Special Ugadi recipes!

Its been such a long time since I last posted and my sis seems to have slipped into a comfortable hibernation, I thought I shall break this hiatus with a post on the new year. This Ugadi was good as we cooked a lot and ate a lot :D.

Maamidikaya Pulihora(my version)

2 cups rice(sona masuri)
1.5 cups grated raw mango(kairi)
1/2 cup peanuts
Popu/tadka ingredients(chana dal, oil, mustard seeds, jeera,curry leaves, slit green chilies)

Heat some oil and add all the popu ingredients. Toast for a minute.
Add the peanuts.
When the peanuts turn light brown, add the grated mango and heat for 1-2 minutes.

Cool the grated mango mixture and mix thoroughly with cooked rice.
Yummy pulihora is ready!




Pongal

1/2 cup rice
1/2 cup chana dal
1/2 to 3/4 cup jaggery
1 spoon ghee
1-2 cups milk
chopped toasted cashews
1/2 cup grated fresh coconut

Mix the rice and dal and cook in milk until rice is cooked and the dal tender.

Add the jaggery slowly until its thoroughly melted and mixed.

Add ghee to this mixture and stir until the mixture thickens.
Finally add the cashews and the coconut and mix and enjoy!


We worked hard to make a traditional meal and enjoyed the heavy lunch!

Politics is politics.....

...irrespective of what country you are in. This profound realization dawned on me over the course of the last 2-3 weeks as I followed the initial stages of US Presidential election process.
You start to follow elections in India a few months before the general election when the parties and their leaders start spinning the same old spiel of what they would do for the poor and the downtrodden and what they would accomplish if they are elected. Not once do they talk about what they accomplished so far.....no way...that is never talked about! What follows during campaigning is shameless mudslinging on the opponent and trying to take him/her down by hook or by crook(almost always by crook). If that doesn't work and it seems like the opponent is still getting votes then starts the ugly process of tampering with the ballot or keeping people from voting. Thus all in all, Indian elections, almost always turn out to be a mockery of the democratic process of the largest democracy in the world.
I call myself a die hard fan of politics and I am put off entirely by what goes on there. Cut to the US and at the beginning of this year I was excited because presidential elections were just beginning and the candidates had started debating each other as to what they would bring to the US if elected President. I was hoping for a contest where each candidate stresses their contributions so far and their promises and showing how different they are from others. I expected it to be a civil and just process, after all this was in a country that is the leader of the polished western world. After all, I was in the country that prides itself on its democratic process(some call it a 2-party dictatorship but thats another post altogether)! But my hopes were to be quashed mercilessly when I started hearing one candidates surrogates whispering bad stuff about other candidates and vice versa. Then it blew from whispers to open mudslinging so much that now there seem to be tense relations between 2 candidates of the 'same' party over....race! C'mon, I thought at least the US had moved away from racial intolerance and were on the verge of probably electing their first black president and there were still whispers about race? Then I started doing some research(wiki-search) about US elections and found this kind of mudslinging isn't new at all! Called the 'politics of personal destruction', tactics of spreading bad stuff about an opponent's personal life so much that people would be scared or put off by him/her has been used very successfully by GWB(who else) in the past. I also now hear political analysts talking about this on TV saying this is bad but almost always works. SO are the people so foolish and narrow minded that they would not do any fact-checking of their own? After all isn't this the internet age when getting information is so easy?
They say it would go on and this kind of politics would never die...always getting results for the people who use them......there goes my romance with politics!

Himesh reshamiya sucks..!!

Whenever i hear this person i feel like commiting suicide..but then i think y shud i commit??usse hee marte hai the game will be over :-) then we will not hear those oooo songs...yuckk..!! huh Himesh he is a bad singer and the worst actor i bet most of you will agree except his die hard fans.I dont understand how can anyone be his FAN like how cum one can call this doggie a singer..heee hee haa haa doggie best suits you himesh and on top of it the person who does'nt know how to sing he has gone for acting haha a big joke that too with an actress who is not even 20.

I saw him in saregama challenge programme he was one of the judges huh in that he was intolerable suddenly he used to shout i mean he use to bark without any reason.

Well i think first of all he should stop acting and then singing or else should sing normally as other singers do.
chalo now its time to end over to you shilpa..:-)

A taste of things to come.

I am back from my looooong vacation and here is a taste of things to come on this blog soon!

Break.

Neither I nor Shweta have updated this blog in a long time. I have been swamped with work and Shweta is busy planning for her future ;-)
Meanwhile, there are some updates. I am going on a vacation to Las Vegas, Death Valley and Grand Canyon for 10 days and would be back with lots of interesting stories and pictures.
~Ciao

Shweta!!!!!! You should really post something.

Letters to the editor.

Here's a puzzle for you:
There is an article in an online news portal about OSO and Saanwariya releasing on the same day(diwali). The comments section of the article go like this:
Commenter 1: OSO seems like a masala movie, Saanwariya might be boring
Commenter 2: OSO will be a bigger hit, SRK rocks
Commenter 3: SRK is crap, he has always been doing the same roles in all his movies, he should retire
Commenter 4: Yes C3 I agree SRK is crap, in fact all Muslims are spoiling our country...they should be sent to pak
Commenter 5: All you bloody hindus don't realise that all industrialists and great people of India are muslims
Commenter 6: kaun hain yaar ye C5, isko pak bhej do and send Raja sen(a movie reviewer) back to kolkata..he is crap
and the thread continues with more pak/india and other people bashing, whereas the article was a harmless piece contemplating which bollywood movie will do better! Guess which news portal am I talking about?

Ok here's another sample:The article is about the India and US nuclear deal...all very serious business people. And what happens in the comments section? Yeah you guessed it - more pak bashing, this time along with US and taliban and how all countries except india are not 'doodh ke dhule'. And what else do I see here in comments? 'If you failed at 5th standard or uneducated, do not worry. Go to Andhra universities. You can get BE, MCA, MTech degrees for few thousand rupees and go to the USA to spoil their economy'. &%5E$*&%5E#@*&$^*& what does that have to do with the article, you say? Well I say the same thing!

So now from the samples provided above, tell me what portal am I talking about? Yeah you guessed it right fellows! Its our dear rediff.com! While I really admire the instant gratification provided by online news sites to people who want to convey their feelings about a particular issue, I am taken aback by the way this is misused by some people(and almost all rediff commenters). Its all nice that you don't have to wait for your letter to reach the editor, and then get published a month or more after the issue was raised but people! Is technology enabling us or just making us stoop to a level where we have to bash those who are not like us? Why do we have to succumb to the urge to verbally assault someone we don't even know? (why should you get that urge in the first place?). And don't even get me started on the irrelevant comments(the AP education type!).....As far as my memory goes, responding to an article is a literary activity and should create an atmosphere of debate and perspective...not meaningless chatter that is intended to spark raging tempers!

Note: The comments are a 'direct lift off ' from rediff.com.

Fultoo Dhamaal!

This review might be a little too late but the movie is good enough to warrant a review, late or otherwise. So this weekend we got the Dhamaal DVD from an Indian store. I was expecting a half-baked attempt at comedy, with lots of sexual innuendos and double entendre, a la Masti style but was pleasantly surprised. Before I delve into the depths of brainless slapstick, a word of caution: Dhamaal is a remake of 'Its a mad mad mad world', with a few scenes lifted from 'Roadtrip'. And if you have not seen the above mentioned films, you are in for a great time.

Its a fantastic story of four good for nothing friends who, while attempting to save a dying criminal(a completely bald Prem Chopra ofcourse!) learn that dus carode have been buried in some park in Goa. Thus starts the mad fun-filled trip to Goa, complete with a pagal-khane wali bus full of mental cases, a hanging from the cliff rescue, a daku following Riteish(BTW i observed that its the nth time Ritesh Deshmukh has changed the spelling of his first name!) and the like. Most of the gags work superbly without trying too much(a tribute to the original movie i guess). The gag that takes the cake is when Arshad Warsi, when confronted by a pistol-toting Sanju baba, drops to the ground to show his fear and remorse, and starts collecting mud in an attempt to blind Sanjay Dutt (like Dharam paaji does to Gabbar in Sholay) and by the time Arshad has thrown all the mud in the air, Sanjay has already moved away and he says "sholay maine bhi dekhi hain"....hahaha. One thing is for sure. If you want to enjoy this mad movie, better leave your brains at home(or at work if you are watching at home) and grab that snack and cola and be ready to be entertained bollywood ishtyle! And hey! there are no women or songs to take your mind(didnt you stow it away?) away from the fun!