A Restaurant Review

Diary Entry – 46

The first time I went to Saravana Bhavan, I was ten.

They served unlimited meals and my mother and I had so little that the waiter felt sorry for us. It was the first time my mother was eating there as well and she was shocked when they charged us only forty rupees for the food. We happened to meet the manager and my mother told him, they should be charging more when the food is so good.

I think they took my mother a little too seriously.

A few days ago, I went to Saravana Bhavan again. It was one of those days when I skipped breakfast. When I left the house in the morning, my mother told me to order something other than meals, because last time (11 years ago) we were not able to eat much. If you are wondering why I did not go to Saravana Bhavan for the last decade, it is because a non-vegetarian simply does not pay to eat vegetarian food in a fancy restaurant. If you are a non-vegetarian going to a restaurant which serves only vegetarian food, you won’t even ask for the menu. You simply order Naan with paneer curry.

When the food arrived, I thought I was dreaming because of starvation. I was amazed how small the Naan was. I kept staring at the food, like the fat guy who looks at the small idly in the Docomo ad. (See Video Below.)

The paneer curry I ordered along with the Naan was served on fire. There was this casing sort of thing which had a bowl with paneer on top. Below the casing was a lamp. All that looked cool and fancy, till I realized how small the bowl actually was. After gobbling down a few pieces, I was left poking my finger into the bowl searching for the paneer.

When I finished eating, I felt as hungry as I was before. The quantity of the food they served was not half as shocking as the bill. They made sure that my purse wouldn’t let me think about food till I reached home.

I know. I should have just gone to McDonalds. So much for cheap, healthy, vegetarian food.




Previous Post - The Relatives

The Relatives

Every time I go to a family gathering, my brain goes on over drive. I frantically try to jog the memories I formed in my head when I was 3 years old. I smile and pretend to know everybody. If I fail to smile at someone, they will come up to me and ask,

“Ariyo?” (Do you know me?) - Malayalam

When someone asks me this question, I act all offended that they even thought of asking me such a question after all the good times (I assume) I spent with them in the past. This is what you should do if you don’t have the slightest clue who you are talking to. If you fail to answer or deflect the previous question you will be asked the next question from which there is no escape

 “Njan aara?” (“Who am I?”)

Unlike the first question, there is no way to deflect this one. I will have to hear them describe my family tree, which has more branches and leaves and roots than any other tree in the planet. It is so big that there is a high probability you are one of the leaves in my family tree. Even if you are Chinese, or Punjabi, my relatives would have married someone from there.

The ones who bore you describing the family tree are not that bad when you meet, the ones who love drama. The other day I met this lady

Aunty: Njan aara ariyo? (Do you know who I am?)

Me: *stupid grin on my face implying I have no idea*

Aunty: You forgot me didn’t you?

Me: Sorry aunty. I know your face so well. I just can’t recall your name now.

Aunty: You used to come to me saying Binduamma binduamma as a kid.

Me: Oh now I remember your name :D Sorry binduamma. Pettanu maranu poi (Sorry Bindu Aunty. I forgot your name, when you asked me all of a sudden.)

Aunty: You remember the toy train I got you when you were a kid?

(Me: What train?)

Me: Uh hmmm.

Aunty: You don’t remember the train do you? You have forgotten me completely.

(Me: Hey lady, wait a minute. It’s not like you got me a xbox)

Me: Aunty my grandmother there just called me. I will go and come back in one min.

(And I disappear forever)

Later that day, back home.

Grand Mother: I saw you talking to Bindu.

Me: Yeah. I got out when it started turning into a nightmare.

Grand Mother: What did she say? Last time she saw you, you were three years old.

Me: WHAT! Did I have the verbal ability to run around saying Binduamma Binduamma when I was three?

Grand Mother: What are you talking about?

Me: You will never believe what happened.

So when I say that some of my relatives expect me to have the memory of an autistic savant, I am not exaggerating one bit. I thought this CIA like interrogation happens only when I go out of the house to meet my relatives.  But the other day when I logged into facebook I get this friends request from a strange looking old man along with a message, “Guess who I am? I saw you today. You are wearing a blue shirt. Aren’t you?” Scenes from the horror movie, “I know what you did last summer” flashes in my head. Is this a psycho serial killer? Am I going to die? Then I did a quick translation of “Guess who I am?” in Malayalam and I realized that when translated it becomes, “Njan aara?” Next thing I do is search for the report abuse button. A friends request has never creeped me out this much.

There have been a few developments in the past six months. I have gained 9 kilos staying at home. I have reached a personal record of my highest ever weight of 57 Kilos. Though still very far away from being overweight, I fear the worst if I stick with the current gluttonous diet pattern. My relatives however don’t seem to think so. Before this, I have NEVER crossed 50 kilos in my life. 50 was my personal best in high school. The last four years I spent in college made me look like a kid from Sudan. So I cannot stress enough of how much “not thin” I am now. But when a relative of mine sees me, they have only one thing to say:

“YOU HAVE BECOME SO THIN!!”

What shocks me is that, they always say it with such shock. Their own children are starved because their mothers fear cholesterol and obesity. The other day I was at my cousins place:

Cousin: Amma, it is evening. Make me some tea.

Aunt: Do you really need to drink tea now? No need. Drink some water.

Yet in the name of love, they try to stuff everything that there is, into MY mouth. What can you do with these people, especially when you love them? I just sit and make false mental promises of going to the gym as I gobble down the fourth round of payasam that they made "just of me".   

Previous Post - Tonight We Sleep In Hell

Tonight We Sleep In Hell

Diary Entry – 44

At two in the morning I woke up and cried out fu*k Jayalalitha. Jayalalitha is the chief minister of the state that I live in. A state with no electricity.

When you have a power cut at two in the morning, it will tick anybody off. In my state people blame Jayalalitha for their troubles the same way we blamed the dean of student affairs (aka dosa) in our college. We blamed him for the lack of water and the pathetic food. I blamed him more for the food than the water. Our mess + electricity fee + water fee per day is 75 rupees. It was a miracle that we even got food. My college is a management miracle that should be a case study in Harvard Business School. For the obese, joining my college is like joining a weight loss program. What could the poor old DOSA, do if he is expected to serve a full day meal for seventy five rupees apart from providing water and electricity. So whenever I seem to miss college, I think about the food, the water and the electricity and say to myself, “Home Sweet Home.” But home is turning out to be an even bigger nightmare. Nights like these where you spend swimming in the pool of your own sweat makes you miss hostel.

Some people from other states will now empathize with our problem saying that they don’t have electricity either. When this empathy comes from places like Kerala, it really pisses me off. The monsoon rains there makes the entire state feel like it is being air conditioned where as we people here in Chennai feel like we are living in a furnace. Empathy from such people is not wanted here. Chennai is hot as it is and the other day this is what my mom had to say:

Amma: Eda Kathri is coming to Chennai in another few days and will be here for the entire month. So don’t go out too much.

Me: Kathri? Is it one of our relatives? Why the hell does she want to stay here for an entire month? I cant entertain relatives, who decide to vacation in the hottest place in the world.

Amma: Ayo Kathri is not our relative. It is the name of hottest season in Chennai. It is going to get more hot from now on.

Me: What? That is worse. I wish Kathri was one of our relatives now. *sigh*

The power cut at two in the morning lasted for two hours. I couldn’t bear it and so I decided to take a bath. As I found my way to the bathroom in the dark, I saw a shadowy figure lurking around the bathroom. Times like that you wish you saw the reruns of the Karate Kid in Sony Pix. It is not usual to have power cuts at 2 A.M and I thought the thief’s played with the power lines. I was ready to ambush what I thought was a thief. It turned out to be a lady and the lady turned out to be my mother. I was glad that I hesitated with the punch. My mother was in the bathroom for the same reason as I was. She couldn’t bear the heat and wanted to wash her face and hands to cool down.

We don’t have an inverter in the house because of rationalization that we do in the house for any purchase we make other than food. When it comes to food, the people in my house will spend their entire fortunes on it. Sometimes I get the feeling we are buying too many sweets and ice creams. When I tell mother we should be saving she says, we don’t spend our money on any other unwanted things so we shouldn’t worry. She couldn’t be more right. We don’t spend money on anything at all. That includes the inverter. Whenever I tell her that an inverter is something we need in our house, I am asked the question on how our ancestors who had no electricity hundreds of years ago lived in this country. Then I am asked, how the British not only lived in the exact same place we are living in now, but also made a big city during a time when even a ceiling fan was a luxury. *face palms* is the only reaction I can give.

One good thing came out of this early morning nightmare though. Current came back at 4 A.M and we went back to sleep. When I woke up, mom comes up to me and tells me, I made some calls. We will have an inverter with 5 hours back up in our house in another few days. In my head I shouted, “Thank you God.”

I know my blog was about to face extinction. I have been very busy doing several things at once in life. A lot of good things came out of this blog and I will never let it die that easy.

Previous Post - Getting Killed in The Kitchen

Getting Killed in The Kitchen

Diary Entry – 43

So my stomach was making noises. I was hungry and mom was not home. I think veins started popping out of my eyes. I could not stand it any longer. So I do a brave thing of going into the kitchen, of all places.

I opened the fridge to find eggs, vegetables but no edible food. Mom manages to conjure food from thin air, in minutes, every time I say I am hungry. That is one magic trick I should have learnt.

Noodles?

I already searched for a packet in every corner of the house. Nothing.

I said a prayer: Please God! Dont let me die. I wont waste any food from now on.

Tears started to stream down my face.

I should have listened when I was asked not to skip lunch. I could not even find an apple (apple because some of you will find banana too perverse).

I went to the fridge one more time to study my options. There were carrots, capsicum and a few other things I did not know. Eat carrots like bugs bunny rite?

No.

I did not want to eat something I spent my entire life hating.

Eggs was the last option. Well I had to cook it. Fortunately I had seen it being cooked so many times before that I was some what of an expert in it, even if I had never actually cooked one in the kitchen.

So I decided I was going to have fried eggs. I turned on the gas.  I tried several times to turn on the stove. Gas smell filled my nose but there was no fire in stove. If I kept that up, tomorrow’s news would have been “Hungry Boy Died in Kitchen trying to make an omelette.”  Not the kind of headlines I want to be making.

So I turned off the gas and looked around to realize that we had a microwave. This is where I got really nerdy. Well we can cook eggs in a microwave without anybody getting killed rite? Well not quite. I happened to attend a lecture on microwave welding of metals by a visiting IIT faculty in our college and I remembered him telling:

“Eggs explode when you put them in a microwave.”

But he was talking about an egg with a shell. The shell prevents the water molecules from escaping out and so because of the pressure build up, it explodes. I was going to make a fried egg so my egg was not going to have a shell. I just wanted to make sure it was safe so I looked it up in google. Turned out the egg's yellow has a membrane which holds it together. So when I microwave the egg, the water molecules wont be able to escape from the membrane and it might blow up. Though it will be less disastrous than microwaving an egg with a shell, trying to cook it in a microwave is going to be catastrophic one way or the other.

That is when my brain started saying “Eat it Raw dude. I will turn off your taste buds till you swallow it.”

But then I decided to make one more google search before I was left to take that desperate measure. I landed upon a fellow bloggers blog and she had this ingenious idea. Break the membrane of the eggs yellow with a tooth pick so when the water wants to escape, it can from the hole in the membrane. I poked the eggs membrane with the plastic tip of my compass.

Three minutes I peered into the microwave to find any starting signs of an explosion. Monitoring a nuclear reactor would have been easier because I had no idea whether it was getting cooked or whether it was going to explode.

The end result was a work of art that would have made even Pablo Picasso envy me. Whether I ate it, will forever be a mystery.

Previous Post - IIT Bombay