Sunday Comfort Food

Scarborough Fair potatoes, seasoned with (what else?) parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

The parsley is from Morocco, the rosemary is from Israel, the sage and thyme are from Spain, but they were all bought at Waitrose Canary Wharf. I love the food section of Waitrose.

I must admit the recipe is not an original one; I found it online. (Without the internet I am nothing.) My only improvisations were adding caramelised onions and grated cheddar.

Hometown

I now know enough Japanese to make smalltalk (on limited topics) with my teacher. The other day we were talking about our hometowns (Kōbe and Calcutta) and she asked me, “Karukatta wa kireina machi desu ka?” (Is Calcutta a kireina city?)

What do you say to that? The Japanese word kireina means both ‘beautiful’ and ‘clean’. Calcutta is a beautiful city, but even its greatest admirers would not call it clean.

It is not uncommon to hear negative comments about Calcutta and Bombay, often from people who have never visited these cities or bothered to look under the surface. Calcutta is my favourite city in the world, but when people speak ill of it, I usually adopt a superior, condescending attitude, rarely bothering to contradict them, much less launch a passionate defence. Perhaps this is because Calcutta is my hometown; perhaps it is because I am cool like that. But sometime back a classmate from college said negative things about Bombay, and I got uncharacteristically worked up and made some rather caustic remarks. I must have been in a bad mood that day because usually, when someone criticises Bombay, I tell them my favourite Bombay story.

When Sarbajeet was interning at a law firm in the summer of 2007, he had to go to a company’s office for a due diligence. The firm gave him the taxi fare, but in those days we were poor and a taxi ride was a lot of money. Sarbajeet naturally opted to keep the fare and take the local train.

Sarbajeet was carrying a laptop which belonged to the firm. When he was boarding the train at VT, in the crush of people trying to get on the train, the laptop bag slipped from his shoulder and fell on the platform. Sarbajeet himself was swept into the compartment by the crowds, and with throngs of people behind him fighting their way into the train, it was impossible for him to get off. He watched helplessly as the laptop lay where it had fallen and the train started to move.

At this point, someone picked up the laptop and started to run alongside the train, shouting, “Yeh kiska laptop hai?” Sarbajeet frantically shouted that it was his, and this man, this complete stranger, running full tilt to keep up with the train, threw the laptop into the compartment where it was passed over people’s heads to a shaken but deeply grateful Sarbajeet.

Ask anyone who has stayed in Bombay for an appreciable period of time, and they will always have a story to tell. Because Bombay is like that – an unpredictable city, a crazy city... I’ll say it then: a great city.

Ferry Cross the Mersey

Last Saturday I happened to be on a large bus full of people – some young and some old, speaking different languages, hailing from different parts of the world. But this was the Magical Mystery Tour bus in Liverpool, so our motley crowd had one thing in common – we had roughly similar tastes in music.

As we were passing the River Mersey, our guide mentioned that the river had a prominent place in pop music. He said, “Besides giving its name to Merseybeat, the river is also mentioned in a number of songs, notably Ferry Cross the Mersey, made famous by...?”

“Gerry and the Pacemakers,” fifty-two voices answered in chorus, and I knew I was among friends.

The 59th Street Bridge Song

I just spent a three-day weekend visiting friends at Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford and Cambridge are cool places. People cycle around town and punt on the river and park Austin Sevens on the Senate House roof. They wear T-shirts which say, "Do NOT ask me about my thesis." But what struck me most was how quiet these places are compared to London, just as – when I first moved to London – I was struck by how quiet it is compared to Calcutta.

The thing about a fast city is that, well, it is fast. And if you work in a law firm, the pace is positively frenetic. It is almost an experiment in practical philosophy – when you frequently work fifteen-hour days, you learn surprising things about yourself. You learn a little more about what makes you happy, what makes you sad. In a particularly busy week, when free time means a half-hour interval after you return from work and before you go to sleep, you learn what your priorities are. You learn about the incredible awesomeness of weekends.

You also make interesting adaptations in behaviour, and pick up new skills. I can now carry out a credit card transaction while talking on the phone, I can read a book while walking and step onto a moving escalator without taking my eyes off the page. I'm still not the most efficient person in a supermarket (that'll be the day), but I no longer behave like a complete idiot. One day, in the course of an hour-long lunch break, I managed to buy a sandwich, sushi and an overcoat, eat the first two, and still have half an hour to sit in the park and watch people go by. Of course, the desirability of being in a situation where you have to pick up skills like this is debatable.

When I was small, I would read whilst eating, and this was a perpetual bone of contention with my parents. They argued that it was unsocial, that it was an injustice to the food (and to the book), and that, on a more practical level, I would spill gravy on the pages. Now I have a better appreciation for what a luxury it is to do just one thing at a time.

Istanbul

On the shores of the Bosphorus, they once built a city beyond reproach.

Now the successors of Suleymān the Magnificent clamour for EU membership, and on their trams they put up warning posters such as these.

I thought it was a warning against wearing scary masks on public transport (or perhaps a reminder that what seems like a devil with horns on the 9.45 to Zeytinburnu may in fact be a chubby businessman with a juvenile sense of humour). But apparently the sign says Please give priority to passengers who are alighting.

Music, Food and Drink

My friend Saha once made a list of ten things he likes about London. As may be expected, the list was misguided and pretentious, and my own list – if I were to make one – would look completely different. Except for one item: Buskers on the Underground, which featured at no. 8.

At peak hour at Bank station, with hundreds of lawyers and bankers hurrying past, Simon and Garfunkel assume a special significance: Slow down, you move too fast / Got to make the moment last...

* * *

An eatery in Central London claims to have invented this snack which they call a ‘shwrap’, but which is basically unsliced Mazikushi. The packaging says:

Eating shwrap promotes peace and harmony, increases brain size and makes you more attractive to the opposite sex.*

*Or same sex – clever shwrap can determine orientation.

As if being blamed for tsunamis was not bad enough, gay people are also getting a limited choice of shwrap.

* * *

On Friday evening after work I had this conversation with my friend.

Me: I had a tough day at work. I came home and decided to drown my sorrows in drink.

Friend: What did you do?

Me: I ate a liqueur chocolate.

Friend: Nice. Manly thing to do.

CARTOONIED

Language Log had this hilarious post last week, called A doubtful benevolence: Mark Twain on spelling. I was reading it today at work, and by the time I got to the part about sicisiors, I was laughing uncontrollably and causing heads to turn in consternation.

Nearly as hilarious is the passage where Twain talks about a Good Spelling prize that was awarded at his school, and it reminded me of a funny story from my own school days.

My friend and I went for an inter-school spelling competition, and we had a round where a scrambled word would come up on the screen. The teams had to hit the buzzer and come up with the right word (sometimes there was more than one right word, but any one would do).

One of the words on the screen was CARTOONIED. This can be rearranged to form both COORDINATE and DECORATION, and these were evidently the words they were looking for. My friend hit the buzzer a split second after the word came up, and said, “Carotenoid.” And the person who was conducting the competition didn’t even have the word on his card, and they had to check a dictionary to confirm that the word actually exists, and I will never forget the look on his face.

We didn’t win the competition that year – we came a close second – but that one perfect moment was worth more to me than a first prize.

The Age of Convenience

I like people who, for no apparent reason, opt to do something the hard way. I don’t mean people who achieve heroic feats like climbing Everest without oxygen. For complex personal reasons, out of sheer bloodymindedness, or just for fun, ordinary people doing ordinary things sometimes reject the easy way out.

There are examples even on my blogroll. In his carpentry workshop, Tommy makes things out of wood, using lumber which he mills himself. Randall Munroe doesn’t allow ads on his website. When most of us chose soft corporate jobs, Anuj started out practising at the Delhi High Court, and if there is a harder way to make a living in the legal profession, I don’t know of it. My father types with two fingers – though (a) he is not on my blogroll, and (b) he doesn’t do it out of choice.

I rarely fall into this category myself because I am lazy. But in school I once solved all the problems in a Trigonometry textbook using nothing but Euclid. For a web site which I designed last year, I initially wrote the code from scratch, i.e. on Notepad, and I had fun doing it.

These days Sarbajeet and I work late and usually have dinner in the office. So we cook only on weekends, but on the other hand, we never cheat – which is to say, we never use ready-made sauces and pastes. Some of the more elaborate dishes occupy us for an entire evening: just shopping for mushroom bourguignon took us the better part of an hour.

Saha takes photographs on black-and-white film, on a camera with a dysfunctional light-meter. He took one of me a few months back, on Baker Street with a camera-strap round my neck and a fuzzy double-decker bus in the background. He had asked me to “pose, but not look like you are posing.” I hate it when people take photos of me, and usually I hate the results even more, but this photo is one of the few exceptions.

Saha had it developed in India, and this – not the photo itself, not the fact that it was taken on black-and-white film and developed by hand – was what I liked best: it arrived in an envelope which said “Thanks for indulging. - Saha.”