My real life Hero with Gypsy Blood in his veins!

Abhilash Tomy, the super sailor

My Hero & I !

There is a race of men that won’t fit in
A race that can’t stay still

So they break the hearts
Of kith and kin
And they roam the world at will

They range the field and they rove the flood
And they climb the mountains’ crest

Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood
And they don’t know how to rest.

My career in journalism spans more than his life does. Hardened , and generally cynical reporters,--self included-- rarely, very rarely,  compliment someone who has delivered a fabulous lecture or narrated a wonderful story. 

Recently, I not only did that, but unabashedly told the speaker that he had become my real life hero. And for once, those present in the hall—starting from the top management of the Malayala Manorama Co Ltd  to the reporter who joined us just a few days earlier—were all happy with that compliment. It was a matter of joy and pride to personally salute the 34-year old Abhilash Tomy, who had kept us on the edge of our seats, with a frank and  fantastic narration of his fabulous voyage : Sagar Parikrama 2, in which he solo circumnavigated the Earth  non stop , on a totally “made in India” ship, named Mahdei , after a goddess from Goa!The  gypsy blood clearly runs in this  real life hero, who  shared his scintillating , thrilling, sometimes dangerous, and at all times a rare experience of  the mission accomplished.  He is the first Indian, second Asian and 79th person to have done this non-stop solo circumnavigation of the Earth, starting at Mumbai, and finishing there as well.By the way, he is a Commander in the Indian Navy.
Abhilash has been sharing his story  of Sagar Parikrama 2, with people across the country , possibly across the world. Google and you are likely to find a lot about him and his adventure. His blogs, his Face Book posts will all fill in the details the print media may have missed out. So I will not attempt to share that.

But a few of the things he said, I am putting down as much for my own joy as  for the pleasure of those who may chance upon this blog post .
Sailors, according to the old joke, have a woman in every port. For Abhilash, there was no port, considering it was a non-stop circumnavigation. But it was as if there was a "she" with him all the time! When he spoke of the voyage , he never used an “I”. It was always a “we”. We got the impression that he and his ship had become one, the “we”. He confirmed it.  The return to Mumbai would not have been possible if one of the two had developed a snag-- of it the two did not go into it as "we".
He often spoke of  being “alone”. Loneliness was not a word that crept into his talk. Clearly his hands,heart, head, mind and entire body were all so fully occupied that there was no time to feel lonely!
What hit me about this total absence of loneliness was that often, in discussions on death penalty or capital punishment –a subject I have covered profusely!—I have favoured total isolation, of the Kala pani variety, as THE punishment that  can teach criminals the value of the existence of fellow human beings. If that lesson gets into the being of the criminal, he may never want to harm another human being.
But Abhilash’s story made it amply clear that total isolation can also be very creatively used. I  won’t go into the issue of whether criminals will get a ship to maintain, and  face weathers to brave etc etc as there are endless options before the human mind.

Abhilash said the purpose of the mission was not to sell or promote the Indian Navy. It was to sell the oceans, since most people in India don’t know what an ocean looks like.
He is content that a part of that mission was achieved when a group of students in a government school in rural Maharashtra replied, “ Cape Horn, “Cape of Good Hope” and Cape Leewin, when asked to name the capes Abhilash crossed.
Once he had set sail, Abhilash was unassisted. “You can mine the sea, you can fish if you want, but as my guru said, it is easier to open a can of tuna”.
He had brought home no showpieces, but only lessons, my hero confessed.“The earth provides for everyone’s need but not for greed”.Nothing that we may not have heard or read. But coming from a man who braved the elements for 151 days, non stop, covering 21,000 nautical miles, gives the 10 words a new, and more  deep meaning—in fact reinforces the truth .

What makes the voyage even more important  for Indians, is the fact that when Mahdei  touched port after the non-stop circumnavigation of the earth, “she was good to go again”. Mahdei is a totally made in India ship. More pride worthy is the way Abhilash described it. “Mahdei was built with extreme honesty, top quality honesty”. Mahdei is also the most decorated ship , with Kirti Chakra, Shaurya Chakra and many other honours in her kitty.
Abhilash has been a topper all through school and college. He is an ace pilot, and prefers to spend the afternoons on his bike. The record holding sailor is remarkably humble, amusingly shy, straight in contrast to what stories would describe sailors, fun to talk to, full of beans, and of course  full of adventure. He was just as  serious and evolved .

 He had lessons for us, the staff of The Week as well. Plan, prepare,prepare and prepare .And work according to that plan.  Don’t go on a wild goose chase. Don’t while away your waiting time.

Coming from Abhilash,  the importance of these lessons we take lightly, get underscored.


He would love to do the voyage again, but the oceans and Mahdei probably need a female touch. Sagar Parikrama 3 will either see three women do the nonstop circumnavigation of the Earth, or one lucky lady sail away with that honor! 

I can't wait for my heroine to surface..like a mermaid from the depths of the oceans.

India's original Master Chef Tarla Dalal

The Wizard of Cooking 

For many Indian foodies and educated – and also the somewhat educated-women of a certain age, today’s papers brought an end to an era –an era of good, simple, old style cooking , taught to the masses in a language and idiom almost everyone can understand. It announced the end of the Tarla Dalal era.

Years before most Indians knew the meaning of the word chef, and long before chefs started sporting the cylindrical headgear(a part of the kitchen hygiene drill), Tarla with her lose hair tied into a neat bun, sporting only a smile to accessorise her saree, she appeared in photographs—generally in the Femina of the yore. She did two, three even ten to fifteen pages of recipes when the size of the page was bigger, and the number of photographs much smaller. People knew her as a great cook.Possibly she taught at a well known catering institute in Mumbai that was Bombay. Her envelope-sized books on different styles of cooking and veg and non veg recipes, regional and other food etc sold  more than hot cakes did those days. And then she moved on to the traditional book format, wrote cook books for microwave manufacturers, thus moving ahead with technology. She also constantly reinvented herself. Hugely popular master chef Sanjeev Kapoor may or may not have been the first to hit Indian tv with food shows, but Tarla was not far behind. In one show , there she was , playing not the master chef, but the experienced aunty teaching  chefs to cook. And of course, her website, which also credited many of her young students, friends and fans for recipes contributed by them.

I will never forget two things about the lady I have unfortunately  never met in person. One is the fact that many young ladies—daughters of friends—learnt to make the mango cheesecake, using her recipe. From her web site, they learnt how to make it without having to take the trouble of sourcing cream cheese –not easily available  in most of India and not affordable in any case.

The other is the two bound volumes of the cookery pages of Femina from the late 60s through the 80s—my mother subscribed to the magazine because of these pages that helped her stay afloat in the very competitive world of cookery for army wives! The pages are much thumbed, dog eared, yellowed, brittle and all but falling apart. But when I am not very sure that any of the zillions of recipes on the net will work for me, I go back to those pages, with Tarla Dalal smiling at me as she teaches me how to make….the best Shahi Tukre !

Rest in Peace Tarla Aunty. We love you. Will miss you..

PS: Have downloaded the first picture on the net, simply because this smile was her permanent accessory. 

Malnutrition and Indian Women

Blind about malnutrition

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who stands a fair chance –more than fair, really—of becoming the prime minister of India  if he gets lucky,has created a storm by attributing malnutrition in his state to middle class women’s  desire to look slim—call it a Kareena Kapoor kind of Size Zero.

Like many, he has shown total lack of understanding of malnutrition , whether in Gujarat, India or anywhere in Africa. Statistics of malnutrition, by and large, pertain to nutrition levels of children under 3, at most 6.

I don’t even mind the fact that  he could, inadvertently or ignorantly , called female children in that group “women”.  Before the sms and fw era of the internet, a  “joke” that was intended to target feminists went thus:  Sheela was a smart professional who hated to be addressed  “Hey Girl” by her male colleagues. When she had a daughter, the colleagues inquired about the  baby. “Hmmm…how’s the woman doing?”.

Have no idea if anyone then found it funny, but it indicates a male perspective.

I don’t know whether the leader seen as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s best bet for Loksabha elections next time around, thinks that  these “women under 6” are smitten by Size Zero ! A conservative view is that most people would not buy that line from that leader, however popular.

Luckily for Mr Modi, he is not alone when it comes to an indigestible view on malnutrition, perhaps an incorrect view too. At the height of a food crisis, agencies in the western world, possibly not being able to import food, attributed the shortage to Indians and Asians eating a lot more. And they sited nutrition levels of a section of people as evidence!

To starve to shed weight and inches is not easy at all. If the predominantly middle class women of  Gujarat are doing that, hats off to the very strongwilled and positively determined ladies of that state.  They are highly enterprising, be it in the countryside or in the cities.They are smart. And they are sensible.

A few years ago on a visit to Ahmedabad, a friend’s father-in-law proudly showed me his new BPO, where scores and scores of young girls were seated at work. He shared with me what their educational qualifications, work hours and wages were. Pleasantly surprised, I remarked , “So much of money, at such a young age. Won’t it spoil them unless families controlled that salary?”. He immediately said, no, they won’t be  spoilt by the money, and their parents don’t control the salary.”In Gujarat, most youngsters are into investing..shares, mutual funds, starting small businesses with their friends, using it to go abroad to study..Luckily, the children in this state are a little different…” he elaborated, not caring to specify, different from whom. For that hardly matters. Well this description of the Gujarati woman is what sticks in my mind.

And one more thing. They are beautiful, and naturally so. Perhaps without dieting to the point of ending up as cases of malnutrition. I remember Tina Munim, now Tina Ambani, on the cover of Femina, long before she became Dev Anand’s heroine in “Des Pardes”. She was Femina’s Teen Princess, International.

Since then I’ve seen lovely looking Gujju girls on the skating rinks….gorgeous, flowing…fit.

Mr Modi perhaps needs to set aside his “status” and give the young ladies in his state a fresh look. With a totally paternal perspective.Or even look at the most famous Gujarati woman. The world calls her Ba aka Kasturba Gandhi

Contemporary Arts & Crafts, Mumbai

A wooden spectacle stand

A trip to Mumbai earlier this week took me back to Bombay of about 35 years ago. And the journey back in time was possible because I had got to our office here, almost an hour ahead of the schedule. To “spend” those 60 minutes I walked along the  busy D Naoroji road with its beautiful colonial style structures, some well maintained, and some on the verge of collapsing.Beauties they are nevertheless.

Most of the buildings house offices—banks, insurance and the like. The corridor was partly  occupied by hole-in-the-wall shops selling mobile phone accessories primarily. 

But one building pulled me in because of what I could see through the glass doors. It was only when I was almost inside that I turned around to see the name of the place. Contemporary Arts and Crafts. People in Mumbai know it as CAC or simply Contemporary. The place was getting a coat of paint, and  smelling pretty much of maintenance work.

Contemporary, here? Was it not in Napean Sea Road? Is this a branch? I asked the gentleman who seemed to be in charge .He told me that it was not a branch, but the CAC. They’d shifted to this address –Ground Floor, Taj Building on D Naoroji Road –because the owners of that beautiful, time kissed bungalow on 19,Napean Sea Road had wanted the place back. They lived on the first floor, and the ground floor was where CAC had been the last 50 years plus.

Long, long before Fab India or even Cottage Emporium became well known names, and much before lifestyle and home decor, or ethnic or ethnic chic were part of our collective consciousness, Contemporary had stocked and show cased  exquisite handicrafts—not necessary from all over, but from many parts of the country.There were never too many things, but then there was enough to make every visitor pick up something.

I had simply chanced to visit the one on Napean Sea Road  way back. My uncle—tayaji in Hindi and peripa in Tamil—lived in a very well designed building called Sonmarg,on Napean Sea Road  may be a kilometer or more walk from CAC .Walking around  and looking around, I got there then. Much as I did this time.

When we were building our block of apartments in Chandigarh a few years ago, I drew a freehand sketch of that apartment in Sonmarg, to show the architect roughly what I wanted. 

A few years after that building came up--- I am afraid nowhere like Sonmarg, though good in its own way—a friend’s daughter, a bright young architect , was carrying a book on celebrated architect Charles Correa. As I flipped through the pages, what did I see? A picture of Sonmarg. In delight and excitement, I closed the book, and told her I’d lived in that building. I did an encore of the freehand sketch. And she saw the architectural drawings in the book and told me I’d made a good likeness.

My peripa lived in that house when he was Director, International Relations for Air India. He would patiently and proudly tell us the story behind every beautiful piece of art or craft or furniture from every part of the world where he had served.  How come he had never told us that Sonmarg was made by Charles Correa, I asked  my by now really aged Peripa a few years ago.  His reply was that when we lived there the architect was not that well known. For it was one of the early buildings of Correa.

But yes, we knew that film star Shashi Kapoor lived in Petit Hill across, and some other stars –the late Nutan and Waheeda Rehman if I recall correctly—lived in a nearby building called Anita. And like crazy fans we kept our eyes out of the balcony—since glazed—to catch a glimps of them!

Time has not weakened many of Mumbai’s  beautiful and some iconic buildings. If anything , muted now, they look like women who have aged gracefully… with all their charm in tact.

I could not click pictures of these buildings with the only camera I had—my Nokia E5. And inside CAC where they treasure their exclusivity in the face of stiff competition, they would not let me click pictures. 

But nevertheless I have uploaded  visuals of two things that I liked—one modern, and one antique and traditional. 

One is a wooden spectacle stand that I bought for my husband, hoping we will not have to hunt for his specs henceforth.

Carved coconut scraper from Chettinad

 The  picture of the exquisitely carved coconut scraper, I borrowed (Thanks!) from someone who is passionate about antique cookware--- for more on that please visit www.antiquepatra.blogspot.in      The antique coconut scraper in Contemporary appears to have been restored, in a way conserved.

A suitable boy for Anandi

Dadisa

Anandi and the Collector

The Child Bride

Balika Vadhu

So what if he is a collector, Anandi is a sarpanch. Choti umar ki sarpanch bitiya.

The Dadisa, fondly  says to herself, after her son has admonished her for dreaming of every man she likes as a possible grand son in law.

That is the 1001^st episode of Balika Vadhu, where the child bride Anandi, whose divorce from husband Jagiya, has come through. The  story is as much about the grand mother, who has transformed from a rigid and superstitious woman to a forward looking matriarch,  just as it is of  Anandi’s growth into an educated woman in the rural backdrop of Jaitsar villar, presumably imaginary, in Rajasthan. 

That is just the way many mothers –and grand mothers—looking high and low for a suitable match for their daughters behave in India. No boy is good enough. And their daughter, too good for most  of the  bachelors they see.

Anyone who has tried to match-make in the Indian context will doubtless empathise with Dadisa, and marvel at the lengths to goes to, to woo the Collector for her Anandi!

I  caught up with this  Colours channel’s  path breaking serial  when it was into it’s second year. I’ve missed many episodes in between, found some boring, and some less boring. But in all fairness, it has remained one of the good serials in our entertainment channels.  The bad are not worse than life throws up, and the good are not so sugary that they will give us diabetes!

Anandi's story could inspire girls in rural India .

The serial comes with a statement by way of a lesson at the end of each episode, and will serve to sensitise/educate many in the country—only if it is aired in one or two of the the free channels bouquet of DD plus, the dish and set top box  that does not involve a monthly payment, and comes with limited Door Darshan channels only.

Hillary Cinton's takeaways from New Delhi

Humayun's Tomb in Delhi

When US Secretary of State Hillary Clinto flew into New Delhi last week, she had two things or experiences that will hopefully linger on long after she demits office—any office that she may hold.

A glimpse of the Neel Gumbad



One is a visit to the breathtakingly beautiful Humayun’s Tomb. 

Hillary so wanted to see it that to squeeze time for it, she got up real early, they opened it specially for her, and she took a morning walk . Music came in the form of the lovely sounds that birds in the greens around the tomb make, all the time.

 



For me it was love at first sight with the warm and inviting historical monument. In fact, I had to spend quite a few minutes before the  beauty of the Taj  Mahal – not the chai, Saif—thawed into my  system.



A second reason why I’ve begun to like Humayun’s tomb with  the neatly laid out gardens (which are incidentally maintained very clean, devoid of litter) etc, is the fact that my young colleague Mandira Nayyar’s husband Ratish Nanda  has been involved with it, he is the architect driving all the  restoration work of the Aga Khan Foundation.



The morning walk kindled Hillary’s appetite sufficiently for her to request a real quick breakfast, saying “I’m really hungry”. Yes, she said that. 
That gave her the  second “thing” that will forever remain etched in her memory .

About what she ate, and the recipes, you will find out when you visit  my food blog.

  Just click on this link..           http://cookandshare.blogspot.in

And be patient..I've yet to include Hillary's Breakfast there! But there are other things you may want to read about...food!