How to make vegetable biriyani

Go to neighbourhood grocery store and pick up a packet of Kitchens of India veg biriyani paste

Watch a movie, shop and arrive at home two hours before dinner party is supposed to begin

Read recipe at the back of the pack carefully and realise the process will take 1.5 hours.

Get stressed and switch on music loudly to stop you from hearing your own thoughts.

Marinate masala, vegetables and curd in a bowl for 20 minutes. Keep alarm in mobile to remind you of the time. Infact keep mobile handy to ensure all timings followed to the T.

Measure out rice and put it in the cooker

Heat 2 tablespoons ghee in a pan and worry about how your arteries are going to choke in 2 hours. Add marinated veggies and simmer in low flame for 30 minutes with the pan covered

Rice is ready. Time to check on veggies.

Thick layer of ghee floating on top. Otherwise, looking ok. Pat yourself on the back, remove lid, turn heat to high, set alarm on mobile for 5 minutes and read a book

Arrive at end of 5 minutes to find a thick layer of burnt veggies at bottom of pan.

Panic

Panic

Panic

Turn off gas. Carefully remove the burnt part of curry and mix the rest with rice. Put on stove on LOW flame.

Pray

After 3 minutes, turn off the gas

Serve to guests after having loaded them with food made by the cook. So they are too full to want too much of biriyani

Don’t call it biriyani. Call it burnt masala rice.

Women's Day

The good

MTV ran a programme on self defence instead of its usual stuff on make up and boys.

The bad

The concept itself. I feel on par with the Giant Panda or the potato (I believe this is the International Year of the Potato). Frankly I think women are making huge strides. The problem is men do not know how to cope. Especially Indian men who are born and brought up with such a sense of entitlement, they are rudely shocked when reality hits them. What we perhaps need is an International Men’s Day to help them think about the world changing around them.

The funny

A few years ago, when this was becoming a shiny concept, a colleague got carried away by the spirit of the day and bought roses for all 20 of his female colleagues in celebration of womanhood. He got 20 dirty looks. I wonder if the whole office thought he was so desperate that he just decided to do a mass hit.

Notes from Dubai

1. Do not shop for western wear in the last minute when you are going abroad for work. You will end up buying horrible blue blazers from the last of Arrow’s stocks.

2. If you have lots of oil money, you don’t bother going to New York and Paris to shop. You just bring all the shops into your city and construct millions of malls. When you don’t have lots of oil money (eg. Me), cut up your credit cards before you hit danger levels.

3. The desert safari is must-do. I cannot think of another place where you get so much desert, get so many 4-wheel drives to take you on a safari and where you can ride on quad bikes for fun. Quad bikes are unlike anything I have ever done before. You need to keep the vehicle moving when you are over the sand. If you brake, the bike sinks into the sand and you need to haul it out. It is very addictive and one can spend a fortune on quad bikes

4. Lebanese food is awesome. I can eat humus, kaboose, kebabs forever

5. Lebanese men are even better. I would not mind risking a holiday to Beirut just to ogle at the local population

6. Dubai is a city in a hurry to turn into something else. There is almost nothing of its culture to see (Except the touristy desert safari camp and the even touristier Madinat Jumerieh). It is like looking at Singapore with Arabic subtitles.

7. The workplace is much more professional. I enjoyed the 4 days I worked there more than any other place I worked in India.

8. The city lives its stereotypes. Its taxi drivers are Pakistanis, the waiters are Filipinos and the shop assistants are Mallus.

Good place to work. Good place to shop. OK OK to live.

And added

9. Gujjus are exactly the type of tourists everyone tells you they are. Went with a bunch of them (bless their souls) on the desert safari and they took plenty of Patel snaps (i.e. posing against signboards that conclusively establish they visited the place), sneaked onto someone's else table and pretended they did not hear the earlier occupant shouting at them and enthusiastically lapsed into gujarati the minute they had anything interesting to say.

Discoveries Upon turning 30

1. You don’t wake up on the morning of your 30th birthday with crow’s feet and wrinkles. Apparently aging is a gradual process.

2. Infact everyone I know who is 30 looks much younger than the pre-conceived version I had as a kid (formed primarily from Jeetendra’s 30+ ads). Perhaps the definition of what is young has changed for me from clear sparkling skin to a general zest for life.

3.If you are single, people finally stop plaguing you with prospective grooms. This saves all the time and effort involved in explaining politely why ‘change your entire life and cook for me’ guy is not Mr. Right.

4.Your relationship with your parents has moved from ‘They run the universe’ to ‘Get away dictator’ to ‘Panic over signs of aging’ to ‘They are alright, you know’.

5.You can appear in public with your parents and not feel like a social outcast from your peer group. You finally realize that you are lucky to have parents you get along with.

6.You don’t define how your friends need to show their affection for you and appreciate what you get. Some of them brave it to your birthday dinner even if Raj Thackeray is burning up the city, some of them take the time to give you a belated but longish birthday dinner ending up in your house on the other side of town with lots of music and ice cream, some of them join you in a tiring quest for a particular present and some of them design clothes for you. None of it is the perfect party you had planned in your head. But all of it is somehow so much better.

7.You are more or less Ok with your work and the pace at which you are growing and the money you make. Sure there are the occasional blips. This is not the same as the frustration that came in your 20s with knowing that some people are growing faster than you and seem to make truck loads more. You understand different people make different compromises to be where they are and you are happier leading life this way. And if you wake up and realize that it is all wrong, there is still time to jump ship.

8.You have enough money to spend on most of the stuff that matters to you – travel, frivolities, parents and the occasional binging.

9.You are no longer embarrassed about not knowing everything under the sun. And in my case, I am glad I have still not lost the enthusiasm to learn as much as I can.

10.If you meet some one you like, you will hopefully be more aware of your own faults and hence more willing to give a chance.

I think most of all; you are comfortable in your own skin and do most things for yourself. There is only so much you can please your parents, your boss, your friends, everyone. You know where to draw the line.

Say Cheese

I still remember one of the most distinct features of our family vacations. My mom would bring out the camera from her already overloaded bag and hand it to my dad. Then dad would make mom, my sister and me stand in front of a pretty mountain or lake and instruct us to look natural. It was very easy to do so for my sister. She would generally be so uninvolved in the process of posing for the photo that she barely looked at the camera preferring to gaze at a nearby tree or cow. She would look slightly dazed and a bit keen and overall like a distracted angel with a faraway look. My mom would smile politely at the photo. I, on the other hand, suffered the most. The minute the camera came out of mom’s bag, every single muscle in my body would begin to clench till I finally looked like rigor mortis had set in. I would try to look mature and grown up and end up frowning. Snaps of mom, me and my sister always showed a pretty and thin lady flanked on either side by before and after pictures of Lucifer. Every vacation had one snap of dad posing with the rest of the family. I am not sure exactly who used to take these snaps when we vacationed alone. I am quite sure dad was not comfortable entrusting the precious camera to a passerby in the mere cause of a family snap.

When we came back home, the film rolls would be carefully removed from their dark plastic boxes and given for developing. The photos would then be sorted out and pasted onto an album specially bought for that occasion. Over the years, we must have collected about twelve to fifteen albums. Every once in a while some unsuspecting guest would be given the albums to browse through. Most were quite happy to do so since very few people actually vacationed in exotic spots (like North India) and liked to look at what the world looked like.

I am pretty sure we never discarded any of the snaps that were taken. Given the limited amount of film roll that one could carry without going bankrupt, every snap was neatly planned and worth looking at. Candid camera happened but usually about two snaps in a roll.

I am not sure when I was considered old enough to touch the camera and photograph people. But I do remember my dad giving me lots of instructions on how to focus and bring everyone into the frame and so on and so forth. If I had been asked to press the launch button of a rocket, I could not have been more terrified or excited. I remember one excursion in school where a friend had brought along a camera. The news did the rounds in exciting whispers. She had orders for 52 copies of the group snap even before she had clicked her first snap. Through school and college, the fact that I could take the family camera for important occasions like farewell parties and college functions became a symbol of the trust my parents had in me.

It came as a perplexing turn of events when my sister finally bought my parents a digital camera. I was traveling like mad around then and borrowed it frequently. However it took me a while to realize that I could record practically every single moment of the trip thanks to the digicam. It was only after six or seven trips that my snap count began to hit a hundred. I would come back home and show them eagerly to my parents and they would sit and ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ appropriately. I glowed.

Then it was my parent’s turn to take snaps at a cousin’s function. I realized that I did not quite like the fact that I had to pose so often and so frequently. Nor was I happy to sit through a slideshow of various relatives, most of whom looked very vile and got me thinking about what kind of a gene pool I was part of. However, the digicam was a two-way thing and I was polite.

The toughest part was visiting friends. All of us had morphed into our parents and visits involved browsing through snaps of the latest vacations. Unfortunately unlike our parents no one found too many places exotic, nor were the snaps limited to the maximum of thirty six that came in a good film roll. I tried to suppress yawns as the screen changed into the three hundredth picture of dolphins in the Singapore show.

If live shows were not bad enough, I received atleast two sets of snaps every month from different friends and cousins, most of which were given a quite burial in my mail box. However, I realized that sometimes photos have a way of catching up with you. I shared a cab with a friend from town to Bandra and saw the sixty two snaps he had of his young son and the two pictures he had of himself and his wife on his grainy camera mobile. I staggered out of the cab promising myself not to show anything that resembled enthusiasm when asking ‘so how is your kid doing?’

Like all things available in plenty, photos no longer have a charm. They need to be breathtakingly impressive or sent by someone I really care about before I deign to give them my time. The last set of photos I was really blown away by were some old black and white ones which my mom had printed. They were the size of today’s passport snaps and our family, sized like hobbits in them, looked very young and very distant.

I must admit that there have been some good things too. For one, though I have learnt to relax and smile at a camera, I still look terrible in 299 out of every 300 snaps taken. With my digicam, it is actually possible for me to have one snap every year in which I look good. So someday when I show the edited version of my pictures to my grandchildren, they would know that I did grow from a frowning, thin, awkward child into someone who looked pleasant before turning into an old crone. I do hope they care about me enough to actually sit through all those snaps. I also like the fact that when my sister is gushing over Google Talk about her new couch, I can ask her to mail me a snap immediately and then we both gush together.

Maybe it is just a question of no longer thinking like the previous generation and treating every single photo with sanctity but view the camera in the context of the brave new world.