Thanks and I am sharing with the group. Ankur --- On Fri, 3/18/11, kalyan & rani dutta choudhury <[email protected]> wrote:
From: kalyan & rani dutta choudhury <[email protected]> Subject: To: "Ankur Bora" <[email protected]> Date: Friday, March 18, 2011, 9:17 AM Dear Ankur I've just completed this satirical piece. If you want, you may post it Thanks Kalyan Habits, choices and idiosyncrasies Berkeley 15 December, 20111 Kalyan Dutta-Choudhury Well, the other day, I saw in the kitchen-sink the peelings of a ripe papaya and in the midst of peelings, there was laid out haphazardly an innumerable number of plump black-brown seeds. Though temping, I never tried to eat those nice-looking seeds. But I ate packaged seeds of pumpkin here in America because they were advertised as healthy. We know the seeds are needed for propagating to the next generation of papaya. But, why are needed so many seeds? Who holds that knowledge? Charles Darwin? May be marginally!. No, papayas aren’t alone in that regard. There are numerous seeds in a guava. So, is the case with eggplants, tomatoes, pepsicums, chilies, guavas, pomegranate, cucumbers, watermelons, many kinds of ’lau-kumra’’ and ‘’mitha-kumra’’ (favorite Indian squashes) and many other kinds of fruits, vegetables, like the poor-man’s fruit ‘’athiya kal’’ (‘’malbhog kal’’ the people grow them for the upper crust) , and many other fruits, vegetables and condiments. Have you seen or heard of a poor farmer eating a ‘’malbhog kal’’? ‘’Bhadraok hali or hachis’’ (you’ve turned a gentleman), the villagers would tease him mercilessly and ask him ‘’ala or atia, sigret lage?’’ (you want a cigarette now to dangle from your lips?). Anyway, all these multitude of seeds making plants of fruits and vegetables must have evolved since times immemorial beginning with the dawn of life. Is it that one plant began at random and many forms of them then evolved in a super-glacial time scale? Since, I’ve utter disregard for miracles and God-given gifts, what is basis of these palpable things? Did hunger and food begin at the same time? The easy answer is yes. When the concept of taste developed? All the three must be linked together as part of the grand design whatever that means. Wait. I’ve more to say. We’ve our own idiosyncrasies developed over time and circumstances. A Bangladeshi Hindu student in Kentucky, finding that his favorite vegetables weren’t available there, ruefully commented that there was only the beef-curry to push rice through his gullet at dinner. He said he was starving without the beef curry. The way he was eating that preparation, it seemed that he was making up for not-eating-beef practiced by generations and some more before them Well, on previous occasions, I had seen peelings of green papaya in the sink. Green but mature papayas make excellent ‘’khars’’ with whole mustard seeds. The ‘’khar’’ is literary what we, the Assamese, live for. Any supposedly good meal without a ‘’khary’’ preparation isn’t worth sitting down to a satisfying or not satisfying meal. It’s like Bengalis sitting down to a mid-day meal and finding that there was no ‘’sukto’’ (a bitter tasting vegetable preparation). The man, dressed in a sari wrapped around the waist like a lungi, gets mad and says to his wife, ‘’Ogo, Sundari Bodhu. Tumi jano amar pitten ashuk. Suktota seta upasam rakhe’’. (Dear wife. My biles don’t work properly without that preparation)..Well, sometimes, that’s sweet but technically bitter. But, never it’s with ‘’kalamegh’’ and ‘’neem’’ leaves. Those two are extra-ordinary in bitterness scale. It’s also like a ‘’Sylyetia’’ (not meaning in a derogatory sense) finding that there was no ‘’shutki’’ (long sun-dried small fish) to go with the meal. They will go berserk without it. They’re likely to say to the cowering wife, ‘’khitan aspardha! Sutki phakan ni?’’ (What effrontery!. You didn’t cook my whole-village-spreading-smell-sutki?) Mizos, I was told by my nephew, eat a lot of green chilies with the meat which is mainly pork. You guess their bottoms burn while defecting just like mouths burns while eating. ‘’That’s the price for survival’’, they must console themselves. The other option is ‘’maitun’’-bred ''bhokonda'' (fat) rats. But that happens every twelve years with bamboos in full boom.. We went to Nagaland for a visit. The food there is a mixture of Assamese and North Indian fare. But my wife went to a Naga-people organized party in Guwahati. They food, she told me, was a variety of barbequed meats delicately but herbally spiced. There was rice and soups. They were the upper-crusts of Nagas. Also, there is a lot of influence of the American Missionaries. I was tempted to ask her if she eaten any dog meat The Khasis, on the other hand, eat a whole lot of rice with tiny amount of meat cooked with ‘’lai-patta’’ (mustard green). Compared to Mizos, they got it very easy both ways. Well, the enormous language barriers prevent me to comment genuinely on these aspects of eating. There is a saying ‘’The way to get to your heart is by way of your stomach’’. Well, Tamils like their special preparation called ‘’abhiel’’ which is a vegetable preparation with coconut-milk. More on it is below. I was in Bombay staying in a hostel where there were students from many regions of the country. A riotous atmosphere would descend in our hostel with our Tamil boarders when word got out that ‘’abhiel’’ was on the menu with the night’s dinner. The Andhrites returned the favor by the own special condiments. . They reveled at eating copious amount of plain rice soaked in ghee, green mango pickles and red-hot crushed chili or in paste. They came to the dining hall with bottles of them. This was fist night of their arrival back to the hostel from the break. They got back with goodies. The smell of home hasn’t gone from them yet. They’re short of hearing. After you say something to them, they invariably ask ‘’amandi’’ (excuse me) Not to be unfazed by any of any of these activities, Konkanis slurp their ‘’rasam’’ saying that ‘’It’s the best soup in the world’’ while their Mysorian counterparts revel in tossing their yogurt-soaked rice-balls (it’s a sight to see them making them by tossing them again and again into their palms to perfect the roundness of it) into their wide-open mouths eagerly awaiting the ‘special treat’ though that treat was barely a few hours ago at lunch. While the feast is going on the respective enclave, Gujaratis eat their sugar-redolent reparations occasionally raising their eyes to the fellow Gujarati, ‘’Kem Che, Dhirubahai?’’(Dhirubhai, how are you?). Absorbed in single-minded sweetness of eating, the other Gujarati would stop eating for a moment and say, ‘’Majeme, Prahladbhai’’ (Praladbhai, I’m doing well). The tone and intimacy of the conversation were as if the two had not met for a long time. They, in fact, took a walk together around the lake to work off the heavy sugary sleep-inducing eating at lunch. Sugar doesn’t easily get into the scrota to be eliminated. Pretty soon, they would be hooked up into dialysis machines. Or they will for herbal remedy which never worked. But, reaching that state of heath is some years off. Till then, go on eating ‘’majeme’’ all the sugary stuff they want to eat. The Keralites, who take immense pride in their verdant state of cashew, plantain and the wisdom of communist government, gather after dinner at the dorm room of a fellow Karalean to munch on fried chips of plantain taken our of a biscuit-container of ancient vintage. The container has been the pride of the family since the patriarch of the family returned from England after a short training on how to operate and maintain the cashew-husking machines. Anyone who comes to the house in a village near Kottayam has to be refreshed on the story. If the story was told many times before, it doesn’t matter. They love telling old stories and more so in hearing them There would be huge two-tables-joined-together full of raucous Punjabis. They tell each other how good it was in the village during the break. The words heard would be ‘’Gudiya’’, ‘’wah-wahs’’ and ‘’satke-jawa’’ In between talks, one will pull out the chair he is sitting on in a huff and start dancing on floor with shouts ‘’Bale, Bale’’. Once that starts, the crowd joins in. It’s sheer bedlam. More intense is the bedlam, the more is the enjoyment for them Seeing all these activities, the Bengalis descend into an intense criticizing mode. They speak in subdued voice lest anyone hears them. They make clear that they weren’t into all that nonsense. They talk about their superior culture. One of them would solemnly start reciting a Tagore Song ‘’Din Guli More Sonar Khachaey….’’. in barely audible voice. The others would dip their heads in supreme appreciation and obeisance.. In the midst of all that goings on, walks in a Maharastrian from Nagpur. You may know that Nagpur area grows the mosttasty oranges. He is all dressed up for a rainy weather complete with full-length gum-boots. ‘’Where are you going, Vaidya?’’, you ask him because you hadn’t seen any rains in winter in Bombay. ‘’Juhu Beach. I don’t want to get my feet wet walking on the beach’’. The rains comes to Bombay on 15 of June given a day or two either way. No use arguing with an idiosyncratic guy. What the lone Assamese had or could do? .He determines that, come the week-end, he would head for the city to be at his cousin’s place to eat some ‘’motor dalir khar’’. That was a sure thing at his dinner table. Even the Marathi cook learned to cook and appreciate the simple delicacy. He has a married cousin there. Though he was married to a Bengali, she couldn’t take away the dear cousin’s in-born habit of eating ‘’khar’’. The cousin’s desire for eating ‘’khar’’ is so intense that he chose to live in an area of the huge metropolis known as ‘’Khar’’ This is what is called, ‘’Soneme Sohaga’’ (the brightening element is in the gold itself) Note: It’s written in satire rather than for ridiculing communities. _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
