dinner last night?"
"I made Greek Easter Soup"
" Really? What are the ingredients?"
"I used chicken, mushrooms and spring onion"
"Oh! Poor spring onion. Why would you put a nice green vegetable like that in a soup with chicken and mushroom?"
"The recipe said so. Actually the recipe says we should use entrails of lamb and other animals that are slaughtered. I replaced that with chicken because you cannot buy entrails without the animals around them"
"That is just disgusting! I won't be able to get over this for a while. Why can't you cook normal food?"
I have no idea what "normal food" means. She thinks I am taking advantage of the innocence of my flatmates when I cook roast vegetables for them.
"How can you just chop pumpkin, zucchini, eggplant and onion and toss it in the oven without any spice? And they agree to do the dishes in exchange of THAT?"
"No! I add spice. Basil and chili flakes. I coat all of that with lots of olive oil too!"

The other day, when I told her that I made chole with Spanish chorizo, she requested me not to share my bizarre recipes with her anymore. She pulls a Raj Thakrey at the idea of making a cheese sandwich with Maharashtrian dry potato curry. She finds it culturally threatening that when I have my friends over, I sometimes serve mixed vegetables and paneer with tzaziki. When I told her that tzaziki is actually made from cucumber and yogurt with just an addition of garlic and vinegar she almost accused the Greeks of plagiarism. Indeed it is quite plausible that Alexander the Great allured one of her great^n grandmothers and stole her recipe of kakdichi koshimbir on his way out. Then when he was back in his home town entertaining his ten thousandth girl/boyfriend he suddenly ran out of mustard seeds and decided to replace them with garlic and vinegar instead!

Today, I was describing to her what we had for dinner last night. My new flatmate from New Zealand cooked a "fish pie". The ingredients of which are as follows :-
1. (Mandatory) canned fish fillets
2. Boiled, mashed potato
3. (Mandatory) canned corn
4. Hard boiled eggs
5. Half a kilo of cheese
6. Tomato
The end result was too much even for a left/liberal foodizen like me. In fact, the consistency and the appearance of the end result was too much even for the cook. So we were thinking about a makeover for the leftovers. Amongst things like deep-fried fish pie balls, fish pie popsicle, fish pie soup (5 times dilution),etc., we also ended up creating a fish-pie-roast-veggie-sandwich.
And instead of her usual state of horror, my mom surprised me with her two cents. Fish-pie thalipeeth and fish-pie kothimbir vadi. Making me write about it was her idea too. I am sure she would be a bit miffed with the way I paint her!
Kudos to you aai. I dream of the day when I can make you eat all that I cook!