Metaphorical Dental Work

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: getting things done in India is tough. Like nutrition lessons.

After about two weeks of delays, I finally got around to starting my nutrition lessons at KLB today. They were delayed mostly because students were still busy doing exams and didn’t want to be bothered by new material to learn, even though it wouldn’t be on any exam or anything like they. They just had to show up and pay attention. Today, exams were finished, so Principal Ramdev told me to start by teaching two classes. Now that’s another problem. These are students that don’t have class normally, so rounding them up from wherever they are and getting them to the teaching hall took some time. I started a half hour later than planned for the first lesson, but that’s okay. At least it started at all.

I began with nutrition basics: sources of energy, energy balance, and dietary recommendations. I didn’t want to get too much into the science behind it, and I couldn’t tell them exactly what they should be eating on a daily basis. Rather, general education is the goal. In order to eat properly and be healthy, you must understand what it is that you eat, and that’s knowledge that so many people in the area lack. They don’t think about their food; they just eat. I’m hoping to change that.

Easier said than done. Engaging with the students was like pulling teeth. For the most part, they just sat there and didn’t say a word or make any reaction to what I said. I would ask them a question and try to get them to respond, and I would wait for a full minute before answering my own question and moving on to the next topic. How was I supposed to get them to think about their food if they wouldn’t even think about thinking about their food?

The good thing about pulling teeth, however, is that if you try hard enough, it will eventually come out. The first lecture was an hour long, and by the second half, I was making some progress. This came as a result of me making a few fat jokes, but hey, anything I can do to get some interaction is okay by me. By the end of the lecture, they were actively asking and answering questions and even using some reasoning to figure out dietary requirements. Even I didn’t expect them to make so much progress so fast.

This will probably jinx myself, but if I can keep it up, the rest of the lessons should be a breeze.

Finger Food Revamped

It’s funny how people from different cultures can take not only the same ingredients, but also the same cooking methods, and make something completely different for a completely different purpose. This I learned last night from Shammi and Atul. Atul stopped by for a short visit to discuss a few things, and according to Indian etiquette, Shammi decided to make a small snack to keep our mouths busy for the time being. The dish of choice? Scrambled eggs. Yum! But it’s a different kind of yum then what I eat for breakfast in America.

First, let me tell you about American scrambled eggs. They’re based on the French method for scrambled eggs, only with a heck of a lot less cream. What you do is beat the eggs until they are all the same consistency, then add a about a tablespoon of milk per egg, along with some salt and pepper to taste. With a minimum of spices, you can get the full taste of the egg to shine in the final dish, which is what you’re after. To cook them, pour the mixture into a cool frying pan that has a little bit of butter on it. Then you put it into the heat. Don’t put it into a hot frying pan, because that’s how you make a French-style omelette. Scrambled eggs should be different. They should be loose, soft, a little bit creamy, and still hold themselves together on the plate and the on fork that makes it’s way to your eager mouth. Continuously move the eggs around with a wooden or plastic spatula while you turn the heat up to medium flame and the eggs cook slowly. As the heat increases, the eggs will start to come together and become solid, but it will happen slowly. Now, here’s the most important part: remove the eggs from the heat before they are finished. Eggs and egg-based dishes continue to cook themselves from residual heat after they are removed from the hot pan, and if you want perfectly cooked scrambled eggs that are soft and delicate, you must put them on your plate while they are still a little bit runny. Trust me on this, because if you follow these instructions, after a couple of minutes, you will be eating the best eggs you have ever eaten in your life. They’ll be so soft and fluffy that you can spread them like jam on a piece of toast. That’s what my brother said, anyway.

Needless to say, Indian scrambled eggs are a bit different. First, you dice a quarter head of cabbage and three green chili peppers (Serrano peppers, if you’re in the U.S.) for three eggs. While you do that, keep the frying pan on high heat with a very small amount of oil. It will get very hot. First, you sauté the cabbage and peppers in the oil for a couple of minutes until the peppers are soft. You then pour the eggs into the very hot pan. They will immediately start to harden and seize up, so keep moving them around with a spatula. And keep doing it, for longer than you want to do so. When I did it while Shammi prepared muttar paneer (absolutely delicious, one of my favorite Indian dishes), I kept taking them off the heat, and Shammi kept putting them back one. It happened at least three times, because I continuously felt like I was overcooking the eggs. They were completely together and the pan was dry, but apparently, I was supposed to keep coking them until they were dry and lifeless.

The result? Delicious, and different. It was finger food, actually. There was no moisture left in the eggs, which makes for really bad breakfast, but since all the pieces were separated, it was great finger food. I hadn’t seen anything like it before. Even badly cooked scrambled eggs in the states had more moisture then this treat, but you wouldn’t eat Indian scrambled eggs for breakfast. Hard, dry and spicy, these eggs were meant for a snack.

Which makes me think of a cultural difference that I haven’t yet brought up. Most Indians eat food with their hands. Even wet dishes like a water dal soaked in rice are scooped up with one’s fingers. Your fingertips become premature taste buds that can taste the spicy dishes a few moments before they reach your tongue. It’s messy, sure, but that’s why you wash your hand before dinner. It’s also why you don’t eat with your left hand, because that’s the hand you use to wipe your ass. Don’t touch your food with it. Yuck.

Anyway, Indian scrambled eggs are completely different then their American counterpart, but they are certainly delicious in their own way. It makes me think, how else can we combine the same ingredients that we’ve had for thousands of years in new and exciting ways? How can the butter, sugar, eggs and flour be used to make a new kind of cake, or how can garlic be cooked in a different way to yield a new taste? That’s what I was after when I made monkey balls, and that’s what I want to keep on searching for in the rest of my time here. I only have 6 months to investigate the hundreds of ingredients at my disposal. Better hurry!

Kayakalp or Bust

I know that when I first started this blog, I wrote that I will be doing an internship at Kayaklap, a naturopathic health clinic and yoga center. I know that I haven’t gotten there yet. Stuff just keeps getting in the way. It has been like that movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, where in the beginning of the movie they set out to get some hamburgers and continuously get sidetracked on the way by cheetahs and Neil Patrick Harris. At the end, they’re better for it, because the journey is more important than the destination. At least it was in their case, and I can definitely say the same for mine. I love what I’ve done so far, and I’m glad that I’m not working at Kayakalp instead. That’s because I finally visited it yesterday, and I know now that it wouldn’t have been the right place for me.

Mrs. Singh was kind enough to give me the introduction to a doctor at Kayakalp, Dr. Varsha Jain, who agreed to let me come in and ask some questions. Armed with my trusty notebook, the two of us set off on a journey to find out what’s so special about this place that has people coming in from all over the world to do yoga and get massages. Upon arriving, I was at first struck by the modernity of the complex. Being a first-class spa, the campus was decked out with post-modern architecture and pristinely-kept gardens that made me feel like I had left India. Even most of the people walking around were wearing Western clothing instead of Indian dress.

We got to Dr. Jain’s office and she showed me some brochures while explaining to me some of the things they do at Kayakalp. I was surprised to hear that she personally had received my resume months ago, before I arrived when I was sure that I would be interning at Kayakalp. Apparently, the administration was not very receptive to somebody coming in and trying to change their practices. Of course that’s not necessarily what I was going to do, it was just the impression they had of Americans coming in. We have the tendency of kicking down the door of foreign countries and telling them how they should do things better. But that’s another blog. Yet even Dr. Jain expressed her concern that the nutrition methods used at the clinic could be very responsive to outside influence and needed some updating to reflect new foods and diets introduced by globalization. I guess that’s just going to have to be somebody else’s job.

For the last few minutes, I was given a short tour of the main facility by one of the yoga instructors, whom I think was also a doctor, but I couldn’t be sure. She was about 4 foot nothing and talked a mile a minute. Even though her English was perfect, it was hard to follow, like a chipmunk on helium and crack. I walked around to the various naturopathic rooms, which were essentially rooms designed to accommodate various spa treatments. There were the standard massage tables and steam rooms, but a few of them held some very strange equipment. Deluxe massage baths that required the patient to be strapped it… an enclosed “steam chair” that allowed a patient’s head to stick out of the box where the rest of their body was being assaulted by moist heat… oh, and the colon cleansing room. It’s like an enema, except it uses 25 liters. In your butt. After awhile, I wasn’t sure if I hadn’t accidentally gone to Guantanamo Bay.

After narrowly escaping the water boarding room (just kidding… I think), Mrs. Singh and I left to visit one of her friends, and that was my visit to Kayakalp. All this waiting and anticipation, but I was able to get a thorough tour of the place in 10 minutes. It’s not a bad place at all, and I’m not saying that an internship there would have been worthless. I’m just glad that I found some stuff to do at KLB, because that has been a very rewarding experience, and I don’t regret working there instead of Kayakalp. But hey, at least now I will be able to recommend a place that does great colon work. In case you’re interested.

Bake Me a Cake

I know now that if by chance I will end up living in India for the rest of my life, I can find some happiness no matter what. That’s because I found an oven and a bakery that houses it. Today I went for a short field trip to Krishna Bakery in Averi, a small town outside of Palampur and on the way to Paprola, where the Ayurvedic College is located. Today’s excursion had little to do with my work here; it was more to satisfy my own curiosity. I knew that there are bakeries around here, and I wanted to see how one works. Luckily, Atul told me that he knew the owner of one and that I could come spend a few hours there. To say I was looking forward to it is an understatement.

The best part about the whole day was the moment that I walked into the premises of the bakery. A familiar smell hit me right in the face, one to which I had grown accustomed last semester when I worked at MSU’s bakery on campus: yeast. A lot of it. Some people say that there’s nothing like the smell of baking a loaf of bread in your house. I disagree. That smell is easily rivaled by the scent produced by baking about a hundred loaves of bread at a time. There’s nothing like it. It’s an overwhelming smell of delicious bread fermentation that you can’t get anywhere else but at a commercial bakery, and as soon as it found its way into my nostrils, I knew that I was going to have a good day.

Krishna Bakery is owned and operated by a Mr. Ajay Sood, who has no formal training but 12 years of experience. He speaks pretty good English and runs an even better operation. It’s quite small by American standards, with only 4 employees on the payroll, but it’s just the right size for a small place like Palampur. Mr. Sood’s bakery was a literal smash-up of east and west, a perfect example of globalization. I have mentioned before that North Indian cuisine requires very little baking and hasn’t really needed ovens for the past 5000 years, so any bakery in India, by its very existence, is a tribute to globalization. It’s a place where Western practices and methods are employed by Indian bakers with an Indian sense of jugard, which means “to manage.” There was plenty of Western equipment that I am used to: baking tins, loaf pans, an industrial stand mixer, large rolling pins, and last but not least, an industrial oven that I immediately fell in love with. Yet at the same time, the employees make do without some things that I consider necessary for commercial baking. The best example was when Mr. Sood was frosting and decorating a simple birthday cake. In place of the standard baker’s piping bag, he rolled up a piece of newspaper into a cone, cut off the tip and filled it with colored frosting. Awesome! No, it’s not the most hygienic of piping bags, but it certainly is the coolest I’ve ever seen.

This is also the first food operation I’ve seen where necessary waste is okay and acceptable. Standard operating procedure in India is to respect the food, but when you want to frost a cake nicely, you have to cut off the edges to make them nice and smooth. I was afraid that Mr. Sood would go the Indian route when frosting the cake, but my fears were needless, He trimmed the sides. Good for him!

More examples of globalization could be seen in the use of bakery margarine, shortening, and specialty baking tools. More examples of Indian flair could be seen in tin bake ware instead of aluminum or stainless steel, eggless cake mixes to satisfy the vegetarian population in the area, and multiple recipes that were made without weighing ingredients. This place was a great exploration and a wonderful visit, but even I didn’t expect to see such a good example of the effects of globalization. Everything about this place, the fact that it provides foreign-inspired baked goods, is a foreign influence, but it still manages to be very successful in the face of picky, inflexible Indian taste buds. I was very impressed by the whole operation, and even more impressed that Mr. Sood started the business 12 years ago with no experience and has managed to be very successful, despite all odds. What are the chances?

Just 20 minutes after my arrival, Mr. Sood asked me if I would like to bake anything to teach him a new recipe. Well, I had gotten so accustomed to not being able to use an oven that I was at a loss for ideas, until he mentioned trying a brownie recipe the previous week with no success. Luckily, the brownie doctor was in the house, and I just so happened to have a recipe with me that I tried at KLB a couple of times. Those times, making them using shoddy equipment and a lousy oven was a test of my patience and ingenuity. But this time, the brownies came together like a dream. No hesitation, no complications, because every ingredient was already on hand and there was more than enough specialized baking equipment to keep me happy for awhile. Baking brownies today was just like baking at home. It took less than 10 minutes to put together the batter and get it in the oven. Doing the same thing at KLB takes at least three times as long.

I was a little sad to have to go, but Mr. Sood assured me that I could come back any time during work hours to use his oven. Maybe I’ll try an American-style cake next time. It’d sure be an improvement over the tasteless faux-cakes that I’ve had here so far.

Put That in Your Tuition Bill and Pay It

Ah, I love picking out my new classes. Yes, I’m kind of a nerd, but I’ve come to terms with that long ago, right about the time I picked up my super-duper decoder ring and went to the honors college ball (I’m not kidding about that second one, unfortunately). It gives me a kind of thrill to look at a list of classes and choose what knowledge I get to receive in the following year. Do I learn about culture or politics? Language or sociology? Swimming or pottery? It’s my future that I’m deciding, and it’s really fun to have an active say in the education that will become an important part of who I am. But by far, the best part is that this time, I’m picking my last classes. That’s right: in December, I will finish my B.A. in International Studies. Watch out world, here I come!

Even better than that is the fact that I only have 3 more classes, 9 credits total, to finish. That’s it. I won’t even count as a full-time student. I might only have to go to campus 2 or 3 days in a week. Does that rock or what? True, there is a part of me that doesn’t want to end, and not even because I don’t want to trade in the (sort of) carefree college life for a 9 to 5 and my somewhat active social life. I know that there’s more that MSU has to offer, and I want to take advantage of whatever that may be. For example, there’s a class called Language and Culture that I have had my eye on for the past two years but have been unable to take it for various circumstances. I’m talking to my advisor right now to see if I can substitute that class for another one of my requirements, so my fingers are crossed for that. However, it’s only a small part of me that will miss MSU. The greater part of me wants to blow this elaborate Popsicle stand called higher education and never look back.

In perusing MSU’s website for class information, I stumbled across some rather depressing statistics that were compiled as of 2001. Out of a cohort of incoming MSU freshman, 1/3 of them will not graduate in less than 6 years, either because they take longer than that to finish courses, they transfer to a different institution and finish their degree elsewhere, or they simply don’t graduate. Another 1/3 will graduate in 6 years. And only 1/3 will graduate in 4 years or less, which has long been considered the standard timeframe of college education. It looks like that is changing significantly. I should add that this is all worded very nicely, all PC-like, on the front page of the portal that students use to register for classes. Talking about stetting one up to be disappointed. It’s like the administration is telling the students to not expect to graduate in the timeframe they had originally expected. Welcome to MSU, now lower your standards a bit.

Maybe this is why going to college is becoming such an up-in-the-air for young people nowadays. Why spend about a hundred grand in some cases, spending upwards of 5 years in boring classes learning things you don’t need to know or even care about, to get a degree that might not get you anywhere? With the economy the way it is, even bachelor’s degrees don’t quite cut it anymore. One must spend even more money and more time to get a master’s or doctorate degree to get a decent, stable job. It’s not the way it always was, that’s for sure. My mom tells me stories of when she was in nursing school at the University of Michigan. She finished in less than 4 years and spent about 400 dollars each semester on tuition. For all of her classes. That’s ridiculous. I spend more than that on a single credit at MSU, and that’s a public university.

Why bring this up? Because I believe that it’s starting to develop into a similar situation in India, at least from what I’ve seen. Parents send their kids to schools not based on how good the schools are, but how much one spends on tuition. Actual education doesn’t seem to be important at all. As long as you pass the exams and show up to class for three years, you get a degree and a qualification that you can put on your resume. Yes, only three years, because every student in each degree takes exactly the same classes as every other student in their program. It’s like an automated assembly line for the mind. Young adults are just going to school because their parents want them to, and companies are hiring students based on tests scores. There’s no incentive to learn here, just to spend money and get a piece of paper with an institution’s name on it that says you’re a well-qualified worker. If it keeps going on like this, higher education, both in the U.S. and India, will become less and less valued, right along with actual knowledge. No wonder why the apes outsmart us in the future.

I am happy to say that by some luck and some more hard work, I get to be one of the lucky ones who graduates in 3 ½ years, but so what? I can completely understand the theoretical value of a college degree, and I’m glad I did the work, but if the rest of the world continues to devalue education and learning, there’s really no point, is there? One might as well not go to college. Go to India instead. It’s cheaper than the states and the food is better.

Get Your Stinking Paws Off My Vegetables, You Damn Dirty Apes!

I’m starting to think that days off are kind of funny. They don’t really make sense. Even when people are doing a job that they love and don’t mind going to work at all, they still enjoy their days off and look forward to them. I used to think that was dumb, and that I would never be that way. Yet here I am on my day off in India, a place where every day feels like a day off, and I’m really enjoying. What the hell is wrong with me?

Every day at “work” for me is an exercise in patience. Yes, it’s work, and I do actually get some important things done, but certainly not for 8 hours a day. I break at least twice for tea, and often find myself looking for something else to do. And that’s perfectly normal. For example, most of the teachers at KLB work a 4-hour day, and they don’t even teach for the whole time. They get to work between 10 and 11 and leave at 3, but by no means do they have class during all that time. Probably half. The rest of the time they just sit on benches outside and chat with each other until it’s time to sign out. I was raised with a Midwestern work ethic and feel like a waste of space when I don’t have a part time job, so sometimes seeing these teachers do so little work really frustrates me. But there’s nothing I can do about it.

Today is a school holiday, so I knew a couple of days ahead of time that I wouldn’t be coming into work. Two months ago I would have been bored out of my mind staying at home all day with nothing to do. Not anymore. I looked forward to my day off, even though work is like a day off every day anyway. So what is it that I was really looking forward to about my day off? Well, I wouldn’t have to walk several kilometers that day to get to and from work. I love walking, but a day off from that would be nice. I got some extra time to make more Monkey Balls again. I exercised. I read a book. I had tea with Mrs. Singh. I watched another one of the movies that I had purchased last week. I got a visit from Atul. And for a few moments throughout the day, I did absolutely nothing. Surprisingly, I loved it.

Man, India is really getting to me.

So are the monkeys. While having tea with Mrs. Singh, we were interrupted several times and I had to go out into the garden. Why? Because rhesus macaques were eating her vegetables and I had to scare them away. About ten times in an hour. Normally their guard dog, Hira, takes care of that, but she was in her pen while I was visiting. She doesn’t like me. She tries to bite me when I visit. Well fine, I don’t like her either. Anyway, the monkeys never learn. They’re supposed to be so damn smart, but every time I shoo them off, they just keep coming back for more. Don’t they know that I’m watching them?

When I was a kid, just like every other American boy, I always wanted a monkey as a pet. I now know that it’s the result of underexposure to them. There are no monkeys indigenous to North America, so the only time we see them are in zoos and on the Discovery Channel. And Ross had a pet monkey on Friends. Naturally, we want them around more, because what we see of them is very attractive to young boys (or immature adults, like myself): it’s a little furry person that does tricks and has fingers. What’s not to like?

Last semester I took an anthropology class that focused on primatology for part of the semester, and I loved it. I even learned about a certain species of monkey in Brazil called the capuchin monkey that I am now very fond of because it can cook. Really! Is that not the most awesome thing you’ve ever heard? Allow me to clarify. These monkeys know how to find a certain fruit from the trees and pick it only when it is ripe. Then they knock the fruit, which has a very tough exterior like a coconut, off the tree. These fruits are then collected and placed in an area exposed to the sun, where the monkeys leave them to dry several days. This makes the small seeds inside the fruit tastier. But still, the monkeys need to get to the seeds, and to do that, they bring the tough fruits to certain rocks that the monkeys have worked on for some time. These rocks have concave surfaces that make perfect work areas for opening stubborn fruits. The monkeys them slam the hard shells against these rocks over and over again, until they hit it just right, crack the shell, and unlock the deliciousness within. Now that is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. These monkeys are expending hours of work and several days of forethought just to get at a tiny piece of food, only because it tastes good. Before you know it, I’ll be working in a restaurant and be able to hire a monkey as a sous chef. They’re going to be that smart someday.

Unfortunately, my love of monkeys is only from TV and class. The truth isn’t as fun. Since coming to India, I don’t want a monkey anymore. They’re a huge pain in the butt. They steal your food, eat your crops, attack your dog, hide the remote, and generally cause a great mess of things. I can see why Charlton Heston hated them so much, but as for me, they don’t need to enslave humans to be trouble. They’re annoying enough as it is.

Ram Navami

Another holiday? Another religious festival? Another day off school (during exams, nonetheless)? Seriously people, this is getting kind of ridiculous.

For the past 8 days and ending tomorrow, 24 March, Hindus around here have been celebrating Ram Navami, which is the birthday of Lord Rama. Funny thing is, I actually know about this guy. It was one thing that I didn’t have to look up on Wikipedia before I wrote the blog. Go me! But contrary to the other festivals that I have seen so far, this one, while joyous, is a bit more somber in celebration. No drugs and no throwing colors. Many people have performed selective fasting for the past nine days, which includes no alcohol, meat, eggs, onions, ginger and garlic. Basically, if it tastes good, you can’t eat it. Well, you shouldn’t eat it, not necessarily can’t. Sounds like Catholicism. I’ve never been really good at fasting. Instead, I try to stick to the principal of “Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

I have heard of Rama from the Ramayana, a famous Hindu epic story that involves nearly all the gods, but focuses on Rama and his wife Sita. One day, Sita was captured by Ravana, who’s really not a good guy. Nobody likes him, which is maybe why he had to capture a woman at all. Really, though, he did it because he’s jelous of Rama, who everybody likes. That’s how I interpreted it, anyway.

Rama is rather upset at the kidnapping of his beloved wife, so he enlisted the help of the god Hanuman, who is one of my favorites, to find and retrieve her. Hanuman is the monkey god in Hindu mythology, and he is depicted as a superhero. There’s even a kids cartoon about him where he really is a superhero, flying around and saving people. I’ve also noticed that in depictions of him, he is quite well muscled, compared to the soft, beautiful bodies of nearly every other god that I’ve seen. It contrasts with Greek mythology, where every god and statue of them is the epitome of human perfection, perfectly muscled, perfectly proportioned, and completely unrealistic by most human physiques. Hindu gods seem to be more down-to earth and attainable by comparison. At least they don’t have such high standards of perfection. Food for thought.

To find Sita, Hanuman enlists the help of his monkey army. They find her, he defeats Ravana, and all is happy. To this day, there is a certain species of langurs (monkeys, for those of you who didn’t have to memorize primate taxonomy last semester) in the Indian subcontinent that is still worshipped by people for their help in bringing the universe back into order. They’re called Hanuman langurs now, and they’re kind of blue and funny-looking. Google them, you’ll get a laugh.

It’s all made me think of how the Hindu religion, unlike many other religions that I’m used to, connects so much of its faith to things that are real and observable, not unattainable. Like monkeys and your figure, there’s always something about Hinduism that’s easily relatable. If nothing else, it’s a really good religion for the people.

Getting Used To It

Here are a few updates on how I’m getting used to things about India that most people back home would hate to hear about.

A bat that was hanging in the rafters of my house flipped out and starting flying around when I turned on the light last night. It nearly flew into my face, and for the first time (because this happens a lot), I didn’t scream like a little girl. Not that I scream like a little girl anyway, I’m just sayin’.

This morning I went to the sink to wash dishes, but I had to put that on hold while I pulled two spiders the size of my fist out of the sink first.

There’s a long, winding, unstable path from the mud hut to the main road to get to KLB. I remember that for at least the first month, I had to look at my feet the whole time I walked it so that I didn’t trip and break my ankle. But this morning I realized that I’ve stopped looking at my feet. I don’t have to anymore.

I went to the market yesterday to get brown sugar and the shopkeeper told me that he was sorry, but they’re out. They’ll get some more tomorrow. He said it in Hindi, and I didn’t have to ask him to use English.

That’s all, folks!

Ebert and Roper Give "Reverse Globalization" Two Thumbs Up

This week I struck cultural gold. Twice.

First was when I finally found a shop in town that sells DVD’s and better yet, one that has a decent collection of Hollywood movies. Finally, something to fill some of the more boring nights that I have here. I’m not complaining but sometimes I just want to watch a movie. I’m a big movie fan back home, yet I don’t have much opportunity to watching anything good here. Almost none. You can imagine how happy I was when the guy at the shop pulled a big stack of American DVD’s from under the counter. It was like an express tunnel to America had opened up for me to visit it from my computer at my convenience. Yay, McDonalds and Coke!

You can also imagine how happy I was to see that they were all movie collections, 5-6 on one disk, for 50 rupees each. 5 movies for about a 1USD? And new releases too? Score! You may wonder how the guy at the shop was able to find movies like Legion, The Book of Eli and Sherlock Holmes (with one of my favorite actors ever, Robert Downey Jr.). Let’s just say that somewhere in this particular retail chain, somebody ignored the warnings at the beginning of the film that threaten criminal prosecution resulting from the sale or distribution of unauthorized copies. The MPAA might not be too happy with me were I to give away any more details than that.

One of the movies that I purchased was James Cameron’s new cinematographic masterpiece, Avatar, which also happens to be the most expensive movie ever made. Allow me a few sentences to release some frustrations about this film, which I had seen in theatres in the states before I left for India. This movie is visually stunning and the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on screen. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the awesome images and cinematography that littered every single microsecond of the film. That was fortunate, because the story is an anthropologist’s worst nightmare. Were it not for its beauty, I would have walked out of the theatre at the first sign of giant blue humans from another planet. Seriously, James Cameron? In your half-billion dollar budget, did you ever consider shelling out a couple of bucks to hire an actual anthropologist? It’s like he didn’t even try to make it realistic or original. The notion that every major life form that evolved on a completely different planet would still be analogous to major species on earth is ridiculous. We’ve got humans, except they’re blue, 10-feet tall and with four fingers instead of five. We’ve got horses, except they have six legs and breath through their necks. We’ve got something that’s a cross between a rhino and a hammerhead shark. Oh, and don’t forget the dragons, because you have to have scary flying creatures in an alien flick.

Don’t even get me started on the culture of the giant blue monkeys in the film. Too late, I already started. There is no way that humans would have been able to communicate and relate so easily with a different sentient species from another planet. Who’s to say that aliens even have to have tongues, mouths and vocal cords that can fluently express our language? Who’s to say that their mouths aren’t on the top of their heads? Who’s to say that they even speak at all? And of course, it’s so convenient that their alien language can so easily be learned and expressed by our speech capacity. Now, let’s say that lighting does strike a billion times in the same place to give way to a species that looks and talks like us. Why the hell would they have evolved to have the same culture as us? Duh, of course there are differences, but they have bow and arrows and mate monogamously. WTF? Cameron, you have to be a little more creative with your next alien movie and not make it a remake of Pocahontas. There’s a reason that the only little golden figures your pet project won were in visual effects and technical categories.

Ok, I’m done. I think.

Anyway, Avatar is the first great example that I have found of subtle globalization that isn’t Western influence bearing down on everybody else. Well, not the movie, but the word. “Avatar,” I learned, is a Hindi word for reincarnation, but this word has been in the English language for at least a couple of decades. That means somewhere along the line, Western culture was sufficiently influenced enough by Indian culture that a bit of it got transferred over. Principal Ramdev even tells me that there are a lot of Hindi words in an English dictionary, but he can’t think of any besides “avatar.” I found this fascinating, because so much English is sprinkled into everyday Hindi, and I always take it as a sign of the arrogance of Western globalization. It’s always good to see that it’s not true. Not entirely, anyway.

Summary: Avatar is a beautiful movie with a horribly uncreative story, and Hindi is surreptitiously taking over English. Just wait, your great-grandkids are going to grow up speaking Hindi and English. And James Cameron’s grandkids will spend a few trillion dollars to make a holographic movie focusing on a re-imagining of the afterlife that’s populated by people with wings. But they wear green jumpsuits, not flowing white robes, so clearly they’re not angels and are completely original. Right?

The Money Pit

Ah, the news of your first job acceptance. The sense of accomplishment… hard work paid off… regular income… tightly controlled schedule… waking up at 6… loss of social life… wait, why did I want to get a job?

A local bank was conducting a mass interview at KLB today for the senior students who are to graduate in May. The post, should you choose to accept it: insurance sales. Excitement was in the air as the girls poured over the morning newspaper to brush up on current events. That’s one thing that interviewers will usually ask you in India, and these girls almost never read the paper, so they had a lot of catching up to do. This was in the morning, and I realized that a job interview would be a good opportunity to observe some cultural differences. Never having landing a stable career-like job before, I don’t have a lot of comparison, but I figured that it would still be interesting.

First were group interviews. 50 girls were applying for the 10 posts available, and the two interviewers from the bank started by talking to them in groups of ten or so. From that group they narrowed it down to about 20 “finalists.” Singular interviews were carried out after that, and the 10 girls who were finally selected received and signed a sort of contract. Then there were pictures. Each girl was snapped being handed the letter of acceptance from Principal Ramdev (which I found curious, because he had nothing to do with the interviews), and a group photo was taken afterwards. Finally, the girls broke off into groups to call their parents and tell them the good news.

The people who didn’t make the cut? No problem whatsoever. More interviews with more companies would be conducted in April and May, so there was ample opportunity remaining to get employed. In fact, several girls told me that they didn’t want to even get the job at all; they would rather continue their schooling and receive and MBA. So they were glad to not be accepted.

I talked with one girl afterwards and asked her if she was glad that she got the job. She said she was, and I asked if this was something that she wanted to do. Without hesitation, she replied, “No.” Curious. She was one of the ones who seemed actually quite excited to get the offer. She clarified by saying that she still had to talk to her parents first, and she wasn’t entirely sure that it was what she wanted to do. I then inquired what it is that she did want to do for a career.

“Something where I can sit down and make a lot of money.” Well, at least she knows what she wants.

Just One of the Guys

For my last day at the Ayurvedic College, I decided to collect some data from the three hostels there about their food choices, eating, and the health of the hostlers. Even if I don’t end up crunching the numbers on it like I did for KLB, having as much data as possible while I can get it would be beneficial. There were two things I wanted: weight and menus.

First I had the menus translated from Hindi. There was a kitchen each for the boys and girls, and both of them were very well-equipped. If it weren’t for the stone working surfaces and type of equipment used, I would have thought that it was a restaurant-quality kitchen from the U.S. I was very impressed, and have not seen anything like it in India yet. There were huge gas ranges, a gas flat top grill, a large fire pit for cooking in oversized pots, and direct gas lines to all the appliances. Everything was also very clean, even by American standards.

Then there was the food. Sooooooooo much better than KLB’s hostel. Granted, the hostlers pay 2000 rupees per month to stay there, compared to 1600 per month paid by the KBL hostlers, so they can afford more food. The dals were richer, the rice was better quality, there was a better selection of food throughout the week and at each meal, and snacks were provided between meal times. Each kitchen had a permanent staff of either 3 or 4 cooks who were very well trained. Furthermore, the menu was open to changes. Each month, 3-4 students from each hostel would be appointed menu coordinator and they could make changes to the menu for that month. If they were sick of paranthas, they could change it. Also, in the guy’s hostel, a non-veg option, like meat or chicken, was cooked once a week.

The students were much healthier. The weights of the girls that I recorded on my last day were5-10% higher than the girls at KLB. In addition, all of the students were more physically active. This would offset the extra food that they get so that they don’t gain too much more weight. The girls do yoga every morning, walk more, gossip less, and play table tennis or badminton in their free time. The guys, being guys, like to go to the gym and pump iron. I guess that’s the same regardless of your country. The ones who don’t go to the gym often play cricket, football (a.k.a. soccer), go for walks or hikes, and some even go jogging. They’re much more health conscious then I thought they would be. I was asked by several of them how they can get big biceps like mine. Ummm… eat a lot of junk food and travel too much? Now, I don’t have big arms by U.S. standards, but compared to some of the stick figures in India, I’m Schwarzenegger. Or Salmaan Khan, if we’re talking Bollywood. If I’ve said it before, I’ve said it a hundred times: I’ll take my ego-stroking where I can get it.

After I got the menu from the girls and the enough of the weights from both the boys and girls, the girl in charge of the hostel asked me to stay for lunch, which started in an hour. I’ve tried that a few times with the girls at KLB, and it’s always an uncomfortable situation. It usually ends up being me awkwardly eating on one side of the table and 37 others on the other side, with huge grins plastered over their young faces, watching me mechanically put rice and watery dal into my mouth. Not fun, so I politely declined and walked over to the guys’ hostel to get their menu translated. After that was done, I received an invitation from those guys to join me for their lunch. This time I accepted, and I’m really glad I did. It was just like having lunch with my friends back home, except that everybody was talking in a different language and eating with their hands. Yet I felt strangely at home, because for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t the center of attention. For 15 short minutes, I was surrounded by Indians who weren’t staring at me. They were just acting normally, joking around, laughing, eating, and having a good time. Not pestering the white boy with questions, not asking me why I was eating my chapatti in a funny way, not anything. I loved it. I’d forgotten what it’s like to be just one of the guys.

Time to go back to KLB and make some more PBC. Maybe I will be able to take what I’ve learned from the Ayurvedic College and apply it to the hostel in Palampur.

Doctor, Doctor, Gimme the News

Note: I wrote this post on Wednesday, 17 March, and have only now gotten some internet time to post it.

Day 2 at the Ayurvedic College proved to be even more informative about matters besides Ayurveda. I started by discussing quantitative dietetics with Dr. Gupta while she answered, or at least tried to answer, all of my questions from a book in front of her. Again, not much about Ayurveda was learned. Nearly all of the diet advice prescribed goes right along with what a Western doctor would tell you: less fried foods, less heavy foods, less fat, more fruits, more water, etc. They just have different reasons for it, but more often, no reason for it. I found two points that should be updated to reflect modern times, but they haven’t been and won’t be. First, they say that the best salt is crude rock salt because they believe that iodine occurs naturally in salt, which it doesn’t. It’s added as part of the manufacturing process to provide iodine to people who do not get it from vegetables grown in iodine-rich soil, like Indians. The second area is that they say rainwater collected from the sky is the best water to drink, but that may not be so true anymore, depending on the area you call home. Acid rain and all. It ain’t so tasty.

More interesting was when I visited the hospital for the first time. I found it to quite an eye-opening experience. Now, I’m not that naive, and I didn’t expect a spotless, well-organized hospital ward with Noah Wylie flirting with a patient in the next room. Yet I was still shocked by what I saw. The place is filthy, stained and smells of standing water. The lower floor doesn’t even get running water. I will compliment them by saying that this is the first time in India that I didn’t see trash all over the floor; it was well-swept. But what hospitals in the U.S. would consider minimum sanitation wasn’t even being considered here. For example, the door to the operating room was wide open. While a minor surgery was taking place. I worked in a hospital a couple of summers ago, and the sanitation standards that we had to follow were mind-boggling. This place was more like a daycare in terms of organization and cleanliness.

People crowding the exam rooms were another big difference. Let’s just say that HIPPA isn’t followed very well over there. 4 or 5 people are waiting their turn in one exam room while the doctor is examining a patient. Just another example of how privacy isn’t the same here. Plus, I was able to just walk right in and interrupt the doctor with my questions or his translations while he is in the middle of an exam. All in all, it was a very awkward experience.

After my initial tour, I sat down with a doctor to talk about how they diagnose people and classify them according to the vat-pitta-kaph system of digestion and physical makeup, or dhosa. The standard workup sheet that is filled out for every patient contains many of the same things as we analyze in the U.S., like blood pressure, urine and physical examination. It didn’t contain the methods used to analyze dhosa, so I asked the doctor to do mine. He asked me about my excretion, urination, appetite, stomach irritation, sleep habits and level of social interaction. He also observed my complexion, hair, body hair, age, body type and intellect. From all this information, which took less than 5 minutes to collect, he determined that I am predominately pitta. Ideally, all three characteristics, should be in equal balance, but there are times and stages in life when imbalance is completely normal and expected. For example, healthy males at my age should be predominately pitta, which means that I am just as healthy as I should be.

And it means that my system is able to digest more alcohol than normal. That’s a nice thing for a doctor to tell me on St. Patrick’s Day.

I came up with some observations about the analysis. For example, skin complexion is one factor, but I’m whiter than most Indians. He explained that it’s just one of the many factors that contribute to dhosa, which makes sense, but still, how can they use skin color, body hair or IQ to determine normal physical functions? These things are objectively determined and do not have much effect on our physical makeup. They also differ greatly from one culture to another. Maybe one group of people in Africa consider it normal to not sleep much, have dark skin and no body hair. Does the analysis of their dhosa change accordingly? I hope so.

Let this be a lesson about alternative medicines and their usefulness. Sure, it’s great when they give you the okay to drink every day and give into your sexual urges, but most of these practices are culturally biased and don’t necessarily reflect the best interests of people all over the world. They should be taken with a grain of salt, preferably one that has been iodized.

Thinking Inside the Box

Don’t you just hate it when you have to call tech support for help with your mp3 player or computer? It really sucks. You get connected to somewhere in India where your call is recorded for training purposes. You’re stuck speaking to Bob with an Indian accent, whose name you know isn’t really Bob, but whatever. The worst part is that when you tell them your problem, you just know that all they are doing is looking up that problem on your computer and seeing what solutions their company has told them to try (Reboot? Gee, I never would have thought of that on my own. Thanks, Bob!). They’re not actually trying to solve your problem, they’re just following an extensive spreadsheet that covers nearly every problem your software or hardware could have, and if they can’t find a solution, they are instructed to have you call somebody else or send it in for repair.

I can now tell you that it’s not their fault. It’s education in India that teaches them to be that way, and after just two hours at the Ayurvedic College and a follow-up with Principal Ramdev, I know this for sure now. It’s tickled the back of my mind since I got here, but I can finally confirm that Indian education does not value logic and reasoning.

First, let me explain the basics of Ayurvedic dietetics, so that you can understand the rest of what I write. Food is categorized as either being light or heavy on digestion. Then, each person is categorized under one of three digestions, or a combination of the three: vat, meaning moderate digestion; pitta, meaning strong; and kaph, or weak. Based on a person’s digestion, they are prescribed a certain diet that contains a combination of light and heavy foods that are appropriate for their particular digestion. In addition, the season of the year is another determinant of what food you should eat, and Ayurveda distinguishes between 6 seasons throughout the year: spring, summer, rainy, early winter, late winter, and autumn.

Knowing this (which only took about ten minutes to be explained to me) and based on what I learned the previous day, what I really wanted to get out of my time in the college was how exactly foods and people are classified as such. Rice is a light food, but why? I have a moderately-strong digestion, but what in my body determines that? These were my goals.

My goals will not be met. Ever. Know why? Because not even Ayurveda knows the answers.

Consider that for a second, and let me give you an example to help you understand. If you go to a Western doctor with a knee injury, he will likely do some sort of exam, and based on what he thinks about the results of his observations, he will make a recommendation for treatment that will be best for you. What if instead of considering you as a unique person with individual needs and symptoms, he considers the results of your exam and opens up a book in front of you to see what to do? He reads for you the proper recommended treatment word-for-word out of the book, and that’s that. Would you go back to that doctor or follow his advice? Probably not. Unfortunately, that is exactly the method of treatment you will receive if you go to an Ayurvedic doctor.

Dr. Gupta, the dietetics professor, sat with me for two hours today trying to answer my questions about Ayurvedic classification, and I kept asking why. Why is this food light and this food heavy? What are the characteristics that give me a stronger digestion than that person? She was never able to answer my questions, and kept flipping through the pages of a book that she had in front of her and reading loosely-related paragraphs in the hope that they would answer my questions and shut me up. Fortunately, I am stubborn, and tried to ask the most simple questions possible that could never be answered from a book. I could tell that after awhile, she was getting really sick of my questions. In my mind, I was asking the same question 10 different ways and never getting a good answer. In her mind, this stupid Westerner was asking the same question 10 times and she was showing me the right answer in her book each time.

First, I tried this one: “Why is rice light on your digestion?” She answered because rice has properties that make it light and easy to digest. “Yes, but why? What are those properties?” She rattled off Sanskrit terms out of the text in front of those. “Okay, but how does one discover those properties?” She didn’t know.

Then I tried a new one. I pulled a pack of American-brand gum out of my backpack, one that she had never seen before. I asked her to tell me how to classify this food. She said this was impossible without eating the food in the first place. In other words, a food is light if it feels light on your body, and heavy if it feels heavy. That’s it. But wait, you might ask, what if rice makes one person feel heavy and another feel light? There’s no way that food can be universally classified as light or heavy, because different people react to the same food in different ways. Ah, but a food is only light or heavy after it enters your system and is digested, upon which its lightness or heaviness is revealed. In this respect, Ayurveda is a completely objective branch of science. It contrasts heavily with Western science, which strives to be as subjective as possible. After 2 hours of me asking why, I finally got down to the real answer: who knows?

Let me remind you that Dr. Gupta is a well-practiced doctor of Ayurvedic dietetics. She has a 5-year undergraduate degree in Ayurveda and a 2-year master’s in Ayurvedic diet. On top of that, she’s over 40 and thus has 15+ years of practical experience. Yet she is physically unable to tell me why rice is light, because she simply doesn’t know. Upon realizing this, I finally understood Ayurveda. Completely. They told me it couldn’t be done in a week, but I did it in two hours. Ayurveda is a set of texts over 2,000 years old that lists conditions of the body and treatments, and it has been blindly followed since its inception. In order to be a practicing Ayurvedic, all you have to do is memorize. No logic, no reasoning, no diagnosis. It doesn’t exist. It’s not needed. A computer can do it, and could probably do it better and faster than a person.

This is the way education of all kinds works in India. I’ve seen copies of tests at several levels of education in a variety of subjects, and it boggles my mind the kind of questions that are asked. For example, “What are the four characteristics shared by most democracies?” This question was asked on a pre-university entrance test, one comparable to the SAT or ACT, but the type of questions, as you can see are completely different. They have different values. 4 characteristics? Just 4?I can think of 6 or 7 characteristics shared by democracies, based on several classes I have taken, but if I didn’t write down the answer that was told to me in the government-sponsored textbook, verbatim, I would fail that question. Does that mean that I know nothing about democracies? No, it just means I haven’t read that book. Yet this is the kind of teaching and learning valued in India: memorization and regurgitation. That’s the only way one can succeed here. If you ask questions, think for yourself, and try to exercise logic, you are shunned.

You may wonder, if logic is not valued, why so much business is starting to be shipped out to India. 10-15 years ago, MNC’s specializing in technology and IT, like Microsoft and HP, decided to set up businesses in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kolkata (then Calcutta). They favored these places not just because they were some of the only big cities in India with relatively stable power supply, but because there was so much cheap labor available. Most people know this. What they probably don’t know is that they also snatched up the rejects from the educational system, those who asked questions and tried to exercise logic. These people were not welcome in what India saw as development, but foreign MNC’s saw their potential and recruited them for their purposes. Today, these are the leaders of the industry in Asia. America frowns upon excessive outsourcing and calls it the labor drain, but India is also unhappy with some of the results of international cooperation. Sure, their IT industry is booming, but they are experiencing a brain drain, with strong thinkers and innovators leaving the country because they have no reason to stay in India. It’s their own fault, though. Until education can move away from rote memorization and teaching students how to pass the exams and nothing else, India can never be a big thinker in the world.

Here I’m starting to get biased and judgmental. I’ve tried not to do it so far, but this time, I don’t care. This is something that really strikes me at the center of my beliefs and values. I’ve tried to be understanding and tolerant of all the cultural differences I’ve encountered so far, but now I have to take a stand. This isn’t right. A person cannot become smarter by reading a book and memorizing facts alone. At some point, we have to ask Why. It’s the only question that leads to progress and higher learning. That’s how we evolved and grew as a species. Without “Why,” we would still be hiding in our caves and eating raw animal flesh, wondering why the sky kept throwing bright fire at us and making loud noises when it rained. It’s the only thing that separates us from animals. Humans can think, reason and act upon their beliefs. It’s human nature, and the Indian system of education is suppressing it.

When I started at MSU, I began my studies in political science and international political relations at James Madison College. I really disliked it and changed majors after a year. That whole first year, all we did was read political texts and case studies and analyze them according to arguments, points of view and logic behind policy. Then we would right excruciating essays on an obscure issue and argue one point or another. I hated it because I didn’t like politics, and I felt like the professors believed that reading a book will make you an expert on that subject immediately. While I never regret my decision and I stick by it, there is something that I cannot deny about JMC, and that is the value they put on teaching logic and critical thinking. In just one year of classes with them, I learn invaluable, incalculable amounts of reasoning powers and methods of deduction. I learned how to read a newspaper article and consider hundreds of points of view represented by it. I learned how to listen to a person and consider their background and how it affects their way of speaking on an issue. Most importantly, I learned how to question. Since then, I never, ever, ever take anything I read, hear or see at face value. I always question everything in my life without exception, and this has helped me excel in everything I do. Thank you, James Madison College. You and I may not have gotten along at all times, but I will never forget that you taught me to think.

I won’t lie, this realization has made me question the impact I can possibly have here. There’s no way that people who have been trained in a system teaching them exactly one way to think can be very receptive to outside viewpoints and different ways of doing things. Even if a few people want my input, the system won’t let me get very far. Ultimately, I can’t make much of a difference. I can try, and most certainly will, but I have to do so working within the system, and that’s quite difficult. For example, how can I teach about eating a proper diet when I can’t get the students to question what’s in the food they eat and think critically about it? I can’t exactly go over every single piece of food that they will possibly consume over the course of their lives and tell them how much to eat of it. Instead, I have to somehow get them to think more about what they put into their mouths and not take it for granted all the time. It might not even work, but at least I can try.

For the rest of my time at the Ayurvedic College, I will hopefully be shadowing doctors as they diagnose patients and recommend changes in their diet. I will also be reading some literature about specific classifications of food. I’m not too happy about that part, because I didn’t come to India to read a book about Ayurveda when I can just as easily pick one up from the library. I’ll never be able to learn why the classification is why it is, but any knowledge about it is good knowledge at this point. I also was able to visit the hostels today and get some information about their diet, upon which I will expand in the next few days. Unfortunately, as I have no plans to become an Ayurvedic doctor or learn much more about it, the college has little to offer me. I won’t be spending much more time there.

In other news: Madam Utra’s son, Shankir, has come home for a vacation after working for some time in the states for AT&T. It was so nice to be able to talk to somebody who speaks American English. It was even nicer that he brought dark chocolate from the states. I love dark chocolate, and there is exactly one kind of chocolate that you can get in Palampur: Cadbury milk chocolate. It sucks. Who would have thought that Hershey’s could taste so good?

Elemental Hospital

It’s time for me to forget everything I’ve ever learned about stomachaches and surgery. For most of the next week, I will be spending time observing the way things are done, especially relating to nutrition, at Rajiv Gandhi Ayurvedic College. Don’t know anything about Ayurvedic medicine? Me neither. This morning, I left for my meeting with Dr. Y.K. Sharma, the principal-dean of the college, to see what kind of work or studies I could do in about a week. I thought that I would be able to get a crash course in Ayurvedic medicine and learn a little bit about everything there is to know in that time.

Couldn’t have been more wrong. I didn’t understand a thing about Ayurveda, so I wouldn’t have known that it’s an entirely different science and system of medicine that we really don’t encounter at all in the western world. It’s like somebody who spent 13 years of standard American education, but no science classes at all, asking to become a doctor. It just doesn’t work that way. At the Ayurvedic College, only 5-year degrees are available. That’s even more than the standard 3 years of med school that our doctors have to take. It really is a vast branch of knowledge, and I felt like a complete idiot when I realized that I didn’t know a thing about it.

Nonetheless, I picked up a couple of things by asking the right questions. Basically, Ayurveda teaches that humans are made up of the five elements in combinations unique to each individual: earth, water, air, fire and ether. These elements have to be in balance, and if they are not, they cause disease, anything from a headache to cancer. Ayurvedic teaches how to correct the imbalances in order to cure the disease, and there are a variety of ways to do that. Yoga, massage, herbal medicine and spiritual chanting are ways to do that, but so is surgery, just in a different way. It’s completely different from Western medicine.

Nutrition is the backbone of Ayurveda, and once I realized that I couldn’t learn about a completely different branch of science in a week, I decided to focus on that. I was introduced to Dr. Gupta, a female dietician instructor and the warden for the girl’s hostel on campus (two hostels are for girls, and one is for boys, but I’ll get to that later). The first thing that struck me about Dr. Gupta was how healthy she looked compared to everybody else. She was elderly, and that much was noticeable from wrinkles and hair color, but aside from that, she had a physique of a much younger woman. Compared to all the woman I see here, who are either stick-thin or obese, her weight was right where it should be. She looked neither thin nor chubby, neither well-built nor sickly; the essence of balance. She and Dr. Sharma gave me a quick intro on Ayurvedic dietetics, which I cannot wait to continue.

Foods and eating in Ayurveda is not broken down numerically into calories and grams like we are used to. Instead, foods are classified on a scale of being either easy or hard to digest. They are given values as such, and each person is also classified as having either a strong or weak digestion. They should eat foods that match with their appropriate metabolism. In addition, I learned that Ayurveda teaches that nature provides the correct diet for people according to their area. For example, people living in cold areas should eat more oil and heavy foods like meat and potatoes, while people living in warm areas should consume fruits, juices and light grains or vegetables. Out of the entire day, this struck me as making the most sense out of anything that I’ve heard in a long time. Why not? If life gives you lemons, make lemonade if you want, but be sure to eat them somehow.

Oh, and there’s another cool thing that I learned: Ayurveda teaches 6 tastes. Western science teaches sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Many Asian countries, like China and Japan, add a fifth called umamai, or savory. Ayurveda holds on to sweet, sour and salty, but divides bitter into two categories (which I still didn’t fully understand, even after it was taught to me), and adds astringent, the feeling when a food dries up your mucus membranes. Who would’ve thought?

For the rest of the week, I have two goals. First, I will be spending more time with Dr. Gupta learning about the nutrition aspect. By reading some literature and (hopefully) being allowed to shadow some doctors at the hospital, I want to learn more specifically about how both foods and people are classified under the Ayurvedic system. What is it that makes a food heavy, and what about a person tells the doctor that they have more fire in their system than air? Secondly, I will be taking some data from the hostels at the college in order to compare it with the data I’ve collected from KLB’s hostel. I’m not sure yet whether I will be even able to complete a full nutritional analysis of the same caliber, but any data that I can get can be compared in some way, even if it’s just a superficial analysis.

One more thing I should add is that I may not be going to KLB this week, which means that I may not have internet access to regularly post on the blog. Surely I will be writing about my experiences every day, but until I get an internet connection, you won’t hear about them. Guess you’ll just have to be patient. In the meantime, I’ll try to forget about every science class I’ve ever taken.

Balls to the Wall

Principal Ramdev returned to KLB last Friday. That very day, he brought up a subject again which I had hoped he had forgotten, because it had been a couple of weeks since we last discussed it:

“Pat, you need to try again to come up with some spicy snack to sell.” Damnit!

Number one, I’m no good at spicy. I’m good at sweet. Number two, he wants something as a snack, not a meal, and all the salty/spicy snacks that the girls like are already being sold elsewhere in mass quantities. Number three, American cuisine just isn’t very good at spicy. We’re good at sweet, and some southern cuisine is spicy, but those things are usually meats or meals, like tacos or fajitas or carne adovado. I’ve told him this many times, but he keeps insisting that I borrow from another culture or country. “Perhaps Canadian cuisine has something spicy?” Wait, does Canada even have a cuisine, or just watery beer and hockey?

The fourth and biggest obstacle that I’ve mentioned before is limitations, both in ingredients and equipment. No oven, no large burners, sometimes not even measuring cups or spatulas, and there’s not a lot I can do with food that hasn’t already been done. You have to understand that this culture has been using the same recipes, same basic cooking methods, and sometimes even the same equipment for the past 5,000 years. Palampur is rural enough that Western influence hasn’t yet kicked down the door with hot dogs and marshmallow cream, so they haven’t had the need to change much. As a result, when it comes to their ingredients and their methods, they’ve thought of it all. Everything. Anything that can be done has already been done for at least a few millennia. They’ve got their own version of falafel, which I found out after I made it. And all the desserts I’ve made require either unusual equipment (an oven) or uncommon, expensive ingredients (peanut butter, cocoa). Plus I still can’t use eggs without alienating a large portion of the market. This is one of the biggest challenges I face here: being original with what I’ve got.

So you can imagine how excited I was this weekend when I invented a completely new dessert. Not only has it never been done in India, but I’m pretty sure that while it has counterparts in American sweet pastries, it is in a category of its own. I have a friend that writes a cooking blog and takes pictures of the delicious delicacies that she creates, and earlier this week, cinnamon buns were featured on her site. My mouth waters every time I open her page, but this time, I had to practically turn off the faucet in my salivary glands. I love yeasted desserts like cinnamon buns, as well as pretty much anything else that is leavened by yeast and baked. The smell that fills your kitchen when you cook off a fresh loaf of good bread or a pan of monkey bread is unbeatable, and cinnamon is another one of those smells that cannot be matched.

(Sidebar: I purchased 300g of great-quality whole cinnamon from a shop here for 36 rupees. That’s about 80 cents. Go to Penzeys Spices website and check out the price of cinnamon there, by weight. Then feel free to email me your spice orders.)

“Man, I have to make those here. I’ll need to buy milk, a couple of eggs, cinnamon… and an oven. Crap.”

No. Not this time. I’m going to figure it out how to have my eggless, oven-free cake and eat it too. I just have to think outside the box a little. I’ve got a really good recipe for sweet yeasted dough from back in the states. This same dough can be used for not only cinnamon buns, but also any sort of sweet baked bread that requires rising times. And I can’t bake them, but there are other cooking methods available. Pan frying won’t work, because it doesn’t generate enough even heat to get the yeast to expand the dough. Boiling is completely out of the question, unless you like to eat your cinnamon buns out of a soup bowl. Open flame is a good idea, but that would burn the outside before the inside has a chance to even feel the heat. That leaves deep frying.

Deep frying gets a bad rep in the states, and it shouldn’t. Sure, if that’s the only kind of food you eat, and you go to McDonalds for three meals a day, you’ll gain a few (hundred) pounds. But if you fry something correctly, on your own, you add almost no fat to the target food. It’s a very popular method of cooking in Asian countries because it’s very efficient; the food is done in no time with a minimal amount of fuel and wasted. The way to fry something correctly is to keep the oil hot as possible without burning it and not fry too many pieces of food at the same time. Generally, oil stays right around 190°C, and you already know that water boils at 100°C. So, when a piece of food that has water in it (which they all do before they are cooked) is surrounded by oil that is already almost twice the temperature of the boiling point, the water is going to instantly boil and turn into steam, which will force its way out of the food. As long as there is water left in the food turning to steam and pushing out of the food, it will keep the oil from getting into the food. The trick is to remove the food from the oil just before it is finished cooking and just before all the water in the food is gone. The other trick is to not add too much food at a time, because that will crowd the pot and decrease the total temperature of the oil, slowing the cooking time and inviting oil into the food. If you do it right and keep an eye on the temperature, no oil is added to the food besides whatever sticks to the surface as it is removed, and that is usually wicked off by newspaper or the like. Plus, you’ll be treated with crispy, delicious and fast food without all the greasiness. Don’t believe me? Next time you deep fry, weigh the pot full of oil before and after the cooking. If you fry well, it’s not going to weigh much less after cooking, meaning very little oil left the pot.

Thus, the cinnamon rolls, I decided, were destined to be deep fried. The only problem is that if I make the traditional cinnamon roll shape, the butter/sugar/cinnamon filling rolled up in the middle of the pastry would immediately melt and leak out into the oil. That would not only ruin the oil, but I would lose that oh-so-delicious cinnamon taste that drives me crazy. Solution? Roll a flat circle out of a small piece of the dough, place the cinnamon filling in the middle, and crimp up the sides to form a neat little walnut-sized ball with the cinnamon filling hidden on the inside, safe from the oil.

Verdict: Freaking Awesome! It’s kind of like a doughnut in that it’s a small fried ball with a sweet filling, and it’s true that the outside tastes kind of like one, but on the inside, the dough is all bun-like. It’s flaky and light, minimally sweet, with none of the grainy, fall-apart-in-your-mouth texture of a doughnut. Plus the cinnamon filling is contained on the inside and doesn’t spread throughout the whole thing, which, in my mind, separates it from a true cinnamon bun. Why do I think that is new to not only India, but America? Because there is no reason for it to be made this way in the states. If you want a cinnamon bun, you bake it, and if you want a fried pastry, you use doughnut dough. Necessity is the mother of invention, and in the land of opportunity there was no necessity to think of a way besides oven baking to cook sweet yeasted dough, which is distinctly different from doughnuts in texture, taste, sweetness and structure.

One more question you may have is, why do I feel this is an important enough experience to write about? Because it’s a sign that I’m starting to be original in my surroundings. I used ingredients, cooking methods and equipment very common in Himachal Pradesh to create something completely new and different, as well as delicious. There’s hope for me, and my work, yet.

As I sit here and write this, polishing off yet another of my tasty creations for more inspiration, I realize that these new concoctions need a name. Hmm… well, this is a sweet yeasted dough that, while commonly used in cinnamon rolls, can be used for many things, including a favorite from my camping days called monkey bread. Monkeys are common in India. These things are small and round. They’re new and need a catchy name. Nothing’s more memorable than humor.

Sooooo…

Monkey Balls.

Coming soon to a bakery near you!

Super Size You, India

I’m getting really good at making tea. I’m also getting really good at drinking it. It’s so delicious that I just can’t get enough. Yet I’m always polite and have just one small cup (which is actually about half a cup in Imperial measurements) at a time, because I know that soon, there will be a chance to have another cup. But when I’m at home, I go a little nuts and make myself a big boy cup. This also happens when I have guests at the mud hut and I make tea for them. Yesterday I brought out three glasses for Shammi, Atul and myself. Atul suggested that I start making my cups of tea smaller. For once, I completely disagreed with cultural norms.

“That’s what happens when you let an American make you food. You get American portions.”

No, I’m not making everybody around me fat. These super-sized glasses of tea are no more than an average 8-ounce glass. They’re just huge when compared to the potion size of normal Indian snacks. For example, their candies are tiny, slightly bigger than an M&M. When I make taffy to distribute, they complain that I’ve made the pieces too big. Again, that’s what you get!

Does this create a problem when I make food at the hostel? Not one bit. For some reason, they like their meals to be as big as their plate, especially if it’s rice. One pancake doesn’t quite cut it, and two pieces of PBC for each girl is only just enough.

Am I at fault for trying to increase portion sizes, or are they at fault for trying to refuse? I don’t know, but at least Shammi likes it when I make big cups of tea for him.

Tongue Tied

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a superpower. Be amazed. It’s the ability to quickly and efficiently learn any language on the planet without even so much as a book to study or a dictionary to read. I know, I know, with great power comes great responsibility.

Unfortunately, as with any superpower, it comes with limitations. My limitation is that my power is only good when it comes to language relating to food and eating.

It’s been about two months, and my Hindi absolutely sucks. Anything besides “Hello, how are you, I am fine” completely escapes me. I haven’t been taking lessons with Madam Utra anymore. I haven’t been taking lessons of any kind since I got here. I have no phrasebook and no dictionary to study on my own. Atul has been telling me since he picked me up in Delhi that he has a Hindi phrasebook to give me, and I’m still waiting on that. The only tools at my disposal are my ears and my memory, and my memory when it comes to remembering how to pronounce hundreds of completely new words that I only hear once or twice is a little lacking, to say the least.

Yet when it comes to food, something inside of my head just switches on, and my superpower is suddenly activated. I can remember the Hindi name of every dish that I’ve eaten here. I know a lot of names of food ingredients, as well as some of the tools used to cook things, like pots and spatulas. When I’m talking to Indians about food in English, I will use the Hindi words for “potato” and “whole-wheat flour” instead of their English counterparts. Then I run into problems, because using those words with such good pronunciation prompts the person to praise my excellent Hindi skills. Then they start using more common phrases, and I’m completely lost again. I just can’t get it. They’ll even tell me some words or phrases and ask me to repeat them, and even though I’m repeating exactly what I think I hear, it’s still not right.

The same thing has happened to me before. I’m not a linguist, and I’m not fluent in any languages, but this is the fourth language besides English that I’ve studied and the second time that I’ve decided to live in a country that speaks a language that I haven’t studied at all. In all cases, I am able to pick up vocabulary relating to food a hell of a lot easier than anything else, and my pronunciation of food terms is much better than everything else. When I was in Hungary, I would go to restaurants with friends and be able to read the menu and order food in Hungarian with ease. My friends would take this as a hint to try and speak Hungarian with me exclusively. But when I try to hold a normal conversation, I just fall to pieces and can’t even make a full sentence.

Yesterday, my landlord came to the mud hut to talk with Atul about some matters, and I sat on the balcony and had my tea while they talked for 10-15 minutes in Hindi. Of course, I didn’t understand a word. Soon, the landlord asked me if I understood, and I said no, not a word. His retort: “You should try to understand. You have been here for some time.” Okay, sir, if you think it’s that easy, why don’t you go to a country that speaks a completely different language that’s not even in the same language family and just pick up common dialogue by ear, with no book and no dictionary. Oh, and try doing it while struggling to adapt to a radically different culture, all at the same time as you attempting to work with these people and make enough progress to justify receiving 12 credits from an American university. Let’s see how quickly you learn to discuss complex leasing matters in a new language then.

I don’t regret not being able to go to the language school in Mussorie at the beginning of the trip. In those first few days, I would have had so much trouble trying to adapt to my new environment that I doubt a 6-hour per day crash course for two weeks would have given me a significant base from which to communicate. Yet now that I have settled in, I could really use it. In May, when the next batch of U.S. students gets here, they will be doing their Hindi language courses in Palampur, and I will be joining them for that, for which I am thankful. It just seems a bit late to be learning the language, one or two months before I leave.

In the meantime, all I can do it listen harder and try to remember even harder. At least I have superpowers when it comes to food. Cuisine Crusader, to the rescue!

Inconceivable!

Yesterday I made pancakes for the hostel girls as part of their extra meal. First of all, they were delicious. A bit of homemade syrup and they’re almost better than pancakes back in America. Even making them one at a time to serve 40 wasn’t that bad, because I got an early start and knew I would probably end up doing one at a time. However, I was beset by a difficulty that I have now found to be an integral part of how Indians view food, and that is their innate difficulty in accepting something new when it comes to food.

I would like to describe for you what a perfect American pancake should be. It’s light, fluffy, and thick. It should be lightly browned on both sides but still only just cooked within. If you pour syrup on top of it, it should absorb most, but not all of the liquid sugar while still holding its structure when cut and picked up with a fork. Rich yet light, sweet and a little bit salty, a perfect pancake is practically accompanied by a chorus of angels. There should be a plateful of pancakes at the end of the rainbow, not a pot of gold.

Constructing a good pancake is not rocket science, but there are some guidelines that must be followed. You must mix approximately equal amounts, by volume, of wet and dry ingredients along with a chemical leavener like baking powder, but do not stir them too much. Lots of mixing means that you will develop gluten in the pancakes, a tough and fibrous protein in wheat flours that is beloved in bread and pizza but the enemy of delicate cakes and cookies. It means that you have to stop mixing the pancake batter while there are still lumps of unmixed flour in it. No. Stop. Walk away from the bowl. Do not overmix. You will regret it.

The other thing you must remember is that in order for the baking powder to do its job, you shouldn’t flatten the mixture right when you put it on the hot surface. Just dump it on and let its own weight take care of spreading itself out. Then be patient, and let low, steady heat do its job. Only then will you be rewarded with thick, fluffy gifts from the gods.

Here’s the problem that you will experience when making American pancakes for Indians, if you ever find yourself in that unique situation: they won’t like how you make it. Not one bit. Three things about making pancakes contrast directly with typical Indian cooking. First, they like to mix the bejeezus out of everything. Second, they like to put the heat up as high as it will go. Third, they have no patience with their food and want it as soon as possible.

Pancakes are delicate. You have to love them, and they will love you back. The whole time I was making the flapjacks, Neetu, the hostel cook, wanted to flip them quickly and go on to the next one. I practically had to handcuff the spatula to myself. She and all of the other Indians that have watched me make pancakes also want to spread them out thinly to cover the entire surface. I really don’t know why. It frustrates me, because here I am, going out of my way to make something new and different for people who have never had it before, and they keep telling me how I can do it better, their way. They’ve never even heard of pancakes before, and they’re telling me the proper method before I even turn on the gas. Today it wasn’t so bad, but I just about smacked somebody with a hot iron pan the last time I made them for 4 or 5 of the staff last week. It went something like this:

-Mr. Pat, what do you make?

-Pancakes.

-This is flour, milk and baking powder?

-Yes.

-No sugar?

-No, you put a sweet liquid on top of it before you eat them.

-These are not sweet. You need to add more sugar.

-No, I just told you, the sugar is added after.

-So you must add more salt.

-No, they will be sweet.

-They are not sweet.

-I told you, put syrup on them.

-Ok, give us the syrup.

-I haven’t made it yet. It is heating right now.

-So these are salty. Put more salt.

-(insert sound of brain exploding)

Oh, let me tell you about when Malkeet tried to make one. First I showed him how I did it: slowly, thick, low heat. I made sure that he understood those three points. I even had somebody translate it. Then I handed him the spatula. He promptly jacked up the heat, threw way too much batter on the iron, spread it out as thin as possible, and tried to flip it in ten seconds. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out so well. It looked like a partially burnt, partially uncooked pile of gelatinized vomit. He never quite got it right that day.

The best part about all of this is when they finally eat one of my pancakes (with syrup). Their face lights up and I can practically hear their stomach scream with joy. It’s kind of like that short bald guy in the Princess Bride. “These taste good? Inconceivable!” I’m not surprised, and frankly, I can’t take the credit. The milk and flour here (and the eggs, when you’re not making them for vegetarians) are such great quality that it’s hard to make a bad pancake. But even after they tasted how good mine are, some still tell me that I’m making them wrong. I just don’t get it.

What is it about new things that they find so hard to accept? To be honest, when I think about it, I can’t help but feel somewhat offended. After all, I’m the one who comes to their country and throws out years of conditioning on etiquette, basic hygiene and eating habits, just to name a few, and they can’t even let me show them a new food without injecting their culture into it.

Wait a second…

Isn’t that what Europeans did to every indigenous people on the American landmasses hundreds of years ago? Isn’t that what Americans did to Native Americans? Isn’t that what Westerners do to the rest of the world through globalization today?

Um… my bad.

Well, damn. Guess I’m the one that needs to be more patient and tolerant.

“The American actually learned something? Inconceivable!”

The Importance of Being Hungry

Is something wrong with me? Am I losing my sense of wonder and excitement about being here?

The past week or so, I have been losing my appetite for Indian foods, and I don’t know why. Chapattis, which are eaten with nearly every meal, usually number 4 or 5 on my plate. Lately, I only eat 2. Sometimes Shammi and I are making dinner, and I feel like I don’t even want to eat at all. The Indian mentality of eating everything on your plate and respecting the food is the only thing that is keeping the spoon moving to my mouth. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even be eating.

More than the unhealthiness that I have always associated with not being able to eat normally, I feel downright offensive sometimes. Shammi and I go to all the trouble of making delicious meals from scratch, and I feel like I am hurting his feelings when I only make 2 chapattis to go with dinner. Chapattis are the main part of the meal most of the time. Whatever is made besides them is supposed to just flavor the chapattis, and usually doesn’t provide significant nutrition on its own. What it does provide is adequate amounts of refined soybean oil used to cook the dish. While I am still getting a relatively low-fat diet, every main meal is much greasier than I am used to, so maybe that’s the reason for my diminished appetite.

Maybe I’m getting sick. Doubtful, because I feel great and am still working out and exercising like I normally do. I haven’t had so much as a runny nose since I got here.

Maybe I’m getting homesick. It’s possible, and I won’t deny that I miss home sometimes, but there are too many things here that I love for me to downright want to leave. I really don’t, I love being here.

What I’m really afraid of is that I’m reverting back to my American conditioning. I rarely get desserts or sweets here, everything is natural and unprocessed, and every food is cooked from scratch. This also means that everything is spicy, the food is rough and heavy, and there’s no convenience. I also feel like everything is starting to taste the same, and since everything is eaten with chapattis, that may not be so far off. Could it be possible that 21 years of American eating is finally starting to break through the excitement of eating new and interesting cuisine? Maybe my body is yearning for convenience and corn syrup so much that it’s activating a physical response whenever I see a pot of dal being prepared or a parantha being grilled.

I worry the most about how this is going to affect my projects at KLB. How can I continue to work on diet and nutrition when I can’t even maintain a healthy appetite? Hopefully this is all temporary and I’ll be back to my normal second and third helpings by next week.

Real Indians of Genius

International Interns present Real Indians of Genius

Real Indians of Genius…

Today we salute you, Mr. Ignorant and Lazy Indian Shopkeeper.

Mr. Ignorant and Lazy Indian Shopkeeper…

Thanks to you, foreign customers have no need to learn Hindi, since you hardly notice when they walk into your store anyway.

What you sayin’ to me?

Even though words like chocolate and chicken are the same in both languages, you still don’t understand what we want to buy.

…mmm, it’s so sweet…

Go ahead and say that you’re out of brown sugar. They’ll point to it on the shelf behind you anyway.

…that’s a good brand…

So kick your feet up on the cot you’ve got behind the counter, O Guardian of Groceries, and feel confident knowing that without you, white people in India would have no trouble buying shampoo. No trouble at all.

Mr. Ignorant and Lazy Indian Shopkeeper!

International Interns, Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, India.

(If you're confused, look up Budweiser's Real Men of Genius ads.)

Simon Says Stop

I got to work today to find that Principal Ramdev had unexpectedly gone to Chandigarh on business. It puts a hold on my work here because he is the only one besides Madame Utra who knows about my plans for cooking the extra meal at the hostel, which means that he is also in charge of making sure I have the ingredients that I need. Today I don’t, and he’s not here, so I have nothing to do. No ingredients means no cooking means not much busy work at KLB. Well, I could at least go to Madame Utra to make sure that there will be the necessary ingredients for tomorrow’s dish… except that she is also out of town. My VIP’s are MIA, so I am SOL, FYI.

But that’s just the way things go here, and I was surprised to find that I wasn’t at all frustrated about it. Honestly. Yes, it kind of sucks that I can’t do any more progress on my planned work, but stuff like that happens. It might not be the way life is supposed to work, but it’s the way Indian life works, at least. I have no idea when he’s supposed to get back, so I have no idea what to do next, but that’s alright. I can work some more on my lesson plans, catch up on writing emails, make calls, hang out with the teachers, read the newspapers a little more thoroughly, and fine-tune the menu. It’s all a part of the “independent working environment” about which I was told before I came here. This probably isn’t the way I want to spend the rest of my life and career, whatever that may be, but for right now, it’s just perfect.

That's Amore

I have made another important observation of Indian cuisine: it is efficient in both time and fuel. It contrasts starkly with typical American cooking, some of which requires long hours spent obsessing over a single serving of food. Think about Southern pulled pork, which is often cooked overnight and requires constant heat maintenance. Sure, it’s delicious, but is a two-hour tomato sauce really worth two hours? Depends on what Indian you ask.

It all started with snacks last week. Mrs. Sing, Harmit’s mother, invited me over her house on Holi for a few Indian sweets that she made herself, which were so much better than the same things I had bought in a shop. She went to university in the states and has studied a lot about food science, so she has a vast knowledge of food from several different cultures in her 40+ years of cooking experience. Stuffing my face with her delectable treats and discussing food was like heaven to me, so I was more than happy when she suggested that we should make some pasta dish together the following week.

Mrs. Singh wanted spaghetti and meatballs. I informed her that meatballs were typically made from beef. We decided to find a substitute, and she happened to have a box of Nutri lying around. Nutri is dried soy granules that are rehydrated in warm water and cooked any way you want, so why not roll them into balls with spices and onions and call them meatballs? The reason she was asking me is because she didn’t know how to make tomato sauce, and I happen to have a fantastic recipe for it.

I’ll let readers know right now that this sauce takes a very long time, even though it is the best tomato sauce recipe I have ever tasted anywhere. First you have to cut the tomatoes in half and remove the seeds and juice. Strain the seeds out of the juice, reserving the liquid and throwing away the seeds (if you cook seeds too long, it turns the whole mixture bitter). To the tomato juice, add some vinegar, honey, a bit more water, red wine, dried herbs, spices, and some sugar. Cook the liquid over high heat until it has reduced by about half and has become syrupy and smells way too strong. Reserve the mixture for later.

Dice two parts onion and one part each carrot and celery. Sweat the mixture over low heat with olive oil and salt for about 15-20 minutes in a big, tall pot, until the carrots have become almost soft and the onions and celery are translucent. Throw in a few crushed/chopped cloves of garlic and cook for a few more minutes. Then add the tomato flesh that you’ve seeded, strained, drained and chopped. Boost the heat to medium or medium-high and cook until the liquid left in the tomatoes has almost been cooked away and the flesh is soft and starting to stick to the sides of the pot.

Now you’re going to take all the vegetation that you’ve cooked for over a half hour and dump it into an oven-proof casserole dish or other wide, shallow container. Put it in the oven on the highest rack with the broiler on high, right under the heating coil. Leave it there, stirring it every few minutes. What you actually want to do is burn the tomatoes a bit. They’re done when there are bits of black edges throughout the mixture, but it’s not even close to being completely burnt yet. It will take 20-30 minutes.

When that’s finished, move the whole mess back into the big pot you’ve used to cook the onions/celery/carrots in the first place. Cook it on high until it’s very dry and the tomatoes are starting to really stick to the pot. Now it’s time to deglaze the browned bits on the bottom with some alcohol: red wine is best, white wine is good, rum is okay, and vodka will work in a pinch if that’s all you’ve got. Continue to mix it a bit until the bottom is no longer stuck with tomatoes. Kill the heat and add the syrup that you made from the reserved tomato juice, vinegar, wine, sugar and other stuff. Use a stick blender to puree the mixture to your liking and add salt and pepper to taste.

Number one, this recipe is awesome. Number two, it’s a lot of work. Hell, it took longer to type it than it would have taken to open up a can of diced tomatoes, heat it up and puree it. It also uses up a lot of time, energy and sometimes unnecessary ingredients, like alcohol, vinegar and honey. It can take an hour and a half to cook. And it’s just a sauce! The whole time I was making it at Mrs. Harmit’s house, I felt really guilty for using so much of their cooking fuel and ingredients. Shammi makes a delicious meal at least twice a day in less than a half hour, and that’s normal for all families here. Today was a special occasion, and Mrs. Singh encouraged me to cook as much as I want in her house, but I won’t be doing that recipe many more times. It’s wasteful and extravagant compared to the rest of the food here. I love cooking, and there are few things I consider to be more fun than spending three hours making a side dish or small snack that get’s eaten in two bites, but that’s just not what people do here. I hope to learn to be more efficient and less wasteful in my time here.

On another note, meatless meatballs are pretty damn good. A little tough and chewy, but they go great with two-hour tomato sauce and imported spaghetti. Also, I made kidney bean burgers for the hostel yesterday, and they looked exactly like beef burgers. What does it mean when Indians, who wouldn’t even dream of eating cows, love cow-imitation products so much?