Culinary Exploits…. Bits n Bites !!!

I was thinking of my culinary skill almost a year after leaving home. When I left home, I didn’t know how to cook. Not that I am any better now. But when you have people like G in your life, who always make sure they give you 4 days of food every time you visit them, you barely want to take the trouble of cooking. Eating mom’s food has heightened my taste buds to such an extent that it is very difficult to survive on my own cooking. Add to it the fact that I start to cook following a recipe, but at the middle of it I get so impatient that I just do things my own way to take a short cut, and then everything ends up in a mess.

My neighbor became extremely useful to me in these situations. Whenever I cooked something barely palatable, I would eat it. And when the food was utterly unpalatable, I'd present it well, garnish it, and knock on my neighbor’s door, telling him that I had cooked an Indian delicacy for him. I mean come on, the food was not rotten or fermenting, just badly cooked. Mom always said, do not waste food. 

Dad always told me that the best way to ensure good cooking is to take a lot of time and patience to fry the onions. Mom says that too many and too much of spices only ruin the food. However, I never learnt to cook back at home, and I still do not have much idea about what ingredients to put. But I have survived. I cook very rarely, but every cooking session has been like performing an experiment. There were disasters, there was excess or too little spices, and sometimes the food was damaged beyond repair. And yeah there were earth shattering accidental discoveries in the process. And then I would feel like Archimedes in the bath tub, basking in the glory of my own success.

Naah, I am not telling you any disastrous recipes here. But when I look back at my collection of pics from the last one year, I cannot help but smile at so many memories, disasters, failures, anger, frustration, and all for the lack of the knowledge of cooking. Here take a look-

This was the first time I had ever cooked. And you will roll on the floor laughing if I told you what this was. Obviously it had tasted too yucky to even go to my neighbor’s stomach. This is a disastrous attempt to cook pasta without sauce, the Indian way, where I went ahead and added lots of vegetables, and then most disastrously added one whole tablespoon of turmeric powder.

Lesson learnt- Never be generous with adding turmeric. And before Italians fall off the Leaning Tower and commit suicide, stop using pasta to make an Indian-style curry.

Then this is the mushroom curry that turned out to be relatively better.

Did you know that I could never make omelets without messing them up and ultimately ending up making scrambled eggs? Here they usually look like this.

But the only time, and the one and only time I managed not to mess it up, it looked like this.

This was when I made rice for the first time. I added lots of vegetables and mushrooms to it, and then went ahead and actually let the cooker whistle five times before I turned it off. Needless to say, it turned out to be more like the gooey liquid you’ll feed your newborn.

The bread pulao I once made tasted okay and looked like this.

And so did the noodles.

One thing I do a good job is of making salads. That is provided my mood is good and I am not too impatient to notice the size and shape of the vegetables I cut.

Once, I also made a fruit salad with lots of sweetened strawberry flavored yogurt, black grapes, apples, and chocolate sauce.

I love to make Maggi (instant noodles) with lots of vegetables thrown in. So much that the so called 2 minute dish takes me about an hour to cook.

The sweet and sour mushroom and baby corn curry I made once turned out to be very tasty.

But then, I messed up the chicken by trying to add sugar in order to make the onions brown, and throwing in so much of sugar in the process that it actually became more of a sweet dish.

But the egg curry I made was quite decent. Here take a look at the slits I made on the eggs to let the spices seep in.

And this is one of those nutritious “ready in 5 minutes” corn salad with lots of vegetables thrown in and served with a dash of lime.

My over ambitious plans of making fish curry resulted in frying the fish excessively and thus breaking it due to accidental injuries with the spatula till the fish was powdered into something I called a powdered fish salad. It tasted amazing, but there was no fish.

The Bengali potato curry (alu dum) in fact turned out to be very nice.

And so did the lemon and spicy chicken I made the other day.

If you have noticed, I always start cooking something that eventually turns out to be something else. And yeah, ask me about a particular dish, and I would not be able to tell you most of the ingredients or the actual measurements. I cook by instinct. And yeah, my food always looks much better than it tastes.

Well, that in a nutshell is my cooking exploits in this country. Only in these times you do remember how your mom had a hard time asking you to learn to cook. These days, I have an idea of what not to put where, though I still try to figure out what to add to what. And as usual if the food isn’t to my liking, my neighbor ends up eating it.

Still trying, still learning, in bits and bites.

sunshine

The Mystery Behind Green Snakes On Your Legs- Solved !!!!

One of the many things I remember about my granny is the fact that she used to be extremely fair and strong, and had bluish green veins all over her legs. As a kid, I would often touch the skin there with intrigue and exclaim- Wow, look at the snakes on your legs !

I do not know why am I being reminded of this today.

My job with the worms requires me to keep standing or walking in the lab for a good 5 hours a day, 7 days a week. I started to come home with my feet all swollen. I thought the problem would go away with time, but every morning started to be a pain for me when I would be in bed in so bad a state that even getting up would require huge amounts of determination.

People had their own interpretations and solutions to it. Some said that it was because I had gained weight in recent months. Some said that perhaps the fluids in my knees had gone dry and I should start taking glucosamine pills to lubricate it. Some said that it was perhaps juvenile arthritis. Some said that perhaps I was overworking while some said that it was perhaps because I did not have much physical activity. While the dumber ones visually diagnosed it to be filariasis, the wicked ones gave me those nasty “oh are you pregnant?” looks without saying a word (now you know why they call it paaon bhaari hona).

To get an expert opinion about what is happening, I went to the doctor. And despite years of studying human anatomy and physiology, there were so many things I learnt in my visit.

An external examination of my legs immediately revealed those green snakes my granny had. These are known as the varicose veins. These are located close to the skin, are more common in women, usually appear before 40, and get worse with age.

Since the veins in the legs have to return blood to the heart against the force of gravity, and they have no muscles (unlike arteries), the veins use the muscles of the legs to aid in this process. When the valves in the veins that ensure unidirectional blood flow stop functioning, the blood cannot reach up the heart and thus the blood accumulates and swell up the lower part of the body, especially the legs.

This can cause due to one or a combination of factors like pregnancy, excess weight, and standing for long hours. These are usually genetic. They cause intense swelling or cramps and heaviness in the legs. The initial stage can be treated by wearing special elastic stockings available in pharmacy stores, by making sure that you do not stand for long hours, and by consciously sleeping with your legs placed on a pile of pillows and by keeping your legs above the level of your heart when you are sitting. Physiotherapy also helps a lot. Complicated case diagnosis may include sclerotherapy, laser techniques, or surgery to remove the veins in worst cases.

Other steps to avoid aggravating the problem include avoiding crossing ones legs while sitting, exercising the calf muscles while sitting, and raising the legs higher than the level of the heart while resting. The point is not to let fluids accumulate in the legs.

These were quite interesting to know. First, I had no idea that only certain people have blue veins. Second, I had no idea that I had blue veins. And this has got nothing to do with having royal blood or blue blood, like granny used to joke. Initially, I hated the idea of accepting that something is wrong with me. But what the hell, if a machine has a defect, just need to go repair it.

So it is gonna be special stocking and as much of rest as possible for me for the next few weeks. For all those of you out there who have always wondered about those green lines snaking your feet, you now know what they are and what to do about it. And for all those who need to stand or sit in a position for long hours, try taking special care of your feet now.

Now I know why I hated going for movies and the idea of sitting cramped in a place for 3 hours and coming out with swollen legs. Now I know that I hated chemistry practical classes since I had to keep standing. I remember once I got the stool to rest my knees on, and the teacher was so offended that she indirectly hinted about the luxuries I was used to and how I should opt for humanities or commerce if I could not bear to stand in labs. My board exams and university exams always got my legs swollen, and so I always made it a point to prop up my legs on a chair while I wrote the exam. This has earned me so many nasty stares from ignorant teachers because raising your legs is a sign of disrespect apparently. I remember munching on biscuits during the 4 hour exams actually made an invigilator ask me not to do that. I had to tell her that I have gastric ulcer and not eating for 4 hours would only mean having to call an ambulance. Of course I exaggerated, but that was good enough to shut her up.

Anyway, on my way back from the doctor's, I met this acquaintance of mine who seemed all excited to share her health updates with me. She has been on her period, bleeding for 25 days now, and was debating about seeing the doctor.

“Do you know the doctor said she will do a pelvic exam. Andar haath daalte hain kya? Do they put the hand inside?”

The very lack of euphemism put me off.

“Yeah, but it isn’t painful. I got a routine pelvic done last week”.

“Oh man, I am still a virgin and what if they find this out and rupture my virginity in the process?”

“Naah”, she continued, “I asked my mom and she said that the bleeding will stop on its own. No need to do the pelvic exam”.

And thus she bid a goodbye and walked away.

I wasn't really sure what to say. Good that she left before I had to say something.

Anyway, you wonderful ladies out there with green veins, just take care, okay?

sunshine

Worming Up-II

Continued from here…..

Nothing is as exciting as taking up new challenges. The most difficult challenge for me was to overcome the fear of letting worms crawl all over your hands, and yet not drop them out of fear and injure them. These are the tobacco worms the department has been breeding for decades now. My challenge was to learn the art of doing it rightly in 5 days’ training, and yet not feel sick every time I entered the smelly breeding room.

No worms as a prize to guess that I went ahead and took up the job. The first day, I just followed the guy who was training me. And I had no freaking clue about what was happening. This is the same guy who says bok of inseks and botton (guess what, I think he calls his sexy wife ekki) and who has sternly written instructions all over the place in wrong English (e.g., please do not removed the machine). I was handed a checklist of some 50 things to do while he went around changing worm boxes, putting older ones into newer boxes, and categorizing them based on certain characteristics. If you happen to be in the biosciences or have little interest in insects, you will know that most insects have 4 life stages- egg, larva, pupa, and adult. These were the diagrams in the good old biology textbooks. The larval stage could further be divided into 3rd, 4th, and 5th instar stages.

Now….

My trainer has left for “botton” after training me to feed “insek” (he cannot say “S”, poor thing).

I start my job at 8 every morning, first categorizing the larvae into different boxes based on the presence or absence of eyes and the shape of the head (let me spare you the details).

Then, I take the adult worms from the previous days which are no longer feeding and put them in dry wooden blocks. You know that they are ready to go without food when they smack the food all around the cups and a thick black line appears on their back. Here see the difference for yourself.

Once put in blocks, they go without food and in a few days, they all reach the pupae stage with the brown covering that makes them look like cockroaches.

After a few days, when the pupae turn black and soft from being brown, they are left in the cages where they emerge into adult moths.

The adult moths live on sugar water, and lay eggs on the underside of the tobacco plant leaf.

These are attracted to light and hence every time you take the plant out of the cage, you need to switch off the lights and have to know your way in the darkness. Once the plants are taken out, eggs are collected by gentle scraping with the hand without damaging the leaves. There are two varieties of worms, the green ones and the black ones. These are the collected eggs.

Three days later, the eggs are made to hatch on a thin strip of food. The food is a special diet made with calculated amounts of vitamins and antibiotics, and smells ten times more horrible than fermented dosa dough. In the pic, moisture is being wiped off the surface of the food block to be cut into pieces.

When the eggs hatch into thin hairy beings on the strips of food, they look like this.

About 200 of them are put in small cups everyday and allowed to grow.

After a couple of days, they are transferred to a bigger cup, and the cycle is repeated again.

Look how the worms get a grip on the food and dig it out with their pointed jaws.

Sometimes, eggs hatch out into weird looking creatures. Naah, this is nor Surf Ki Safedi Lalita ji. It is just a whiter worm.

Challenges 

First, the sheer number of things intimidated me. There are 3 huge rooms filled with boxes like this and I had to know my way through them.

The second challenge was to put the larva into the dry box. These are extremely soft and the moment you hold them, they start wriggling their heads and butts. Yet you cannot drop them or squish them. This is how they looked. 

And this is how you put them into the dry blocks with your hands.

I remember how the guy asked me to use forceps to do that, and I was touched with his compassion for me. My hopes came crashing down when he dutifully informed me that he wants me to use the forceps because he doesn’t want me to injure the worms. When I put the worms into the boxes, they wriggle their heads and crawl out. Soon, I figured out a way to grip them softly by the neck and put their head facing downwards so that it was difficult for them to crawl out.

Learning and knowledge gained

I have learnt how to distinguish between a male and a female pupa looking for a tiny hole somewhere in the male pupa. Imagine the chaos holding a brown pupa which is wriggling itself furiously trying to locate a freaking hole.

It was a challenge to come to the lab every morning (even on the weekends) and not faint out of the smell and the trauma of dealing with these creepy crawly things. The initial few days were so bad that everything I ate smelt of them. I would step onto something and get startled, wondering if I had stepped on an insect. I would rummage through my bag for a pen and then back off immediately wondering if some of those insects have crawled into my bag. I killed so many insects by dropping them abruptly because they wriggled so much and I was too scared to touch them.

But eventually, things got better. Eventually, I stopped using the forceps and started to hold them with my hands. The way they crawl and cling to the skin gives you a very uncomfortable feeling. But at least they do not bite. I mean these are merely insects. Things could have been worse. I could be working in a lab full of white rats or sting rays, getting bitten by them every now and then. I could be working in a lab full of snakes. I could be working with the chimps, the monkeys, crocodiles or whatever. These are just tiny harmless insects.

Like I said, this job isn’t related to what I study. But one of the best things about the US is that one can learn anything one wants to. One could be waiting tables, feeding insects, or working as a car mechanic on the side. Even when you are a student from a different department, you could do so many things. You could work in the library, feed worms, take poetry classes, learn graphics designing, learn or teach languages, and so on. The opportunities are endless. You acquire newer skills, make new contacts, and get to do something different, even if that means dealing with wriggling, crawling green creatures.

I am so glad I didn’t chicken out the day I went to see what the training was like. And if you get my point, go take a break off your hectic work life and learn something new. Not only does it teach you a lot, but it also acquaints you with things you could never think of.

Let me know the next time you learnt something which was totally unrelated to what you are doing now.

sunshine

Everyone Loves A Good Tsunami.

Updates- clips to the play-

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgx7rF8K1kk&mode=related&search=

2.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Ew_b2jE9c

Spoilers ahead-

Go watch it if it’s not too late. It is every dollar- paisa wasool.

I have never been much of a play person. Or maybe I never moved in the right play circles. But curiosity, Friday evening, and my friend acting here made me decide to go to the play.

Set in the San Francisco bay area in Dec. 2004-Jan.2005, this comic satire beautifully portrays the nuances of human emotions like rivalry, competitiveness, the need to feel important, and the urge to outsmart others. Dr.Sunil Ahuja is the president of the Indian Association who has been betrayed by Panjawani, the vice-president, who starts his own parallel desi group called the Indian Council and many members of the IA flock to IC, much to the dismay of Dr.Ahuja. Wanting to do better than the Republic Day Parade organized by the IC (rumored to have invited Amitabh Bachchan as the celebrity of the event), IA decides to organize a fund raising concert for the Tsunami victims (remember, it is set in Dec., 2004).

Ahuja leaves no stone unturned to make the concert more successful than the republic day parade. Jindal, his right hand and another surviving member of the IA, tries to invite every celebrity from Lata Mangeshkar to Sonu Nigam. Unfortunately, this far exceeds their budget. They think of bringing some lesser known singer, one of the winners of Sa Re Ga Ma at a much cheaper rate. However at the end, they make it into a local talent show with their own children performing (and his daughter Pinky winning the first prize in Piano as well). A very ambitious plan to actually bring a tsunami survivor on stage actually ends up in Sushma ji, another surviving member of the IA, giving a condolence speech. She is portrayed as the survivor who has suffered a deep trauma because 40 years ago, they had South Indian neighbors in Delhi and though she has no contacts with them, she assumes that the neighbors are dead or are victims of the tsunami. She thus deeply mourns the loss of the neighbors.

Oh, by the way, they take quite a while to argue over the name of the concert till they change it from Tsunami Hungama (hungama?) to Tsunami 2005. Eh, why not Tsunami Bumper Dhamaka then?

I loved the little touches here and there, like how Indu (Dr.Ahuja’swife) runs a women’s organization called Patita (alleged by Dr.Ahuja to consist of husband-hater women), the way his elder daughter Aarti from Stanford brings out a calendar of nude men and women with her friends to raise money for the victims, and how the pundit says that no one died in the tsunami because what we perceive as death is merely the soul changing bodies just like the body changes clothes (interesting !). When the newspaper reporter arrives, everyone forgets the cause and all are in their own worlds trying to gain publicity with their stories and wanting to be in the limelight of the group picture.

Panjawani finally arrives at the end, coaxing Dr.Ahuja to jointly form the Association of Indian Council (AIC) and together they pledge over whiskey that they will organize a Tsunami-concert every year, like Tsunami 2006, Tsunami 2007.

But will there be a tsunami next year?, Dr.Ahuja asks with whatever wisdom he has.

Arre tsunami nahin to kya hua, India mein har saal kuch na kuch to hota hi rehta hai. Based on that, we shall make the concert a huge success every year.

And thus they join hands once again. Who cares about raising money for the tsunami victims? It is the position of the president and all the publicity that comes along with it that drove these two men.

Beer before whisky? Very risky.

Whisky before beer? No fear.

I loved these lines of the play. Along with many more.

I know it wouldn’t make much sense unless you have seen it. But in case you get a chance, GO WATCH IT !!!

Great job everyone !!! And yeah, non-Seattleites, just watch out for the link posted here if the play comes up on youtube :).

sunshine.

Worming Up- I.

This summer, I decided to broaden the periphery of my learning, and do something unusual. I was skimming through the students’ board for campus job opportunities when something interesting caught my eyes.

Needed someone to feed the insects.

Now this was not exactly something I’d jump at. However, I emailed the professor and she agreed to meet me. She informed me that no graduate student had done anything like this before, and she also made it clear that the pay would be hourly and low. Moreover, I’d be expected to work on the weekends. But this being the time when the course load is low, I decided to give it a shot instead of whiling my time in shopping malls. We decided on a week’s training before I took charge.

Day 1-

She took me around to show me things and introduce me to the guy who’d train me. It seemed that he was leaving town for a while and the department needed a temporary replacement. The first thing that caught my nose is the stench so very characteristic of any animal lab. While she introduced me to the guy and left, I could almost feel my stomach churning and crying to puke.

My trainer was a Vietnamese guy, a short fellow reaching almost till my shoulders with hair standing out like a porcupine. And here read his English.

Trainer: There are many bokk of insek here. I go to Botton so you take care and feed insekk.

I could laugh and laugh the way he funnily skipped the S and replaced it by a K. What more, I went home and tried to peak like him. I mean speak like him.

I was taken to a lab full of these worms at different stages of their life. Anybody with a basic idea of entomology would know that most insects go through four main life stages of egg, larva, pupa, and adult. My job was to keep the cycle going, which consisted of about 25-30 steps daily. Mornings would take me some 4 hours while evenings would take me another one hour.

The first time I saw the insects, I wanted to flee as far from the department as I could. Let it suffice to say that I am an extremely touch-sensitive person who has never even let G's cat close till date in fear that the cat’s fur would brush on my skin. My nightmares consist of being in a room with insects let out, crawling all over me. It seemed that my nightmares we coming true after all.

My trainer told me to use forceps initially. I was pleased that he was aware of my discomfort. But he told me that that's because I should be gentle with the insects and not injure them and squish them in nervousness or fear, so it is better that I start with the forceps initially.

Now here take a look at the worms. They come in two types, the wild type (green ones) and the black type.

By the time I had watched him doing stuff on day 1, I had decided that I was not taking up the job. I could sell newspapers, work as a waitress, or do anything else. But it was a torture to spend five hours a day in such stench, letting hundreds of worms wriggle all over your hands. Come on, I was not really one of those shorts-clad guys from the Discovery channel who got their kicks out of jutting their hands into snake pits.

Later that night, she came into my room to have a talk with me. She as in my alter ego, my second half that talks to me during confusion and apprehension. And she told me this-

Look, someone has to do it. And you are helping someone in their research. If all this while you sold apple pies, now you are helping grow the apples. It might not be something as hot as learning to fly planes, but it is a job after all. If your dentist could make a living out of peeping and poring into people’s mouths (or worse still, think of your gynecologist), if masseuses could make a living out of oiling huge blobs of fat of strangers, if your local Govinda hair salon (pronounced as Gobindo heyar cheloon) could make business cutting lice-infested hair with dandruff, what was wrong in helping the department breed worms? For all the research you did with rat fetus, did you ever realize that someone actually does the job of extracting the rat fetus out of the mother’s body?
Will sunshine realize the point of her alter ego? Will she decide to go out of the way and take up the job that needed her to be in stinking places with worms all around her? Will she help the department and also gain some very unusual experience in the process? The experience might not make her a stellar resume, but it is an art learnt and a skill acquired nevertheless. Will her alter ego convince her that no experience in life whatsoever, goes waste? Will sunshine mentally prepare herself to deal with the occupational hazards of the job where she would have to touch the wriggling insects, clean insect exuvia (the dead remains of the insects or the skin they shed during molting), and work at weird timings like 7 AM on a weekend? Or will she chicken out, spend the summer comfortably hanging out in shopping malls and hogging on pizzas and burritos?

We will see.

sunshine.

Hidden Treasures.

I was clearing up the table of a professor to make some lab space. This meant papers needed to be filed, files needed to be put neatly into cardboard boxes and put away someplace where they could be retrieved when needed. It took me longer than I anticipated, and I was covered with dust and grime. Anyway, a few hours of toil and aching muscles later, the files were put away, boxes shoved elsewhere and the place looked more in order. It is then that my eye caught on something. Something extremely mesmerizing that was hidden behind the files by the walls for God knows how long. I hesitated only a bit, wondering if it would be proper on my part to go and talk to the professor about this. I mean, I was not really eight anymore.

Debating, I finally went up to the professor and told him I had found this behind the files. I asked him if it was okay for me to take them home. The professor gave me a look of utter surprise, wondering if this was the right age of be excited about things like this. However, he gladly let me take them home. And every morning, I look at them mesmerized, wondering how different and yet how enthralling they look. For many, these are nothing more than few pieces of junk. For me, it is like a treasure hunt.

This is what I am talking about.

sunshine.

The Cycle Of Crime.

A picture is worth a thousand words. And a gesture is worth a thousand warnings. Was taking a stroll in the campus when I came across one of the many cycle stands. I saw this.

And this.
And finally this !!!!

Amazing idea, whoever’s it is to get rid of the tires to carry while leaving the cycle frame behind.

There are so many things to see and learn in life. Beyond the text books I mean.

sunshine.

Truncated Love.

Hi

Wazzup

Hr u?

Gr8 gr8.

U liked the buk?

ROTFLMAO

temme

Gud

I lv u

Me2

I lv u 1/0

k. gtg. Brb.

Wtf?

lol. ttyl. Gtg.

k. tc.

U2.

Now that is what I call the expression of love in codes. Anybody care for full sentences, correct spelling and proper grammar?

Gtg.
-
sunshine.

Let’s SLEEP Over It.

Did you know?

I can usually go to sleep after I have woken up.

I cannot watch any movie in one go, not even a 90 minute English movie. I need to take at least one nap in between. Even at movie theaters. Ask my friends. We once went to watch Eklavya. I dozed off in an action-filled scene where Amitabh was crouched on mud in the sweltering heat amidst the lanky legs of the camels. The next scene, I see Saif and Amitabh together, only to wonder what happened in between.

G claims that she cannot sleep at anytime but night. I wonder why. I just need a place to lie on and close my eyes, telling myself that I need to fall asleep in the next 10 minutes. And this way, I can fall asleep even amid loud music.

The more exams draw near, the more I get tensed. The more I get tensed, the more I sleep. The more I sleep, the sleepier and guiltier I feel. Guilt only increases my tension, making me sleep all the more. Now this is what I call a real life synergistic effect of a vicious cycle.

I often hang around with a bunch of party animals. They meet at 8, start cooking at 9, eat dinner at 11, and then watch a movie or play a game, only to wind up at 3 in the morning. No matter what state the party is in, by 11 pm, I am fast asleep on the couch. These guys watch a movie while I sleep, call me when they are about to leave, I accompany them to the car sleepy-eyed, one of them drops me to my place, I climb up the stairs with my eyes closed, go back to my room, and resume my sleep from where I had left it.

I loved Vegas. I didn’t mind all the walking and casino hopping, as long as I had my 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep at night. No wonder he went home and told his mom that I am the only woman he has seen who sleeps so much.

My naps are as dream-filled as you could imagine. My dreams are a potpourri of action-packed, comic, tragic, suspense-filled and romantic melodrama.

Sleep is therapeutic for me. When I am stressed, I prefer sleeping instead of crying.

I have never had to take sleeping pills. Believe me even consuming pills prescribed to make me sleep less wouldn’t help.

I can never breeze through a class without dozing off at least once. Seminars are definitely meant to be slept in. My max concentration time is about an hour. When I can’t sit through a class, I sleep through it. I can even sleep in class with my eyes wide open. And just so that I do not fall asleep, I take my laptop to classes.

I remember a funny episode when we had a picture exhibition of one of the best wildlife photography. There was a slideshow in a dark room for about an hour, and they were showing pics of animals in the order of their biological classification. This meant that the order would be like this-

Ø Plants and trees
Ø Microbes (bacteria, virus)
Ø Protozoa
Ø Porifera
Ø Cnidarians (jellyfish)
Ø Platyhelminths (flatworms)
Ø Annelids (roundworms and earthworms)
Ø Arthropods (cockroach, spider, prawn, shrimp)
Ø Mollusk (snails)
Ø Echinoderms (starfish)
Ø Fish
Ø Amphibians
Ø Reptiles
Ø Birds
Ø Mammals

Well, I remembered till the Cnidarians. With the darkness and the AC going full blast, who cared? When I woke up, they were almost at the end of the slideshow, showing the picture of monkeys and tigers. And I had gasped aloud- “But how did they come to monkeys so soon?"

While I travel in a train, all I need is the upper berth. I love the rocking motion of the train. Barring occasional loo breaks and food breaks, I have dozed the entire length of tracks from Kolkata to Chennai.

I can never read a book on the bed to relax. I eventually fall asleep. I need to be wide awake and upright in the study even to watch a movie or read a book.

They say I sleep a lot. I say my heavy-duty batteries take a little more time to get charged.

It often happens that I fall asleep in the afternoons, only to wake up in the fading light of the evenings to imagine it to be dawn the early morning and start getting ready for school.

If I am hungry and there is no food at home and I am too lazy to cook or to go out to eat, I can fall asleep in order not to feel the hunger.

There have been more than one occasion when I have fallen asleep prior to the day of the examination, only to wake up the next morning and realize that I haven’t yet started to study.

Back in India, I couldn’t sleep in loud music or even if the night bulb glowed. After coming here, life has been so stressed and my lab work requires such weird hours that I have trained myself to catch occasional naps amid work. Most days, I do not even come home to sleep. I sleep on the couch in the lab amid the droning of machines. Unfamiliar surroundings do not bother me anymore.

I once applied to a study where all you had to do was sleep, while they traced your sleeping and dreaming patterns. I wish they had selected me.

I have slept through Sleepless in Seattle, Sleeping with the enemy, and eyes wide shut. I haven’t yet tried the movie Jaagte Raho.

Unlike other lovers, I can never claim that I have lost sleep thinking of someone.

If they made a movie about me, I’d never let them name it Sona Manaa Hai. Guess what I’d call it? Sleeping in Seattle.

All said and done, I lead as much of an active life as anyone else would. I gym, I dance, I attend classes and hang around with friends, I go for hiking, I blog, and I do a lot more. It is just that I take sleep as seriously as any other thing I do in life.

The Sleeping Beauty signing off now.

sunshine.

Something sweet?

Ever woken up in the middle of the night craving for sweets? Naah, I do not mean the American cheese cake or the black forest cake, but the typical Indian sweets? Now, I never buy sweets from the Indian stores. I once bought 10 laddus in all of 4 varieties on a Friday evening, wanting to share it with my lab mates the next Monday. The entire weekend I had spent dipped in bucketful of guilt, having eaten all the laddus myself.

People have a sweet tooth. I claim that all my 28 teeth are sweet. And of all the days, I had to crave for sweets when I didn’t even have milk at home. How to I pacify myself?

Irritated and grumpy with myself, I got out of bed, brushed, and put on my thinking cap. I wish I could go back to sleep fantasizing about sweets, but that was not happening. Think harder! Something had to be done to mollify this sudden bout of sweet craving.

I heard the next door guy use the microwave. Still awake so late? I could already see my plan taking shape.

* Went out and told him hi, and gave him my sweetest smile.

* Told him that I barely saw him these days and if he was working very hard to get that Nobel prize he rightfully deserved.

*Opened the fridge and scooped out a whole large spoonful of vegetable curry for him, telling him that this is an Indian delicacy I was planning to share with him.

*Delved into the fridge, digging my nose into it and then making incoherent regret moans. Tsk tsk.

* Told him that since I had to keep awake at night studying, I came looking for some coffee, but it’s fine since I did not have milk.

Thankfully, my plan worked and he almost jumped at me, trying to help. 

“Oh no milk? Take it from me. And don’t ask me again, if you need for coffee, take it anytime you want”.

I started to act all coy and “no-no, thank you so much but I’ll survive without milk”, but after he left and shut his door and before he could open the door again telling me that he had changed his mind about the milk and being helpful, I grabbed at it.

Coffee be darned, I filled half the frying pan with milk. Put it on low flame and left it that way. But what to do with milk? Think, think.

Suddenly, a brilliant idea hit me. I had this huge packet of breakfast cereals that was quite misleadingly called “Honey bunches of oats with almonds”. I had bought it all greedy about the almond part, only to discover that there was one thin shaving of one-twentieth of an almond for every five spoonful of cereal. So the next 20 minutes was spent ripping open the cereal packet, hand picking the almond shavings, and putting it into the milk. Thankfully, I remembered mom telling someone always to add the sugar last while boiling milk so that it did not char.

So for the next 2 hours, the milk with tiny shavings of almond boiled. Two hours later when the milk had almost reduced to half its volume and had a brownish, thicker consistency to it post addition of the sugar, I knew my food was ready. I knew not what I had made of it and if it was an American version of payesh. But one mouthful and I was going mmmm mmmmmm mmmmm!

I thought it tasted a little like rasmalai, a little like rabri, and a little like kheer. The fat or malai was sticking to the walls of the pan with a thickness of almost a few millimeters, and scraping it with the steel spoon, the almond bits embedded in it was just…. just… just….Heavenly !!!

I licked my lips like a greedy cat, and man, finally after 4 am, it was the “sweetest” sleep I had. All puns intended.

sunshine.