I want my Dosa

Here I am in Delhi and I cant stop thinking about Masala Dosa, Set Dosa, Puri Sagu. I really did not realize that I am such a big foodie.  And seriously I have been  blessed and  staying with people  who  are foodies  and  dont compromise on food. Food in Delhi is  awesome althought nothing similar  to what I have in Bangalore. There are so many varities of  Dal here  that shopping for them  felt like I it was a toy shop and I didnt know  whether to buy transformers and beyblades. (Yes I like toys for those who  still didnt know  that and yes someone still owes me a remote controlled car)

Yummy Dosa

Back to the topic I have  had some most  amazing stuff in Delhi be it the  Bread Pakoda next to my office (with  amazing  panneer in between) and Khasta Roti …yummy stuff.. I have  had the same problem in  Pune and now  in Delhi. With every region, people  eat so many different things for breakfast its not  funny. If Pune at the yummiest  Misal Pav, Sabudana Khichdi & Poha..Delhi seems much different with Alu Parantha, Batura , Broken Wheat Porridge (Dhaliya ) and what not.

What I love about the commercialization and commoditization we at least  get water which tastes similar everywhere and of good quality. I remember going to Madras as a kid for my summer holidays and I suffered so badly those two months with weird tasting water of chennai. I love the water at my ancestral place, sweet and soft on your throat. Its really a pleasure to get there , get to the well and pull out an entire “Kodapana” (not finding any equivalent word for this in English) and drink it.

And as they say when you think of something you attract similar thoughts. Got a mail about Gowri – Ganesha  Habbad oota.  Imagine this you are alone in  a city and want to celebrate your  festival like you do at home and you go pick up the entire food range for that festival . Marvelous  idea !!! Wish it was there at  Delhi too.Do check out the websites rural menu. Pathrode, Kadubu, Akki & Ragi Rotti . I am sure most of  my good friends are salivating at this point. (esp all the mangloreans)

I distinctly remember our travel plans  affected  more by the eateries on the route than by places to visit. Every visit to mysore is a gastronomical piligrimage for me. I need to visit Mylary and eat his super yummy dosas else I feel i have earned myself a place in hell. From there to this small lane  behind Rajkamal Talkies where he makes the most unique of the chats. Garlic CHakli, Nippat masala, Sev Puri and every concieveable  chat with a taste thats is  so different from what one would expect , yet at the same time yummy. An open mind and an empty  stomach will ensure a  brilliant experience.

Actual Shreyas Thali

And then there is Pune, a place blessed with amazing thali places . From the traditional marathi menus(not manoos ) of Shreyas, rich meal of  Panchvati Gaurav, crazy indian thali at Sukantha & wannabe south Indian experiments of  Rupali-Vaishali me and my partners in crime have had many a brunches after  a dinnerless night. We clearly believed in getting the maximum for our  buck. And eat we would till our limbs refused to move. Nandus parantha at Dole patil road also  served many a late nights in those  two magnificient years. How can I miss Chocolate -n  Chocolate cake at Cake-n-Counter ? The yummiest chocolate cake on the planet. You will find this shop open for  only a fraction of  year, open for  roughly about 4 hours a day and selling about 6-7 of these  cakes a day .

For those of  you interested in cooking here is  a blog of a good friend and his  experiments at the kitchen. For  some reason those i get along with well are all food lovers. There is  some kind of food brotherhood that brings about a sense of  familiarity and trust. So this  post is  dedicated to all those people who take food very seriously out there .

All said and done I miss my Dosa at home.. Simple , Elegant and Filled with love

lv

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Butterflies & Blessings

There I sat looking at the  butterfly , while it flapped around the garden settling on flowers of  random hues and  colors. Here was a magnificent creature filled with color and yet it searched for color elsewhere and I was reminded of this story I had read.

One fine evening in our world not so long ago God was resting, sitting, watching some children at play in a village. The children laughed and sang, yet as he watched them, His heart was sad. He was thinking: These children will grow old.He thought of how their skin would  wrinkle, hair  turn gray and youth would all be lost. He looked in the horizon and saw the  approaching winter and realized the  rustles of dry leaves beneath his  feet.  Yet he  felt something about the  spirit the warmth of the Sunlight, the gentle wind , the song birds and the colors of the  rainbow.  He had decided to do something for the children to look at and enjoy and he gathered his  ingredients , a little  sunlight patches, yellow  leaves of  fall, the colors of  flowers, and songs of the birds.

All these he put into his bag and gave it to the children and out came  the butterflies.

The butterflies began to sing, and children listened smiling.But then a songbird came flying, settling on the Gods shoulder, scolding him, saying” Its not right to give our songs to these new pretty things.You told us when you made us that every bird would have his own song. And now you’ve passed them all around. Isn’t it enough that you gave your new playthings the colors of the rainbow?”

“You’re right”, said the God. I made one song for each bird, and I shouldn’t have taken what belongs to you.

So the Creator took the songs away from the butterflies, and that’s why they are silent.

Why the Silence ? It was Gods way of  ensuring that the butterfly did not take itself too seriously . But butterflies represent an important aspect for humans. They are supposed to  have the ability to transport human souls. They also represent an internal struggle one must endure to achieve greatness but I think most importantly they teach us about blessings. Each of us are blessed in our  own sweet way, yet we hardly ever thank ourselves of the existence of the blessings.

Like someone once said “A Good Memory is one that can remember the days blessings and forget the days troubles”

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Back to Square 1

The Pattern

You wake up one fine day to realize you are not happy with what you are  doing with your  life. You are unable to pin point one  single aspect of your  life because we do tend to get lost in intermingled issues. Maybe your  work is not  fulfilling, maybe you miss  being with your  friends, maybe you just  yearn from freedom..Yet it is not possible to see an obvious solution for this in one single  stroke. Your  day goes from bad to worse when you start comparing with others and by the end of the day you have decided that you need a  new lease of  life. How often do we see this  happening to us ?

The Rationale

There is  mathematics at the  root of everything. Every thing has to to add up to get the big picture. I always look back and  wonder how we are taught integral calculus starting from the same basic operations. There are two basic operations Addition & Inverse. So a basic operation is addition and a basic operation giving wrong results is a Inverse operation.Everything else can be derived from this. Situations we encounter in life, work and otherwise take shades of complexity over a period of time and over multiple basic operations gone wrong.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”

We as humans have a limiting factor, we learn from experience and do not  repeat mistakes or at least aware not to. Success and  Failures are seen as events rather than processes and we typically tend to identify the one thing we did right / wrong to succeed / fail. There is hardly an emphasis on the process. There is  seldom a thought given to the environment variables. What did not work last time around may not necessarily be the reason not to try it this time without considering the changes in the eco system. To explain this  simply we are not comfortable looking at  equations with large number of variables. We like a  black box approach where we can say “Press This” and “this happens”. How many times do we try changing  multiple  parameters in a situation simultaneously ?  Answer is  we struggle with uncertainty. We go by the  algebraic approach of solving one variable at a time.

The Square 1 Philosophy

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
~Confucius

I have been hungrily after the idea of  keeping it simple, breaking it down and  doing things right. First and foremost we all have our  basic happy  place. One needs to find it. Any amount of time spent in doing this  is not  waste. The happy place is  one where you are happy irrespective of your  past or future paths . It is your place where you are happy in the present. It might be a moment of  awesomeness, it might be the moment where you feel love, it might be a moment of great clarity or  it just might be a moment where you pause.

Secondly make a commitment to enjoy the process and not focus on the outcome. A commitment to the process gives you a great deal more clarity than the view of the end result. Also it helps  keep things simple as a process is  made of simple operations. Having found your happy place and having made a commitment to enjoy the process, we stick to the basic operations of breaking down our  existing situations into small milestones. Every complex problem was built by adding many basic operations gone wrong.

Back to Square 1 :

Square 1 is  place where everything starts where we do not have  preferred paths of  resolution. Square 1 is where the ego does not cloud your  decision. Square 1 is about openness and willingness to change. We are willing to change only when we see greater good in the change. To see the greater good in change we need to have a open happiness. The basic unit for a open happiness is a happy place.
Square 1 is about  re-visiting your  assumptions, re-visiting the  variables you are trying to change and most importantly re-visiting your  fears.
Its about you revisiting your happy place and starting the process afresh.

One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.
~Oogway

Imagine the pyramids ; Imagine the engineer looking into it and saying “We just need to build a smaller square on every square”

Keep it Simple

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Return of the Blogger in Me

I last blogged on March 16, 2006  and have since been in constant search of some inspiration to make me brush my palms, stretch by brains and blog.My first post is dedicated to an inspirational source i recently stumbled on. Cheers to this and look forward to putting my thoughts here.

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