Sleeping beauty

It was one of those intense moments of self-awareness.

Sis was telling about her work-from-home job and I eagerly asked her ‘so do you nap in the afternoons?’

The spark in my eye was discernible for a mile around.

‘No’, Sis mentioned nonchalantly, nearly causing me to fall off the chair.

‘But why?!!!! You work for someone in the U.S. You work from India. You take a short nap in the afternoon. No one is the wiser’ I worked out the logic for her.

‘Er..because I don’t like to sleep in the afternoons. Remember, you are the one who enjoys sleeping’ she replied

Voila. Just like that the truth that had been starring me in the face, was released.

I love to sleep.

Mind you, when I say I love to sleep, it does not indicate a life of sleeping-in on weekends till noon or oversleeping and waking up with a groggy head. It simply means, when it is time to sleep, I sleep.

I do not stay up too late partying or watching TV. I sleep.

Weekend afternoons are not spent cleaning the house or reading a book or watching reruns on TV. I just sleep.

I get my 8 hours of beauty sleep in the night and then an hour more in the weekend.

The evidence was visible from early on. As a baby I was apparently a pro at going off to sleep and then waking up well after the sun had risen and the birds had started twittering etc. My naïve parents were fooled into thinking that it was a cinch managing a baby and soon enough, along came Sis. Ironically, Sis turned out to be the type who would wake up at 5 a.m. and insist someone play with her.

Sometime around the age of two, I insisted on getting my own bed so I could sleep with arms outstretched, instead of being squeezed into a bed with the whole family.

From class 9 to the end of graduation, classes got over in the afternoons giving me enough time to catch an afternoon nap. If the occasional school activity kept me busy, I still managed to squeeze in forty minutes before tea time. Days when I did not manage even that, saw me surly and red-eyed.

B-School was a much bigger challenge than anything I had seen though. Most people gave up on sleep in order to get acceptable grades and still have a decent social life. It was not unusual for people to work all night and then doze in classes.

Not me. Early on, I figured out how much sleep I was willing to sacrifice for grades. The answer turned out to be ‘none’. In the first year, the compulsory courses ensured I had to skip the post-prandial siesta occasionally. But in the second year, I chose my courses wisely. In the only one that was held between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m., I nearly lose a grade point for having inadequate attendance.

As for late night studying, that was unheard of unless one meant 11 p.m. Friends soon learnt to walk past my room making as little noise as possible during these sleeptimes.

Unfortunately, since then, the precious noontime siesta has not been a part of my life except on weekends.

Come Saturday afternoon, I draw the curtains, prop up my pillows and carry a book to the bed. Then as the effect of lunch takes over and the sun becomes a hazy light beyond the curtains, I gently slide further and further down the pillows. Finally, my eyes are closed, I am drooling on the pillow and snoring like a Hippo with a flu. D usually tiptoes around me at these times, having learnt very early in our relationship that waking me was unnecessarily putting his life in peril.

Given the mounting stack of evidence, one would have thought I would have started putting down ‘sleeping’ as a hobby early in life.

Interestingly enough, no. I always assumed sleeping meant this much to everyone.

Till my sister shook me up by revealing the scandalous truth that she was rather indifferent about it.

Strangely enough, learning the truth has had quite a happy effect on me. Perhaps a younger me would have felt guilty about enjoying something as inactive and non-intellectual and unchallenging as sleep. The older and wiser me though relishes the fact that here is an activity that involves zero effort from me, is a pleasure to do and can easily fill time when bored.

Weekend naptime, here I come. Zzzzzz.

The Girl who stirred the hornet's nest by Steig Larsson

Rating - Read

The first book in the Millennium series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, introduced us to the series. It was a stunning novel. Lisbeth Salander, the protagonist, is a 20 something girl, who has been under legal guardianship most of her life due to an incident from her childhood. Mikael Blomkvist is a journalist looking to lie low after his story and credibility on an investigative journalism piece are ripped apart. Enter Vanger, an aged, wealthy patriarch wanting to solve the mystery of his grand-daughter’s death from long ago. Lisbeth and Mikael paths cross each other and they become allies/friends/what you will.

The whole set up is in Sweden and the book immediately immerses you into tongue-twister names which you have rarely heard before. The pace is quick and heart thumping and the violence, unabashed in its full glory.

When I finished the first novel, I could not wait to get my hands on the next one, The Girl who Played with Fire. This book is a continuation from the next novel and dwells more into Lisbeth Salandar’s background and the reader is exposed to some stunning discoveries. In parallel, Blomkvist takes on an investigation on sex-trafficking. Given the topic of Book II, the stories are fairly heart-wrenching and stomach-revolting. The violence is more gruesome, if that is possible.

Which is why despite wanting to find out what happens in the final part of the series, I decided to take a break from the series. In retrospect, I really needn’t have.

Book III, The Girl who stirred the Hornet’s Nest, ties up loose ends without unleashing fresh bouts of violence. Most of this book goes into providing a background of Swedish law, security police, governance, parliament etc and what needs to be done with Salander. Coming from the Indian culture of accepted corruption and the casual misuse of power, I found it increasingly hard to believe that the option of the Swedish establishment punishing an old crime rather than hiding it away could even be considered in the book. The book eventually ends with the answer to the question ‘Will Lisbeth get justice’.

The series on the whole is definitely a must-read (a no-brainer given its position on best seller charts). What I liked about the series was

- set in Sweden, a country I have not seen as a backdrop in novels
- a female protagonist who is incredibly strong and quick-witted and whose character feels true despite the low probability of actually meeting someone like that in my daily life.
- plots that keep your interest going with some detailed fleshing out
- no apologies for the kind of violence that the stories narrate. Most of them are based on crime statistics.

The points all tick off well, but most importantly the mix is served neatly.

What the @#&*

Anyone watching any English channel regularly must be familiar with the censorship of ‘bad’ words that go on. The English subtitles provided in the channels all miraculously swallow up words like ‘fuck’ or replace ‘crap’ with ‘shit’ (or maybe it is the other way around).

I am most amused by this editing. Who is supposed to benefit from this I wonder?

Clearly it can’t be for kids. I certainly hope not considering some of the serials subject to this include ‘Dexter’ – a gripping tale about a serial killer who kills other serial killers. Which kid is watching this! Or for that matter which kid is watching the cynical ‘Family Guy’ or ‘How I met your Mother’ where the lead characters deal with relationship issues and one of the characters lives largely for sex.

On the other hand, surely we adults don’t need the policing.

Most times it is amusing. Like when ‘sex’ is replaced by ‘love’ in sentences like ‘It is just about sex, isn’t it?’ As you can well imagine, the whole context of the scene changes when you do the substitution.

Sometimes, it is plain annoying. Try watching a Guy Ritchie movie where the volume dips everytime an obscenity is used and your head will spin from the rapid changes in volume.

Of course, like everything else in our country that defies logic, after all this careful policing, we have five year olds singing the hit number ‘Bhaag DK Bose’.

Makes you go 'What the @#&* ' ?

Number9dream by David Mitchell

Rating - Read

Number9dream tells the story of Eiji Miyake, a nineteen year old Japanese village boy, who comes to big-city Tokyo in search of his father. Back in her youth, his mother had been the mistress of a rich man and had ended up abandoned, with twins and an allowance. Eiji and his now-dead sister Anju were brought up by their maternal grandmother, his mother being too unstable to raise kids. As he approaches his 20th birthday, Eiji decides to find who his father is.

Eiji knows practically nothing about his father and starts the search from the building occupied by the lawyer who handles his father’s affairs. As Eiji moves along in his search, he gets involved in all sorts of experiences. He gets a job and a place to stay. He gets mixed up with the Japanese mafia equivalent, Yakuza. He moves to another job. He finds a girlfriend. He experiences the kindness of part-strangers. As the book nears its end, Eiji moves towards embracing his reality as best as he can

The book by itself is a largely neat read. Eiji’s experiences take you through various aspects of Japanese society and boy is that country interesting! The book’s selling point is however not meant to be its storytelling alone but also its structure. Like its famous cousin, Cloud Atlas, this book also follows an interesting structure but does not pull it off quite as well. Each chapter in the book alternates between Eiji’s primary goal and some other event happening to Eiji in his mind or in reality. For instance, the first chapter jumps between Eiji’s imagination of how he meets his father in rather bizarre circumstances, and his actual confinement to a coffee house, too scared to even enter the building in which his father’s lawyer is located. The chapter on the mafia was my favourite, loaded with Kill Bill-style imagery.

This is one of those books where you go with the flow and let the author lead you between the various strands, enjoying each strand for its imagination.

If you are new to David Mitchell, I would strong recommend you start off with Cloud Atlas. Then, you can come back to this one. I dithered between a ‘Read’ and a ‘Read if you have the time’ rating but decided the entertainment value is adequate to give it the benefit of doubt and move it to ‘Read’.

Sausage and Fresh basil Pizza

My brush with cooking has at worst been a disaster and at best, satisfactory. This is largely on account of inexperience and finding a million other things more interesting to do than being tied to the kitchen.

Then, I got incentivized. Two things happened. First was a resolution to go closer to my cultural roots when it came to eating. Thus began Saturday morning breakfasts of idlis and dosas and adais and now, pesarattu. Since I just had to soak all the ingredients and the bai did the necessary grinding, chopping up onions etc, this was a breeze. After the first few times, we have even learnt how to make a dosa in less than 5 minutes. (The good cooks can refrain from laughing at this point…)

Second was sheer boredom from eating plain old dal and sabzi that the bai churns out on a daily basis. A mid-week non-roti routine is now beginning to take shape. Most times the bai makes pav bhaji or paratha or some such non-roti food. Once in a while, I have wielded the spoon myself (largely caused by useless programming on Star World on weeknights. Bring back How I met your Mother to the 8 p.m. slot, I say)

This week, finally one of those experiments met with great success and after the stories of my non-cooking, this deserves some recording.

It all began with seeing an episode of Castle which had the lead character eat a sausage and fresh basil pizza that looked yummy enough to be grabbed out of the TV screen. There was some basil and cheddar cheese leftover in the fridge after the previous week’s experiment with pasta (which we will avoid discussing). I had got whole wheat pizza bases and now we had found the exact thing we wanted to eat. D promptly picked up the other ingredients in between rushing around to office and other places. I trawled online, did not find the exact recipe I wanted and decided to strike out on my own with a combination of recipes (Feeling exactly like how Columbus must have felt back then, navigating strange territory with primitive tools)

Ingredients

For the pizza (serves 2)

2 whole wheat pizza bases (ours were a bit larger than quarter plates)
Tomato sauce (recipe follows)
Sausages (we picked up smoked pork sausages that were pre-cooked) – to the amount of topping you would like. ½ packet should be more than enough
Fresh basil leaves – ¼ cup
Cheese – 1 cup (we used Cheddar but I presume Mozarella is standard)
2 tsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil

For the tomato sauce

½ kg tomatoes
1 onion – chopped
5 garlic – chopped
1 tsp chilli power
1 tsp oregano
2 tsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Salt to taste


Preparation

Tomato Sauce –

Boil the tomatoes in water for 10 minutes.
Remove from stove, cool and take off skin, deseed and grind coarsely
Fry chopped onion in olive oil till light brown
Add chopped garlic and fry for a half a minute more
Add chilli power, oregano and salt
Finally add the tomatoes

Now comes the part I picked up from enthusiastic cook HaAThi. I covered the frying pan and let the sauce simmer till the water had evaporated. This took about 20 – 25 minutes.

It is useful to let all the water boil away since a watery sauce makes the pizza base soggy.

Pizza –

Step 1 – Remove sausages from casing and cut the sausages into circular pieces. Shallow fry in some olive oil till it gets brown.

If you have got pre-cooked sausages, then you can skip the shallow-frying

Step 2 –

Chop the basil leaves into long shreds. I found an easy way to do this online but unfortunately lost the link. Anyhow – you arrange the basil leaves one on top of another and then roll up from stem part to tip. You have something that looks like a cigar now. Chop breadth wise. When the basil unfurls, it is automatically in long pieces

Step 3 -

Coat the pizza bases with 1 tsp olive oil each.
Divide the tomato sauce into two portions and apply to each pizza base on the oiled side
Strew half a cup of cheese over the sauce (I actually grated directly onto the base instead of grating separately into a cup and then transferring. Much quicker this way).
Arrange the sausages on top of the pizza.
Sprinkle the basil leaves
Add the rest of the cheese on top

Step 4 –

I have a microwave cum oven. So just followed the directions to use it as per the oven’s guide book. Which was 600 MW + 220 degrees.

If you have a normal oven, apparently the way to do it is to pre-heat to 400 degrees and then put the pizza in and bake for 7 – 10 minutes at 400 degrees.

In my case, I kept the first pizza for 7 minutes and it was a bit overcooked.

So I kept the second one for 5 minutes, with the intention of increasing the time if needed but it turned out just fine and yummy.

Step 5 –

Do the victory dance. Proclaim that perhaps the time has come to sign up for Masterchef. Disregard all previous evidence (here, here, here and here) and say that you are an intelligent cook who can synthesize various recipes and tips and come up with the perfect pizza. But secretly thank god for smoked sausages since it tastes good on practically anything.