CNN-IBN had an article a few weeks ago about how 10 million tons of wheat and rice are at risk of rotting in India, as they are stored in the open under tarpaulins.

This isn’t new, as we know. Every few years, some newspaper publishes a picture or a news article about rotting foodgrains, and the story dies down a few days later.   There is rarely much outrage over the wasted foodgrains.

Suman Sahia writes in Tehelka that “The government acknowledges that food worth nearly Rs 60,000 crore is destroyed every year due to poor and insufficient storage facilities. This lost food is keeping millions of Indians hungry. To add insult to injury, the government spends about Rs 2.6 crore of the tax payers’ money to get rid of food grain that has rotted during storage.”

Rotting grains (Pic courtesy: IBNlive.in.com)

On this note, I love what the Minister of State for Agriculture K V Thomas said in his interview to Tehelka :  “There were 11,708 tonnes of damaged and non-issuable food grain in Food Corporation of India (FCI) depots. However, the whole lot hasn’t become spoilt. This quantity has become non-issuable to beneficiaries of the public distribution system because of various reasons.”

Ah, so they weren’t spoilt, they were just wasted.  I’m sure that is an important distinction.

FCI, for its part, has been in the business of storing foodgrains in the open for years.  The IBN article says “The amount of food grain wasted was 9.4 million tonnes in 2008, 16 million tonnes in 2009 and 17.8 million tonnes in 2010.“

But how many tons of foodgrains were spoiled due to improper storage in 2000 or 1990? What about the years when we imported wheat when we could have used stored foodgrains if only they hadn’t rotted?

-  Here is a report from the Hindu, dated March 19,2002, about FCI floating tenders for building 70 godowns across 13 states to store foodgrains.  What happened to those godowns – were they ever built, or were they inadequate?

-  There was also the case of 17,000 tons of rice that were taken from FCI godowns in Karnataka over a 15 day period in 2004 and were found at Mangalore port awaiting export to Kenya by a private company.  This was happening at the same time that Karnataka was reeling under a drought.

My question is – why has so little attention been paid to this issue by our esteemed Members of Parliament/ ministers/ politicians all these years?

Why have our NGOs not protested?  Why do newspapers not make a bigger issue of this?

Is it that people believe that this issue doesn’t affect them, since FCI foodgrains are only going to be distributed through the PDS?  Do the rich and the middle class not care because they don’t buy PDS rice, and the poor don’t have a voice anyway?

I’m not going to preach about how we need to be more sensitive to issues of the poor. (We do). But this issue is not a poor man’s issue.  FCI’s incompetence does not just affect those dependent on PDS food grains.  It affects all of us, and here are two examples how:

1.  What happens when the PDS cannot supply enough rice or wheat and those dependent on the PDS are forced to buy foodgrains in the open market? Does it not impact the middle class when food grain prices increase as a result?

2.  What happens in years of drought when the Government, without a surplus of stored foodgrains, is forced to import foodgrains? Again the market price goes up and yes, the middle class is impacted.

The Supreme Court order asking the Government to distribute free food grains to the poor is a great idea, but is only a stopgap measure.  We will have the same problem of spoiled food grains next year, and (going by history) the year after that.

Unless the middle class, the media and the NGOs realize that this is not a poor man’s issue alone, and unless they start protesting more.

I started wondering who the millions of people were who would buy this product.

If you go to Pepsi’s website listing the ingredients for its products, you’ll find exotic sounding ingredients like Taurin, Tagatose, and Erythorbic acid, as well as others like Tricalcium Phosphate and Sodium Hexametaphosphate which seem to belong more in the chemistry lab than in a beverage.

Picture by JacobMetcalf.

So, are there really people who will happily drink Tricalcium Phosphate and Acesulfame Potassium, but balk at a little High Fructose Corn Syrup?

I can see that some people might prefer the taste of sugar in Throwback. But no one, you’d think, would buy Pepsi Throwback because they actually believe that it is “healthier” because it doesn’t have HFCS?

Sadly, you’d be wrong.

Indian-American kids in the US have grown up on Mars and KitKat and MilkyWay.  In fact, come to think of it, I hardly see any kids at the Indian stores, and never near the candy.  I can safely rule out the children of even the short-term visitors – software engineers and so on, for I believe kids growing up in India too prefer Mars to Melody these days.  So who does eat these sweets?

Pan Pasand

And then R brought home some Pan Pasand a few days ago.  It was a recipe for instant nostalgia.  Remember the old Doordarshan ad where Archana Joglekar shrieks  

“Shaadi? Aur Tumse?? Kabhi Nahin!!” ? (Marriage? With You? Never!)

One Pan Pasand later, her tone becomes much mellower, even if she says the same thing.   (But does the mellower tone mean there is hope for the guy? We never find out.)

As the Pan Pasand melted in my mouth, releasing its unique (for a candy) flavor of paan, I realized that the target audience for these candy displays had never been the children. They are for us – the poor benighted adult desis caught with the memories of the sweets we had in childhood, even as the supermarket aisles in India today are filled with Mars bars and Hersheys – sweets we once relied on visitors to supply us with.   A lot of them are probably made in India now – I know, for one, that KitKats are.  So like Indian Made Foreign Liquor, we now have Indian Made Foreign Sweets now.

Meanwhile, those of us who have moved to the US, have changed, ironically, from getting imported Mars bars in childhood to looking for imported Pan Pasand as adults.

And while on that, next time I am in the Indian store, I am going to look out for some Alpenliebe.

I plucked my first tomato harvest the other day.  A few days later, they still sit on my countertop, and I wonder how I shall ever bear to cut them up and boil them.

The cherry tomatoes are a different issue, though. Many of them never even made it to the photo shoot. They were gobbled up en route, and biting into them was a pleasure as they burst with flavor. It’s hard enough to keep myself from picking them with one hand while I water the plant with another. What really stops me is that I find it disquieting to pluck tomatoes while watering them.

As I see it, there are two different modes – the nurturer-waterer mode and the plunderer-picker mode. I cannot do both simultaneously. As it is, I do feel quite guilty about plucking the tomatoes the plant is so carefully growing.

I will not get the extraordinary harvest I once feared.  I never got around to creating a vegetable bed for the tomatoes, and could not even repot most of them in bigger containers.  In fact,  while they were growing from seedlings (in April and May), I spent the time traveling.  So practically all of them remain in 1 gallon containers which are clearly too small for them.  Half of them did not even make it outdoors – they remain in the basement, turning towards the glass doors which provide them with all the light they need.  Even better, I only need to water the indoor tomatoes once every 2 or 3 days.

And yet they don’t seem to mind exactly.  The fruit will be slightly smaller, I think (though most of the fruit is still growing) – perhaps roma tomato size or a bit larger, and maybe I will get less tomatoes per plant, but the good news is, I will be able to use all my crop.  I don’t have to beg friends to cart them away (which is good, because everyone I know seems to be growing tomatoes this year) and I don’t have to consider canning them, or any such thing.

The cherry tomatoes, meanwhile, are great to snack on.  As I write this, I have reached out four times and finished off five of those beads.   I think I will stop here.

The voice-over talked about how much easier it is to buy ready-to-eat mashed potatoes. You just buy them and microwave them and they’re ready to eat!

I was horrified. Making mashed potatoes is about as difficult as cooking rice. If you are going to microwave the store bought stuff anyway, why not microwave the potatoes instead?

I am amazed that such products sell. What benefit do they offer? Take these readymade mashed potatoes. The time spent is probably the same, or maybe a couple of minutes saved on the peeling, but the readymade stuff comes with added preservatives and possibly other chemicals. Plus, it’s much less eco-friendly, what with the added energy that goes into transportation, packaging and marketing the product. There are other casualties like taste and the satisfaction (even joy) of creating a dish from scratch.

But people do buy mashed potatoes and hash browns from the supermarket. They also buy frozen waffles and pancakes, even though these things can be made in minutes, about the same time as defrosting and heating a frozen one. The list is long, and includes such wonders as ready-to-eat pasta salad and macaroni and cheese.

I am not suggesting that every dish should be made from scratch. I can see how some processed food can be convenient and save time and effort, and be a great help when you are harried and tired.

But when we start outsourcing our cooking, where do we draw the line? If outsourcing some cooking is good, does it mean that outsourcing all cooking is better?

I am going to shamelessly borrow my brother’s greeting to me to add:

“May the Markets recover, May the economy recover, May Paulson and Bernanke see light and usher in prosperity this year.”

Last Diwali, I was making sweets and ruminating about Ravana’s army. I was pondering deep philosophical questions like why Ravana’s army actually fought with Rama. What were they fighting for – their king’s right to abduct unsuspecting women? Was there a draft, or did people join the army so they could get subsidized home appliances? As I said, deeply philosophical issues.

This year, my thoughts are less on Rama and more on Obama, what with the election just a few days away and campaigning and reporting at fever pitch.

This year too, I made sweets for Diwali.  With no crackers to burst, Diwali here seems to involve pretty much making sweets and eating them.  If eating sweets worries me, the idea of having to make them worries me even more.  But then, it’s Diwali.

I made gulab jamuns this year. I have made Rasagullas so often this year that they are definitely passé, and I have two unopened packs of gulab jamun mix that were purchased so long ago that if I don’t use them now, they will die of old age.

Do I have to even mention that I have never made gulab jamuns before, or that I am not exactly sure what the gulab jamun mix even contains? No, I am sure, if you are a regular reader, you will take all that for granted by now.

But I am a great believer in following instructions.   I am not saying I always do, just that I believe everyone else should.

So I took out this pack and read the instructions.  The good news – there were only 3 steps.  How hard can that be?

Next, I actually read the steps.  Step 1 asked me to add 50-60 ml of water to the mix and knead into a dough.  I did that.  I read on, and found that ideally, I should have added milk. Too late.  These instructions were clearly written by a devious mind. Why not say this right at the beginning: add 50-60 ml of either water or milk?

Step 2 wanted me to make the dough into exactly 20 round jamuns.  I wish they had been more specific.  How was I going to get 20 jamuns?  What should be the diameter of each jamun?  1 inch? 1.5 inches? 2 inches?

The bigger mystery was – why 20?  The pack advertisied that the mix made “25 gulab jamuns of approx. 25g. each (after soaking in syrup)”.  So shouldn’t they ask me to make 25 jamuns and not 20?

Also, what exactly was a “25g. jamun(after soaking in syrup)”?  Was I supposed to weigh each completed jamun in a tiny beam balance (the sort I had last seen in physics/chemistry labs) to make sure it would be exactly 25g., or should it be 20g with a 5g. allowance for sugar syrup?

I gave up on the instructions and started making jamuns based on what I thought I wanted my gulab jamuns to look like.  I ended up making exactly 12 balls.   In hindsight, I could have probably made smaller jamuns; I would have been happy with golf ball sized jamuns, but these fluffed to become lemon-sized, or maybe just smaller than a small orange! On the other hand, the jamuns were a lovely sight.

The instructions also say you have to make round and smooth jamuns without cracks in the dough.  My jamuns were smooth enough, but they weren’t round. Try as I might, I was getting a spheroid with a distinctive equatorial ridge and squashed poles. In the picture above, you can clearly see the ridge in the jamun on the right.  Sounds familiar? Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have solved the mystery of Saturn’s moon Iapetus and its equatorial ridge.? I hereby postulate that Iapetus is just a super-sized gulab jamun in space.

I warmed some oil and started deep-frying these jamuns.  More mysteries of Iapetus started to get solved – in this case, the two-tone surface of Iapetus. Iapetus has a bright hemisphere and a dark hemisphere.  These jamuns were no different.  For some reason, they resolutely fried with one particular side always on the surface.  So while they were beginning to turn a lovely, velvety brown on the underside, the top remained golden.  Flipping them over made no difference.  They just flipped right back and floated lazily, golden crowns mocking me while the underside fried furiously.

The only option I had left was waterboarding, or rather, oilboarding – dunking the jamuns down in the oil, golden side down and holding them there until they turned brown.  I probably violated every tenet of the Geneva convention (Delhi convention?) that applies to the treatment of gulab jamuns.  If there are any gulab jamuns reading this blog, I hope you don’t hold this against me.  I was just trying to get you to tan evenly

Step 3 was to soak the jamuns in sugar syrup for 30 minutes.  Dissolve 300g of sugar in 320 ml water, the pack directed.  Now I was in a quandary.  How many cups is 300g of sugar?  Here was a pack that was clearly targeted at the US market, with its “Nutrional Information” and whatnot, and yet the manufacturers were trying to insidiously foist the metric system on us poor US NRIs The deviousness of it all!

I searched online and found that 190g equals 1 cup of granulated sugar.  So I had to add about 1.6 cups of sugar.

As the sugar syrup boiled, I drained my now-evenly-tanned jamuns on paper and then dunked them in the sugar syrup.

Then I used a technique my mother told me about today, which really saved the day.  Actually, it was probably partly responsible for the super-sized jamuns too, not that I am complaining

When the jamuns are boiling in the sugar syrup, spoon in a little ice-cold water on the tops of each jamun, she said.  They will absorb more of the sugar syrup and fluff up more, she said. You should do this every 5 minutes and keep the pan covered at other times.  (Edit- you can also add ice-cold sugar syrup instead of water if you are worried about diluting the sugar syrup).

This made sense.  I suspect the temperature differential at the top of the jamun causes more hot sugar syrup to rush into the jamun from the boiling solution below.  Repeating this process a few times at intervals results in gulab jamuns loaded with sugar syrup.

My gulab jamuns pretty soon fluffed up so much they filled up the entire bottom of the pan, squishing each other and revealing only tiny gaps where I could see the sugar solution. They were also absorbing sugar syrup in such prodigious quantities that soon there was no solution left even in those tiny gaps.  I had to make another batch of sugar syrup to drizzle over the first one. (Note to myself – next time, completely ignore pack directions on quantity of syrup needed).

In the end, despite following every instruction to the tee (what, didn’t I?) I ended up with gulab jamuns that can be more accurately described as jumbo jamuns

I am not complaining – they are incredibly delicious, but I suspect they will vanish in a couple of days, taking all my weight loss goals with them.

Aquafina bottle with "PWS" circled

I am sure there still are brands that source from springs or alpine mountain lakes or ice melt from glaciers.  But since I am not likely to read the fine print in each bottle, I generally assume that a lot of them are some kind of purified tap water.

“Purified” is the key word here.  Even if it was tap water, I told myself, it must be a slightly purified version.  After all, there must be some logic to why people continue to buy bottled water, and pay those outrageous prices for  purified tap water, right?  Especially in the US, where drinking water fountains are everywhere, in every public space,  in every rest area on the highway and even in unexpected remote corners of national parks.

Sure enough, Aquafina’s bottle, for one, talks about a “rigorous, seven-step purification process called HyDRO-7 ” .

Now, a seven step purification process sounds very impressive.  Three steps would be too little – what, you’d think, did they just remove the chlorine then?  Twelve steps would sound like overkill – why was the water so dirty in the first place, you’d wonder.  What exactly was that public water source?  A seven step process sounds just the right thing to do.

But all good things ultimately disappoint. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised to hear from researchers that bottled water is not all that pure, and “leading brands” whoever they are, contain the same contaminants that are found in tap water.

The study’s lab tests on 10 brands of bottled water detected 38 chemicals including bacteria, caffeine, the pain reliever acetaminophen, fertilizer, solvents, plastic-making chemicals and the radioactive element strontium. Though some probably came from tap water that some companies use for their bottled water, other contaminants probably leached from plastic bottles, the researchers said.

“In some cases, it appears bottled water is no less polluted than tap water and, at 1,900 times the cost, consumers should expect better,” said Jane Houlihan, an environmental engineer who co-authored the study.

I wonder who those leading brands are and whether they all had seven step processes.

But think about it. How fantastic is it to get free acetaminophen (aka paracetamol) with your bottled water! All you need to do if you feel feverish is to drink water. You also get free caffeine with your water! What joy.  And free bacteria to boost your immune system.. what more can one ask for?

No, no, you shouldn’t think about it as paying a premium to drink fertilizer. Don’t you realize how great fertilizer is for health? Just look how well it makes plants grow.

You say you are getting it for free in tap water anyway?

You know, you may have a point there.  If I am going to get my daily dose of acetaminophen and fertilizer anyway,  I might as well trust myself to water purifiers and BPA free bottles.

At least the landfills will thank me for it.  I might not get good water, but maybe at least some good karma?

“Masala pasta”, I said brightly.  My brother V, who was visiting India, grimaced beside her.

“How did you make it?” my Mom asked.

“Well, I boiled the pasta”, I began, when V interrupted “In plain water?”

V can be a little puritanical about cooking.  So I began again “I boiled water, added a little salt, and after it dissolved, I added penne pasta”.

V nodded approvingly.  “Yes, that’s the way to do it.”

“Then as the pasta was boiling, I ground some onion, ginger and green chillies in a mixer..” I stopped.  V’s face had contorted and he seemed to be in a lot of anguish. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he spluttered. “Green chillies in pasta?”  He seemed shocked.

Oh, so this was just his puritanical tastes kicking in.  I could see why he looked so upset.

“Then I had some ragu sauce”,  I continued, “so I mixed that also in and fried all this in oil.  Then I drained the pasta and poured into a bowl, and I poured this masala over it”.

“You can’t call this pasta”, V protested.  “It’s some kind of upma, pasta upma maybe.”

“Upma” reminded me – I did add some boiled peas too.  That didn’t seem like such a great idea, in hindsight.  Then I remembered reading a recipe where someone also added vegetables to the pasta.  I wondered whether I should mention this to V.  Maybe safer not to.

“Well, all I added extra was ginger and green chillies”, I said.  “How does that make it not pasta?”

V had a sudden thought. “I hope you did not add cheese as well to this concoction?”

“No, I did not”, I said indignantly.  Cheese with ginger?  Even I couldn’t have stomached that.

“Do you have a picture?” my Mom interrupted.

“Yes”, I said, and showed her.

“Looks good to me”, she declared.  “How did it taste?”

“Oh, I loved it! I will make it every weekend now!”

I should have stopped at that.  It was bad enough to add green chilli and ginger and still call it pasta.  You’d think I would be quite satisfied with my attempt at Indo-Italian fusion cuisine   But no, I had to try and outdo myself.

So the other day, I opened the refrigerator and found I had a cup of leftover pav bhaji. (I like to blend my bhaji into a paste).  I also found a bowl of excess boiled pasta leftover from the previous evening’s pasta salad.

No prizes for guessing what my lunch was

If you are curious, it tasted wonderful !  The next time I make pav bhaji, I am going to make sure I reserve some bhaji.  Pasta bhaji makes for a great lunch!

But I don’t see V eating it any time soon.

“The court is profoundly concerned about the very poor judgment which this child’s parents have shown in choosing this name,” he wrote. “It makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap, unnecessarily.”

How right he was, I thought. Some parents need a manual on naming children.

Then it struck me that perhaps those parents are not so much to blame. They are, after all, carrying on the glorious tradition of inappropriate names that parents all over the world think of for their kids. It’s not as if desi parents are immune to this glorious tradition either.

In fact, desi parents seem to have devised innovative and interesting ways to mis-name their children. Here are some of the ways they do it.

A taxonomy of desi mis-names:

1. The loooong name : South Indians, of course, do this all the time. How many times have we heard:

“Hi, my name is Peddanuri Girija Prasad Chalapathi Sai Venkatakrishna Rama Rao….er, please call me Ram!” Then Ram comes to the US, Peddanuri becomes his last name and his name changes to “Paddy”. He is now “Ram Paddy”.

2. The name with interesting mis-meanings : This is the kind that lends itself to interesting meanings in other Indian languages:

e.g. “Dhandapani” becomes “Thanda pani” (cold water) or “Danda pani” (a stick and water?) and “Muruga” becomes “Murga” (chicken). On the other hand, “Sood” means “hot” in Tamil and also sounds like “choodu” (see) in Telugu (especially the Hyderabadi version, where it is pronounced as “soodu”).

3. The name sounds beautiful, the meaning? : For one thing, there are the body parts. It’s one thing to call someone “Sunayana”, or “She of the beautiful eyes.” But Nayana (meaning “eye”) ? It sounds very sweet, but what does it convey about the person? And “Shakuntala” is fine, but “Kuntal” (meaning “hair”) ?

I wonder why someone does not come up with a name on arms and legs and kneecaps. On second thoughts, there is “Ram Charan” (Rama’s feet), though you could argue about how Ram’s feet have spiritual significance and whatnot. Rama’s kneecaps, on the other hand, do not have any such significance.

Then there are the geometric shapes. In school, I had a classmate with the interesting name of Anuvrat. Neither of us knew what his name meant, so I looked it up in the dictionary – Anuvrat means “parabola”. There are also people called “Chakkaram” (circle) presumably referring to Sudarshana chakra.

I haven’t yet come across people called squares and ellipses, but I would not rule them out I am waiting for some engineer parents to name their kids the desi equivalent of “Octagon” or “Buckministerfullerene”.

4. The embarassing/ old-fashioned names: “Hi, I am Lajwanti (“Bashful”), please call me Wanti”

“Venti? Like in Starbucks?”

“No, Wanti”.

“Wendy?”

So it is decided – she becomes Wendy. Anything, she reasons, is better than Lajwanti.

4. The unpronounceable names: If those long South Indian ones don’t trip you up, then you should try the North Indian ones. Try saying “Mohinder Partap Shrivastava” at top speed.

5. The mixed gender name: I understand your plight, all those of you named Kiran or Prasanna or Krishna (especially the girls called Krishna). How many times have you received letters addressed to Mr. Krishna when it really was a Ms. ?

Bengali names also have this characteristic – you keep wondering whether Soumittra is a man or a woman, until you see him (or her).

And those long Southie names? Ramanarayanan Ganapatisubramanian can call himself Ram. But what does the hapless Seetharaman Venkatasubramanian and Lakshminarasimhan Santhanam do?

This tendency is not even limited to Indians. One look at the Sri Lankan (men’s) cricket team and Kaushalya Weeraratne and Ajantha Mendis tell their own story. Oh wait, there is also Prasanna Jayawardene and Sachitra Senanayake for good measure. Actually, if I didn’t know better, i would really believe it was the Sri Lankan women’s cricket team.

6. The usually mispronounced name: So there is this girl named Dhanya. You know what is coming, right? Everyone who hears her name wonders why she is named Dhania (coriander).

Going back to the Sri Lankan cricket team again, I have lost count of the times that the commentators have called Mahela Jeyawardane a Mahila (woman). If I remember, the Hindi commentators seemed suspiciously more prone to doing this. Mahela can also be classified in category #2 above.

7. The no-initials-please name: In many companies, there is the practice of referring to people by their initials. This is when people suddenly realize that Anand Sai Shanker or Arjun Shanker Shamnani is perhaps not the best name to go with.

8. The stuck-in-childhood name: Keralites do this all the time. Baby Kochamma is quite a nice name, if only said Baby was three years old instead of a portly 55! And I wonder how she manages to be a Baby and an Amma (mother) at the same time! Then there is Joy Kutty. After figuring out whether Joy is male or female (the answer: male), one starts to wonder at the “Kutty” (which means “little”). Little Joy will turn out to be a 200 pound hunk, and not the little girl in pigtails you were envisioning.

9. The “ghar ka naam”: The best part is that the parents themselves almost never call their offspring by any of these names. You’d think they would be satisfied at punishing the poor child by calling him Pyare Lal Saxena or BPSSK Rao, right ? Poor Pyare Lal is already ruing the day he was named and wondering if he can call himself Parry Saxena instead. But no, the parents are not finished yet. They have to go one step further and call poor Pyare Lal “Bunty” or “Tinku” or “Pappu”.

So Pyare Lal Saxena, or Parry Saxena, the 50 year old CEO and captain of industry, will quail in his boots at the sight of his mother, for he knows she will call him “Tinku beta” in front of all his guests!

****

This is not anything close to a comprehensive list; even as I write this, parents are thinking of creative ways to mis-name their children. So I request all of you readers to send in your contributions. For every one of you who thinks these examples are bizarre enough, I am sure there are 20 of you who think I have not gone far enough, or missed out quite a few examples.

So what are the strangest desi names you have come across? What new types of mis-naming can you think of?