Avial Full of Thoughts

Something about avial first…

Traditionally a mix of at least 7 vegetables typical to the Indian peninsula, meant to signify prosperity and abundance, Avial is my favourite Mallu food. Yes, even the non-Mallu majority of South Indians “prepare” something called avial, with subtle variations from one region to another, but the Mallu avial is the one that I’m in love with. Each bite sends exploding plumes of coconut and its typical fragrance shivering down your taste buds. The veggies, having completely absorbed the flavor of the delicate spices, just melt in your mouth… sigh… It’s heaven for this pseudo - Mallu’s taste buds: D

A sufficiently authentic recipe for this delicacy with snapshots that will make your mouth water:

Avial recipe

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Avial of thoughts. I always like to trace the roots of my thoughts. To know what triggered the writer in me. This time round, it’s not the smashing avial I ate last week at dear old Granny’s place. It is, hold your breath, the Mallu Metal Movement, also christened as Lungi Rock that inspired this one. AVIAL is a Mallu rock band that, quite recently shot to fame, not only in Kerala, but the country in general, not only in India, but the world in general. A unique blend of Metallica (bow to the gods) and their thrash metal, riffs reminiscent of Paki rock band Raeth, imagery that reminds you immediately of nothing but God’s own country and Mallu folk music, with matching vocals to boot; Avial sure lives upto its name. Incidentally, ‘nada nada’ and ‘adupambe’ are my personal favourites, thanks to the lyrics and powerful bass work.

Avial the Band on MySpace

Moving over alternative folk rock, let’s move onwards to the hillock of reason. Avial, I realized, is the perfect metaphor to describe the human mind. Every cook’s avial tastes and looks different, yet avial is avial. At any given point, a mouthful of avial contains at least three different veggies, just like the human RAM, that can actually remember a maximum of three or four things at a time. The vegetables themselves, like thoughts, have their own unique texture and flavor. They sometimes disintegrate and contribute their own bit to the status of the avial, while retaining their own individuality. Choice of vegetables for your avial can be as varied as the different schools of thought the mind subscribes to, depending on your appetite. The coconut is what binds together the avial, like intelligence that conditions your thoughts. (Yes, the same coconut that grows in abundance in Kerala! Hehe)

Conclusion:

• The mind is an avial.
• I love avial.
• Invite me over when you make avial at your place.

'Dabal' Century Maarli!

The title says it all, na?

A hundred unique visitors in the past one and a half months! That makes two hundred since inception of this blog! I love you guys. Keep reading!

The Power of Zero

I read this morning in my beloved (being sarcastic here) TOI, that the English language will soon have a million words in it. A million ways to express yourself, a million permutations of syllables that homo sapiens can produce to convey their needs, desires, achievements, gripes, joys and twisted thoughts and emotions. “One million?” I thought. “So few? I was expecting at least 10 million”. One million seemed too mundane a mark for human vocabulary, considering the many colourful ways we adopt to express ourselves...

But then, I remembered an anecdote that my mechanical-engineer-turned-physics-professor dad had related to me nearly eight years ago. It was during one of those physics-and-math conversations that would go on to mould my eager and observant mind into a deep chalice to hold the wine of the sciences.

Allow me to reproduce the anecdote. I know I can’t do justice to the way Pop had related it, but it’s my best shot.

God always plans our lifespan and sends us down to earth. Nothing you do can change or postpone the day you die, because He always bestows a lifespan on every creature before sending him/her/it to earth. He has a secretary that makes a note of the lifespan in his register (well, I was 11, I bought it). And the age is always recorded in seconds. God likes to be accurate, you know.

So for most people, God commands: “2 into 10 raised to 9 seconds. Tathastu!”. (We calculated how much that would be… turns out that it’s equivalent to 63.5 years nearly). And his secretary writes it down in his register against your soul number. Only then would the person would move down the production line and take birth on Earth. He’d live a happy, wholesome life and at the 2000000000^th second (nine zeros), exactly as recorded in the register, the person would drop dead. The system works like clockwork.

Now, one day, the secretary had had a bad morning at home with his wife before reporting for duty. Work for the day started and God said “2 into 10 raised to 9 seconds. Tathastu!” and sent his creature down to Earth. The secretary recorded “2 into 10 raised to ‘8’ seconds” instead of '9'. (For the uninitiated, he’d hacked off one zero from the person’s lifetime.)

“So?” I’d asked pop in indignation. “Let’s calculate how long the person lived”, replied Pop. And to my wide-eyed kiddie astonishment, the poor person ended up living for just 6.35 years! He died a kid! All because the stupid secretary missed a zero!

And the lesson about exponents of ten was learnt. You need to be careful while dealing with them! Sometimes the immensely profoundly gigantically gargantuan figures might seem like a trifle. (I have a new word for that... immhugargoprofound... What! I'm doing my bit in bringing the one million mark closer...)

And I still don’t know whether the secretary is still on the job up there after making such a fatal error… You never know… He must have got a job at some Indian government office because of his God-father…

Do you know... Or do you not??

Practise what you preach, they say. Just wondering whether the converse of what they say is true… (Or is it INverse?) If I preach, will I practise? Hasn’t ever worked with anyone, subjectively speaking, but like I always hold, words can have different meanings. Thoughts can’t. Anyway, I suppose this exercise might help me out a teeny bit, so here’s this post on indecisiveness with a selfish motive. To drive away my own indecisiveness and to make a stand on whether I want to be decisive or not… hmm…

You, unfortunate reader, must be wondering why you have to be subjected to this new zilch. Well, blame it on Aamir Khan’s puppy-faced nephew. No wait. Blame it on A R Rahman. I went for the movie hoping for some better music than the nonsense that got publicised (I was disappointed, by the way). For the unenlightened souls, read carefully and translate the title of this post to Hindi. For the less brighter ones, think of Imraan Khan’s debut title. Still don’t get it? HAVE YOU BEEN HIDING UNDER A ROCK DUDE?? ARE YOU SURE YOU UNDERSTAND ENGLISH AND HINDI??

Anyway, as the title pretty much conveys, the movie’s an indecisive one. The characters; sadly, the music, the… wait. I didn’t start this post as a movie review. Scram. Go elsewhere if you wanna read the review.

Back to where I started, then. Indecisiveness. Well, what can I say… I’m not even sure whether I’m indecisive or not. Some things are so clear to me, as if someone has etched out my path on the sands of life with the quill of fate. At other times, my mind blows like the tattered skull-and-bones flag atop the Black Pearl at World’s End, at the mercy of the winds of change.

I believe that everything has a reason. That’s one of the things I’m sure of. But I’m not sure I’ve found my reasons yet. No, I don’t even know what reasons I expect to find and for what… But you know what? This Aamir Khan production has been an eye-opener. Life gets complicated if you’re indecisive. So el Buscador is on a new search mission now… To search for the part of me that revels in being sure of itself and is aware of itself…

So I’m on a quest (ooh, I love quests). Till then, adios!