Homemade whole wheat bread: nirvana for the soul

Ever since I started cooking seriously around 3/4 years ago, I was told that if I can make bread at home in my LG microwave-convection oven, I would be considered as a good cook. The people who told me this included a few of my 'know-it-all' friends (who by the way cannot boil an egg, even with instructions), a semi serious individual who specialises in French cooking and a few sundry souls.

I read Mark Bittman's no knead whole wheat bread and wondered if I could manage to ever make that crusty, porous bread that they say can be made if you have magic in your soul or a french baker's daughter for a wife! Bread making has intimidated me. I would look at recipies and curse every one of them that demanded me to have patience for a couple of hours.

I had attempted bread a few times at home, it never ever worked. Each time I was left with a leaden mass of dough that could be outsourced to rioters world over to throw at the establishment.

This time was different.

The ingredients:

Whole wheat flour : 1 - 1/2 standard measure cups ( use any atta, I used Ashirwad ) plus 1/4th cup for dusting
Yeast : 1 tablespoon
Salt: 1/2 teaspoon or to taste
Sugar: 1 teaspoon
Dry herb mix : 4 tablespoon ( I used a mix of Oregano, rosemary, pinch of thyme, chilli flakes, dry coriander leaves, dry garlic flakes)
Olive oil : as required ( I used about 1/4 the standard measure cup / use virgin and not pomace)
Water: 1 standard measure cup / as required ( half room temperature and half lukewarm)
Egg wash: 1 egg beaten with a smidgen of milk
Sesame seeds: 1 teaspoon - or as per need
You will need a large flat bottomed vessel for the dough, a moist clean kitchen towel and a brush. Also a oiled cake tin or a bread tin.

Time required, including baking time: approximately 90 mins

Preparing the yeast: This is where it seems people make a mistake. Take a cup of luke warm water (water thats hots will kill the yeast, and water thats tepid will not allow those organisms to bubble, so lukewarm it should be. Test it by pouring a bit in the back of your hand, if it burns, its hot, it, ideally should be comfortable warm). Now dissolve half the sugar in this lukewarm water and then add the yeast into this mix. Cover with a lid and let it rest. The yeast will form a pasty mix, give it a stir after 2-3 minutes and then leave it alone for 10 mins)

Prepare the dough: mix the salt, remaining sugar and the herb mix throughly. In ten minutes your yeast mix would have started to form a nice bubble layer or a forthy layer on the top surface. Add this to the dough and get to work with your hands. Gather the flour and keep kneading, there is no speacial way to do this, when the dough starts to come together, add water in little spashes, keep kneading till it becomes a sticky mix. If it is too watery, please use the spare flour to give it some dryness. At this stage you will have sticky dough on your fingers, do not try to remove them or wash your hands. Now add olive oil and start to use the fleshly part of your palm to push the dough and stretch it from one end to the other while in the vessel itself. The oil will incorporate into the dough and the stretching will ensure that the gluten breaks down and gives the dough the elasticity (ok, I read this up). Use up all the oil, it helps. You will notice that the dough that stuck to your fingers now have vanished into the dough. Turn the cup that contained the olive oil onto the cake / bread tin and use it to oil the bottom of the tin well and then sprinkle flour on the bottom.

Knead the dough to a nice round ball and leave it to reast for 45 mins while covered by the moist towel (moist is not wet!). The yeast will get to work and will make the dough double in size in 45 minutes. Use the time to play with your kids, they will love you for it or your dog. Or just read the newspaper, dont go peeking at the dough every five minutes, the yeast will not work faster because you are in a hurry. After 45 minutes, take a good look. The dough will look like a bloated ball. Gather all your hatred for whovere deserves and punch the dough to release the air inside. Now quickly knead it once again for about 5 minutes and let it rest again for 15 minutes.

Preheat the over to 200 degrees cel. Pop the dough in the cake tin / bread tin and brush the top with the egg wash. Sprinkle sesame seeds on top and use a sharp knife to cut shashes into the top of the bread dough. Put it in the preheated over and bake it for 20/25 minutes. The bread will puff up and the egg wash will turn golden brown. At the end of the 20 minutes / 25 minutes you can test the bread, it will give out a hollow sound if you knock it with a spoon. Now let it cool on the kitchen top while you prepare the tomato salsa or the roasted almond basil pesto that would go with it.

Your kitchen and if you like in a Mumbai flat, the entire flat will have the fragrance of heaven. When the bread at room temperature cut it with a serrated knife or just tear it into chunks and eat it. No bread ever made will taste the same after this.

My bread was eaten within 10 minutes of serving by four people - 3 adults and one 5 1/5 year old. This little girl asked me in all seriousness, can we start a bakery at home?

I am not sure if it was the best bread that money could buy, I have not eaten enough good quality bread to know. The closest it came to in flavour was the bread that we sometimes buy from Nature's Basket and a couple of times from the BBC at Juhu Marriot. In terms of achievement, for me it was a glory moment, I could bake a decent bread, at home, using home ingredients. I had the dry herbs because I have been buying them for my Saturday / Sunday cooking, but you can experiment with fresh herbs like finely chopped onions and coriander, you can also try using a bit of garam masala to give it that Indian flavour. You can use butter or cooking oil instead of olive oil. When you add fresh herbs, please reduce the quantity of water used.

Hope you are proud of your bread when you take it out of the oven. You will feel liberated and will have attained that Buddha inside you!

Two Status Messages about startups

Ramanath Bhat, someone I met during a business meeting and Senior Manager Google TV Project at Sony this morning posted the following as his Facebook status:

"I think one of the toughest adjustments to make, particularly if you are coming from an established company, is entering a world where you have infinite needs from people around you, and no one needs you. That predicament in some ways defines the challenge of a startup. You have an idea, but no leverage, so you have to start making water into wine. You have to attract a team, attract money, attract customers etc. with nothing more than your vision and powers of communication. Entrepreneurs who succeed are those who don't get demoralized by that asymmetry, but instead view it as a challenge. Occasionally, someone hits on an idea that is just so brilliant or timely that it quickly creates leverage, but that's rare."

-- Tim-Westergren Founder of Pandora on moving from Big company to Start up 

I posted it in turn on my Facebook page later in the day with acknowledgements to Ramnath and to Tim-Westergren, adding that the same is applicable to someone who has to move from a startup to an large organisation. The corporate mavens are not kind to startup entrepreuners who move back and the road blocks are many. This post is not about this issue. 

 Pranay Srinivasan responded with a passionate comment and says:

There is more to this as well. Sometimes, as an Entrepreneur, you end up being a lone negotiator, who's cajoling his own troops to work for close to no money for long hours to attempt to succeed at pleasing completely unyielding customers who think they are doing you a favour by passing business to a relatively unproven vendor. You have to build relationships by destroying your ego, your self-image and come across as humble, but not needy; enthusiastic but not aggressive; foreceful but not arrogant; ambitious but not reckless; you have to find the money to sustain your vendors, your overhead and manage your growth while ensuring you dont create white elephants. You have to forge long term business links with clients based on your flexibility and your superior quality at rates which are lower than that they already pay. You have to make sure you dont compromise on payment terms or else you might end up in a cash crunch. And at the end of it all, no matter what your bank balance or your fears are that keep you awake at night or make you wake up suddenly in a cold sweat, you have to remember to Always Keep Smiling. 

Maybe the ones who are in the midst of this startup dream are fools. Or maybe the ones like me who gave up and decided to play it safe are the smart ones. One thing is for sure, there are no easy answers.

History for her

A couple of days ago I logged into spanfish.in and uploaded the 160+ pictures that I had taken of my daughter over the last 2000 odd days since she was born. I spent around 2 hours agonising over what I wanted to do with the pics, which were not really high resolution and hence not printable as photographs for an album.

I finally decided to order a photobook, paid Rs 750 inclusive of taxes and handling and waited quite excited. Yesterday I recieved the photobook. I had managed to arrange the photos in a manner where they started with her earlier ones and ended with the ones which are the latest. The low res ones are now postage stamp sized. These pics include one of the crow that (atleast Tamara believes ) comes home and crows for her everyday.

I gave it to Tamara last evening and since then she has been looking at the photos and making me tell her stories about each one of them. Stories about how the photo was taken, where, why, with whom, what was she doing? did she really do this? do that? its been an endless stream of events, which I imagine she re-lives in her little head.

I probably will now collect every photograph of the family and get them printed and keep them as family heirlooms for the next generation. They need to know the history of their family and there has to be a family story teller who narrates these stories.

I suppose this is how it was before this incredible invention that captures light and a moment in infinite flowing time was discovered. I think now that the frescoes of Ajanta, Elephanta, Aborginal prints of Australia are all pictures that were created to allow some father somewhere to tell stories to his next generation.

Unfortunately - I have very few pics of my growing up years. It was expensive then to get them printed, and cameras were so few that it was considered a luxury. One of these days I have to go to the family home in Pune (yes I am a Malayali who does not have an ancestral home in Kerala, but a family home in Pune) and go through my Dad's papers. I am sure there will be a treasure trove of history in there. The last time I went through these papers, I found a huge stack of old pictures of Dad's days as a labour union leader in Pune. The ones with George Fernandes, Madhu Dandavate and Datta Samant are the ones I treasure. I have to sit my mom down and get her version of this history written down. I started writing a fictionalised version of my parents life in Parayil House - somehow it has remained an incomplete work, maybe its not time yet.

Coming back to my daughter and her photobook, for her, the last 5 years are mysterious, she remembers little things from her brief life and reaffirms them by referring to the photos. I think it is the best gift one can give a child - a treasure of stories that go beyond Enid Blyton and Chota Bheem.

learning to drive a truck

My dad and maternal uncle tried their best to teach me cycling. Look straight ahead they said, keep handle straight and hold it like you hold a pencil they hollered. They gave up! my death grip on the handle bar caused me to lose balance and in those 3 months mom had to endure me and my numerous scratched, scraped, knees. Then one day, I managed to prop the cycle next to a rock and clamber on to the seat and then pedalled furiously, i was flying. Sure the first time I fly straight into a ditch and the next time into a handcart, I did survive and learn to ride a cycle, a beautiful BSA SLR. Yes the very same one that Kapil Dev borrowed from a kid my age to reach the stadium in the comic strip ad that appeared in Indrajal Comics. (to date i never learnt the monkey kick style of cycle riding or the push and hop on the seat style, my bad!)

I graduated to a scooter and then to a kawasaki bajaj 100 cc bike. It was always a breeze. Then we bought a second hand Maruti 800, and one had to unlearn the cycle / motobike art of riding and learn to sense and measure the 4 corners of the car. Until I had to drive a truck once. To date I do not have the guts to drive something bigger than a hatchback, I have tried and suffered all kind of cars. I think I have the mortal fear of killing someone. With a small car, its easier, you are the master, the lone rider, ranger, etc etc. The bigger the vehicle gets, the larger gets the risk which extends beyond me.

Whats the purpose of writing all of the above? Answer: working for a corporate is like driving that truck which I tried long ago.

You are not alone, your decisions are not your own, the accidents are not caused by you alone. So when you drive a truck you have to aware of the 4 extended corners of the vehicle, that you cannot really see. You have to use the gut, but get approvals for that gut feel, of whether you can turn, or cut lanes. (when on Haryana roads, this rule does not apply :p )

And you have to let go. Use that light hand that dad spoke of, that light hand that makes fluffy cakes.

Ten months and learning.

A book and winged victory

Been reading 'The Good Muslim' by Tahmima Anam, a Bangladeshi writer who is now a global citizen. The writing reminds me of reading a screenplay. I am at page no 75 as of this morning and I went through the fragrance of a pineapple field, a river and its fertile delta and a mango tree. And the common idiom that India shares with her neighbours.

Imagine the stories that are never told because they are not written in English. Of the books that are never going to get read because they were written in a language that is not common. Thank lord for writers in English who bring the local grit, mud, sand to the books they write in English, while keeping the taste of the country intact. This also brings me to that great subcontinent question: why are we divided if we share so much of history and habits.

And now at the fag end of a day filled with agitation, I stumble on this link : The Louvre Less Travelled. I have done this walk, seeked out the oddities in the Louvre while the masses went and gawked at the popular legends. It was done over two days, the first spent in understanding where we were and what we did and the second in seeking out these gems. If you ask specifically at the information centre, they will give you a list of these treasures.

It is a pleasure to be doing something other than thankless work.

Measuring Childhood per square feet

There are hoarding all over Mumbai and one assumes print campaigns in Times on India that asks "what is the carpet area of childhood?". The images are fantastic, neo modern painting with children playing, reading and having fun. While the other builders spoke of the gyms, airconditioned lobbies and spectacular highrises, Rustomjee Builders speaks of childhood, targetting the soft underbelly of parents who have children who are young and need that space to run around. Interesting!

Now what was the carpet area of my childhood? The first few years were spent in a village called Wagholi, around 25 kms outside Pune city in a hospital campus where my mom was deputed as part of her rural training program. The campus was sprawling, with stone buildings that had wooden slatted windows. My playmates were the children of the hospital staff and dad on weekly basis took me to the panchayat office ( am not sure what he was doing there) to watch Doordarshan Mumbai's news bulletin. The news reader was Pradip - i forget his surname, reading the current news at 7 30 from a inland letter. There used to be a huge tract of land just behind the hospital and that was our play ground. A group of 10-12 children and two dogs used to chase dragon flies, play cricket and turn into a dark shade of brick brown in the hot summer sun.

Then it was the Dr Ambedkar Colony at Deccan College in the cantonment areas of Pune. A semi private bungalow with a garden that had a huge jamun tree in its midst and two dozen odd guava and mango trees. I built my first tree house here, my first outdoor tent and had a zoo according to my mother. A koel, a mynah, a rabbit, a dog and a cat were my pets. After school one could vanish up the branches of the guava trees and read as many comics as one wanted.  Star Trek started on Doordarshan around the time and most of us would spend all our evenings pretending to search for aliens. It was a childhood of climbing trees, falling down, eating jamuns till the mouth turned purple and sour, making mango chutney and getting all the boys and girls together to cook a meal over open fire in the evening.

Dad was asked to move closer to his place of work, when TELCO Pimpri had labour problems from 1982 onwards. That was when we shifted to a "flat", 1200 sq ft of nothingness, stacked one on top of another, all 4 floors of them and all 350 buildings. We had moved upwards into a 'complex' with shops, markets and access to transport, school in the complex etc etc. But no playground!

My daughter who is 5 now thinks that the little amount of space we have around our building in Andheri West, when not covered by cars of the residents is her playground. There are trees but she does not want to climb them. She has been told by her friends that their moms have told them that if they climb trees, they would fall down and break their bones. Cannot argue with that.

So then, how do you measure the carpet area of childhood. Most likely answer is Rs 16500 per square feet at the Rustomjee property in Malad, or Rs 22000 per square feet at the JVPD one. Not a childhood 90% of parents can give their children. Not at that cost.

I can see ghosts...

I am on the other side now. I work for a large global organisation and almost everyday meet atleast two startups who pitch for the business ( imagines or otherwise ) that we can give them. Having been on the side of running a startup, raising money, pitching a concept, managing starvation and creating a viable business, I can imagine the eagerness of the guys to prove themselves. And I can see through the shallowness of the concepts. I wonder why there are no mentors who can guide these entrepreuners through the stage where they are fodder for corporates.  I was told once that outside DAKC, the Reliance ADAG headquarters are deadbodies of startups that perished trying to service Relaince ADAG's demands. Am sure if I look carefully we would also have a few skeletons outside out gates.

And honestly most of the companies that I have see do not solve any big problem, they are either derivatives of existing ideas, waiting for just enough mass so that they can find a buyer (prefer google, but facebook will do). It is painful to have to go through shoddy presentations, fake accents and fake stories and get to the core of the ideas.

Am yet to see a great idea that can change the game, something that can make me cry out with joy. Instead I can see ghosts, tired ones, like stale jokers who have lost their mojo. Cottage industries that will get consumed by either the greed of people like me or screwed by investors.

Yesterday, on way to the company, had an idea - can I get 500 people to invest Rs 2000 - the cost of a good dinner in Mumbai, which we can invest in a noble idea like Nurture Talent ( www.nurturetalent.com) that educates startups or in a venture that is exceptional - I do not know what exceptional is as of now, but am sure like love and death, one will know when one is close.

I want to explore the opportunity in water, in waste management and education. In visual display of information. In a micro funding model for artisans. And not take more than 5% equity in the company for the Rs 1000000 that would get invested using the crowdsource model.

Would you help me?

The importance of Badal Sircar

July 1992, it had been raining for most of the last week of the month. We had made it to the last year of BSc. without too many mishaps. Dreams intact in a just liberalised India. PV Narasimha Rao was Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh was slowly unleashing a creaky India onto the world stage. Cable satellite and STAR was fairly new and MTV grind was in vogue. Most of us thought of MBAs, MMS, MCS and such fancy degrees, which would ensure a safe job in a safe company. And heartaches were heartaches that never really went away.

Nowrosjee Wadia College still had Prof. Moogat, Dr Aston, Dr Bhise, Dr Andhar and Prof Rao to make us believe that life was not all that bad, provided you attended their lectures. Somewhere between those lectures we were told of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of the college. The students were to put up a play and the professors were to put up one where the best talent in the college would participate.

The resident TV and stage actor Dr Bhise ( he has played the role of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar in a Marathi movie) decided to experiment, the final outcome was a play written by Badal Sircar - Saari Raat - last performed by Amrish Puri and directed by Girish Karnad. The cast was a mix of students and teachers. Mahesh Gaikwad (lost in the sands of time), Gurtez Ehtas ( Tv actress ), Dr Bhise were the actors. I wandered in just to watch was going on, good friend Rajeev Dubey gave company. With nothing better to do, we ended up staying back everyday, bunking classes, not that it mattered in any manner. Eventually, I ended up creating the sets for the play, was the guy who pointed out the wrong dialogues, the steps the actors needed to take. I had been active in the street play category for a couple of years and wrote for the local newspapers, this was an interesting experience. A Bengali play by a playwright I had never heard of, translated by a linguist called Prathibha Agarwal into Hindi, a language that I was familair with in a manner of speaking. I had learnt it in school but the nuances came alive here. I have somewhere a post card which gave us the permission to stage his play for a royalty of Rs 125. 

This play taught me to focus, to understand what was being said, to look beyond the ordinary language. It taught me poetry, the verse Saari Saari Raat jaga hoon mein sapnon ke dar se, ke ankhen kahin zhapak na jaaye is kaaran kiya hain sangharsh.... ( have stayed awake for an eternity in the fear of my dreams, have struggled to keep my eyes wide open) still remains with me. The simplicity of the idea of a man born out of a woman's desire to be free and seeing him in the human form in an abandoned shack in the middle of a rainy night was beautiful.

I did not understand a lot of what was underneath the surface, at 21 you do not really know the meaning of what the married woman really wanted. Today I do not claim to understand it fully either.

The play was a full scale production, 90- minutes of it, with background music, lights and songs. We had two performances, the first in front of a packed audience in the college and the second one a commercial performance, for which people paid money to buy tickets. We were good.

Three weeks before the first performance, India destroyed its facade of being a secular tolerant state, Babri Masjid was demolised.

The final and third performance was to be held at Bombay in January 1993. It never happened. We went on into a new life after 3 months. Mumbai was never the same again.

In the years that have passed, have read Evam Indrajit, and a few more of Badal Sircar's plays, helped Dr Bhise in his thesis for his PhD - The theater of the Absurd. Started the Pune Literary Forum and the Bombay Literature Cafe which is now Caferati.

I wonder of I would have been any different if I had not wandered into the Wadia college assembly hall that afternoon. I was a drifter then, 6 months later, I did what my dad said was amazing - stayed with one project for a long time till it completed. That defined me, the detail of what I could do. The going through of rehersals till each word was correct. Costume changes, holding the three actors together when the scenes got charged.

Badal Sircar lived an interesting life. The play gave me a chance to meet Nissim Ezekiel, Kolhatkar, Mohan Agashe, Lagoo, Puranik and so many theater stalwarts. It gave me an interesting life.

Sircar passed away this week, it did not make headlines, I discovered the news of his death in Mint - a business newspaper.

For those who never heard of Badal Sircar, here is the link to his wikipedia page

of things gone by

On 31 Octoner 2006, in a moment of madness, I resigned from the small digital agency I was help run in Mumbai, with it I said goodbye to a stable income, peace of mind and sanity. Two guys who knew me wanted to make TV serials and were looking at raising money. Over bottles of beer, in a cramped room at the Hotel Savera, the two half drunk gentlemen went on about making entertainment. Youtube had just got funded and there were a rash of 'tube' clones that had sprouted up.  The more I heard the two of them speak, the more it made sense to me that we must create content for the net.

nautanki.tv was doomed from the start, it was trying to do things that no one else had done. It was not youtube, it was a made for internet entertainment channel that aggregated / made / bought content. It was a network of content pieces which was layered with an ad network. A social network which allowed its users to create playlists, share the playlist and run channels of their own. It was the first to get a sponsored show (Metro Shoes sponsored their Spring Summer collection videos), it was the first to be paid to be a platform (SaharaOne paid money to use the platform to live stream their awards ceremony). 38 TV channels partnered with it, over 300 short films were showcased, 5 internet only channels, 60 hours of content created everyday by a team of 45. It was mad, it was fun, it was insane. The team raised close to 7 crores in funding, had some of the brightest investors and was acquired by a rockstar of new media economy.

And yet it failed.

Last week several people told me that it was too early for its time, it was ahead of the curve. Old friend Amit Grover who now runs a mentoring outfit for startups said it when he told me that sometimes, it is better that something does not work, it plants the seeds of something big. The mistakes we make (expensive ones at that) are the ones that fuel the new ideas.

I tried again with a refined model, something that factored in 4G and the surge in wired entertainment and multiscreen alternate broadcast in 2010. It got 2 investments, one I said no to, and the second decided that I was too much of a risk. They bought the business, I gave up trying to convince people of things that they cannot see.

So on the other side of the year, the cycle completes. We never grow old, ideas never go old. Here is to that spirit and to a whole new experiment. This time I will make it make money for someone atleast. if not me ;)

Break ke baad - layered cookie

I took an unintentional break for a few weeks. Did not find anything interesting to write about in the middle of moving homes, Tamara's big yellow schoolbus, the job, painters, furniture moving, electrician and carpenters and tailors.

A couple of days ago Tamara, mom and Hema went on their annual vacation. This allows mom and Tamara to spend a few weeks with my sister and my nephew, Tamara gets to boss around her 'Braather' and I get sometime to myself. I get to lazy around, think, watch tv and generally live like a single man for a month. By the end of the first 48 hours, I usually get bored out of my mind, especially if its a weekend.

So between reading the entire Calvin & Hobbes collection (yes I have the hardbound copy gifted by a friend), and the option of going across to a coffee shop, today I opted to stay at home. I made a simple Rice Noodle and Sprout Pulao for dinner. All you need is some rice noodles and some simple spices and a heart to innovate. You cannot fail.

Dinner done by 8 30 pm! and I wanted something more - options are go to the nearest coffee shop, the amul icecream parlour or to the Iyengar's Bakery on Veera Desai.

I opted to stay at home and make something with whatever was available. It is baking right now as i type and I will know if it worked in around another 15 mins.

Here is what I did - The help had left some chapatti dough for tomorrow - the size of a normal adult male fist. Or dough made with half a standard tea cup of regular flour. Add to the ready dough two table spoons of ghee and four tables spoons of sugar. Knead it into a nice glossy ball and leave it in the fridge.

Take 7-9 dried figs, half a cup of almonds, an half inch of ginger, 1\2 teaspoon cardamom powder, four teaspoons of sugar, some peanuts and pulse all of this together until you get a rough mix.

Take the cold dough and divide into 3 portions, roll the 3 portaions to make 3 half plate sized sheets on a foil using enough flour so that the dough does not stick to the foil. Now layer the sheets with the fix and almond mix. Crimp the sides and brush it with egg wash and sprinkle sesame seeds on top.

Preheat over to 200 degrees cel. and bake for 30 mins till the crust turns golden brown.

I am not sure what it is going to be like, but what the heck.

The oven beeped and my cookie ( i will call it a cookie, you can call it whatever you want ) is ready

I have to wait for it to cool and the cut it into small wedges. It smells great.

It tastes, nice, kind of nutty with caramalised sugar.

Hope you enjoy making it.


(I did not use any baking powder or bicarbonate of soda, hence the crust is dense and not crumbly, you might want to use the two to get a slightly more crumbly cookie)

Bliss!

I want to be Homai Vyarawalla

She started her career in 1930s and thereafter received noticed at the national level when she moved to Mumbai in 1942 with her family, before moving to Delhi where in the next thirty years she shot many political and national leaders, including Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family working as a press photographer. At the onset of the World War II, she started working on assignments of the Bombay based The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine which over the years till 1970, published many of her black and white images, which later became iconic. (wikipedia)

I want to be Homai Vyarawalla - I want to have seen the last 80 years standing at the threshold of monumental events. Always seeing the world through the eyes of a metal and glass apparatus, recording and preserving history as if it belonged to just her. I want to have seen the lament on the face of Mountbatten, the sorrow in the eyes of Nehru and the passage of time. Of having recorded the same streets every year and knowing how her country changed.

Its like being a rock - a lighthouse - at the mouth of a busy harbour - watching ships go by.

Its an amazing life. Wonder if someone would be interested in making a movie out of her story. Keep those pictures in a chronological order and fade into them and recreate those events on celluloid. Go deeper into her thoughts at that time. It would make wonderful viewing.


I wish i could be her.

The tethered thought bubble

Am sure most of us have grown up reading some form of comic book. It must have been a curious mix of Indrajal, DC, War, Asterix, Archies, TinTin, Chacha Chowdhary, Amar Chitra Katha and so on. Every character in these comics spoke to us readers in little bubbles with a pointy end aimed at the character. THAT is how we figured who was saying what and with what emotion. In comics like Asterix and TinTin it also helped us define our image of the personality of the characters, their voices and their behaviour. You had to read them again and again to discover things in their personalities that changed as we grew up

In real life to know a person is to interact with him or her over long hours, over conversations, over politics, interpersonal relationships and so on. One can never 'know' a person unless you have spent time with him or her and even after that we can never know how the person is in his personal space. Years can change and wax and wane the depth of knowing. New people / characters join in and out of our personal life and professional arenas.

We have now become those comic book characters! The things that we do on our social life while we are tethered to the internet through multiple devices define what we are and what our 'friends' think we are like. The thoughts communicated via the likes, comments, status messages, shares, tweets, blogs and so on hang above our heads in a virtual bubble. If one were to follow these thought bubbles of individuals, we would be able to get a fair approximation of what the individual would be like. We can judge a person's likes and dislikes, political leanings, preferences and personal life by mapping what he does via his social activities. I can visualise this as an invisible thought bubble hanging above the head with every changing updates of everything that ones does.

And worst still is that all of it is visible for all and sundry to see and analyse. And judge. So be careful what trails you leave behind everyday, someone might be keeping an excel of what you have in your thought bubble and create a character sketch based on it.

Social Networks and the art of being a sycopant

Lets define the terms mentioned in the title of this blog post first before we go ahead - Social Networks - Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut
syc·o·phant  /ˈsɪkəfənt, -ˌfænt, ˈsaɪkə-/ Show Sp[sik-uh-fuhnt, -fant, sahy-kuh-]

a self-seeking, servile flatterer; fawning parasite.

 

Social Networks are hugely successful because they satisfy a basic Human need - they allow us to advertise ourselves to our friends, co-workers and acquaintances in order to gain their attention, affection and acceptance. The social networks allow us to portray ourselves in colours that are flattering so that people who know us and people who hear of us are attracted to who we are. Its like a UGC advertising. A sort of frame work which has existed for eons where people duelled in the open with their opponents and displayed their spoils of war in the open. Why am I complaining? I too use FB for the same purpose. The constant cool quotes, the links and the comments are all designed to provide a profile that screams - He is THE man you want for the job or He is THE man for you. Somewhere in between all this attention seeking are honest messages to people who are real friends - most of these messages are hidden in the private sections where the 'audience' cannot see them and figure out the real me.

 

And then there are the sycopants, those men and women who will seek out and follow movie stars, VCs, CEOs, Writers, Social Media Experts, Angel Investors and so on. These souls hang on to every comments and every link from the people they follow. Most of their comments are loud claps on everything that is said, or encouragements that are supposed to have that sweet sound of sucking up accompanying them.

Its sad really! I am not even sure if the men and women they fawn over in the open even know about their existence or do they revel in the cacophony of people who are like groupies of rock stars and rock bands. 

Or do these sycopants use these comments to show that they are close to the people they follow? Sort of that old Delhi malice where everyone knows the chacha of the minister in power.

Growing up with my daughter

My father never imposed his will on both my sister or me. We were free to choose the school we wanted to go to - Rosary School, which was 15 Kms away from where we lived as opposed to St Ursula, Nigdi, which was just four kms away. The courses we chose while in college and the people we chose to become. I am pretty damn sure he would have been happier if I had joined Telco instead of a startup and if my sister would have studied to be a engineer.  I can only begin to imagine how he managed those thousands he required to let us imagine what we wanted, for the hundreds of books I bought and for the subscriptions and the flights of fancy he funded. For a man limited by his own need to be free, he seemed to have a sense of what was good and what was not.

I have tried to emulate him in the last 4 years and 8 months. My daughter is allowed to break things, tear up newspapers, paint the floor, play in the mud and act like an excited puppy. She has discovered books she likes and things she wants to do. Has begun to draw Dragons ( her favourite ) and choose the movies she wants to watch. She helps me fine tune the nursery rhyme she will recite at school - Her contribution to Grey Squirrel - a poem she chose when we browsed together for things that would be interesting for her. When we found a little poem Grey Squirrel interesting but just a bit too short, she helped in adding the lines by about how the grey squirrel runs up the trees so tall but never ever falls.

Sundays are the days when I pretend I can coax a little bit of baking out of a 5 year old convection microwave oven. Influenced by Nigella and Racheal Allen and an overdose of the TLC channel, I involve her in the baking. So far she has sat patiently and asked questions on why eggs need to be added and why milk and butter and sugar need to be beaten and has helped in sifting flour - plain old atta - with baking powder and cocoa powder and has stood around watching the final product rise slowly and brown and then pestered me for a slice even before the cake has cooled.

This sunday we got a little ambitious and allowed Tamara to bake her own cake. While I grated apples and ground cinnamon for a light apple cinnamon cake, she mixed the flour with a bit of oats and then with cocoa powder and then added butter and sugar and milk and whisked up a sticky gooey slop. She patiently mixed and mixed and mixed and finally decided that it needed an egg - I had to help get the egg out of the shell and into her pan. Thereafter she mixed it further to make a fine mess, which she called a mud pie. I had to convince her to allow me to use an handblender and sprinkle a few raisins into it just for some fun :).

We baked it in a tin she buttered and dusted - it had more flour than required but then she will learn as she goes along. And along came a cake that was nice - nice for a almost 5 year old.  The forty minutes were agonized over why the cake is not jumping and if the eggs would break or if there is a possibility of an omlette instead of the cake.

After 45 minutes we had a springy moist dense cake, we decided not to wait for the cake to cool ( as usual) and sliced it and smothered it with some more chocolate 'sauce' and gobbled it up

The cinnamon cake I baked in her words was ok :(

happy banana republic

It is now 62 years since the idea of India exists. Hastily patched together by browbeating princely states and dividing on the basis of language, a nation was born. Also born alongside was a Cello Tape Nation - a jugaad of gigantic proportions.  We are a nation that will stumble and fall and yet at the slightest provocation pull out our thousand year culture and wisdom of the saints and gods and mortals all combined into a bhel puri of identity.

And we are a banana republic! An additional collector is burnt alive by a mafia in a small town around 300 kms from Mumbai. One third of the country is not ruled by the Government of India but by rebels who are better armed, trained and equipped than the people who are supposed to the Law of the country. The wife of a supposed dissenting voice gets arrested by the ATS while people who bombed, maimed and killed are running training schools for future terrorists. Three metros in the country has disfunctional roads, the national capital is also the rape capital of the country, the sparkling new hub of new economy India has a reputation where women are asked to get back home before it gets dark, traffic cops never man the signal, instead hide behind parked police vans only to dance onto the roads when anyone breaks a signal by mistake. Gandhi is a thousand rupee note, a half blind politician runs a broadcast mafia down south. His crony walked away with more money than the GDP of a small African nation. We have a prime minister who is learned but cannot take decisions, a beaurocracy that demands 25 lakhs for sanction for a lift in a building. There are more exploited kids at any signal in Mumbai than there are schools, the government makes people who want to build schools jump hoops for permissions. The gap between people who have money and the ones that live a month on less than the cost of a fine dining meal is widening.  I could go on and on.

And this morning I woke up at six and wondered if I should switch on the TV to watch the annual parade - decided against it. Why bother? when all that shiny hardware cannot get rid of the people who are ruining a fine subcontinent.

measured against the cost of a cup of coffee

Six months ago my daughter started regular school. We had trawled around 20 school starting from the Ryan Global at Andheri Lokhandwala to Don Bosco at Borivli. Our idea of schools is rather old world. I studied at a family run private school called Rosary School in Pune and my wife at the St Ursula School in Nigdi. Both schools did not have airconditioning, did not have new age labs nor new education methods. When we started talking to schools in Mumbai, the first turn off was when the lady at the reception asked us if we could afford a deposit of a couple of lakhs, refundable at the end of the child's school term - and no, interest would not be paid on the deposit. The others wanted to sell a lifestyle to us, one even claimed that our girl would not have to interact with the middle class kids and would not learn their manners! We settled for Maneckji Cooper School at Juhu. And that caused a rather odd problem - it takes 90 minutes to reach the school from where we live. We decided to move and till we found a new home (we did find one eventually) closer to the school, she would use my car - her grandmother found a driver who is from the church she goes to every week.

Our driver is an odd man. He used to drive a tempo - he drives the car like he would drive a tempo even today after 6 months. He has three children - a daughter who is married and two sons who have dropped out of school. He stays in a 'kholi' - a one room dwelling close to where I live. I call my driver odd because he always has some relative who in his words - off ho gaya - the closest translation is the relative has passed away - the 'off' signifying the 'switching off ' of the relative. So far 8 of them have switched off and each time he has wanted an advance. Usually half his salary around the 15th of his month. A month ago I finally asked him how many of his relatives are left? He did not say much, when I asked him if everything was fine with him, he told me about Rs 10000 he had borrowed from some marwadi, and that he had to pay Rs 500 every month as interest. I used to pay him 6500 a month at that time - the amount he asked for. If he paid 500 to the marwadi, he would have Rs 6000 left for the month - Rs 200 a day for a family of 3. Measured against two cups of coffee at the Costa Coffee Shop a day, his family lives on as much as what I pay a month for coffee!

Its a no hope situation - two sons - both dropped out of school when the failed their exams. They do nothing - no hope because there is no way for them to complete their education. We decided to help him pay off his debt. Increased his salary so that he can repay spread over a year or so. The next question was whether I could give up half the cups of coffee a month and use that money to pay for the two kid's education. I am not sure if I want to do it. I am not sure if I want to take that commitment. What if they waste that money? And are really not interested in studying? On the other hand what if they do study and get some part-time jobs and raise their living above the desperation they are in.

It is like investing in a uncharted startup.

Any suggestions would be welcome.