Close Encounters of the Culinary Kind

Aww man.....

It looked like it was gonna rain again. Just the perfect beginning to a day that could probably pose a serious challenge to the age-old wisdom "It could be worse"....

The bloke on the radio was jabbering on about how "Love keeps the mind young" or some crap like that. Ajay made a mental note to try his luck at hiring some local goons to bash up the cheery-voiced RJ. On second thoughts it might be simpler if he could just force feed him a spoonful of last night's dinner....

******************

Diya was riding the crest of one of her 'culinary experiment' waves....which meant that Ajay had to practice the art of pretending to love the food while all he could think of was how much the food reminded him of garden mulch.

Worst part was that Diya was on a diet which meant that she ate a vegetable salad while he was supposed to gulp down the serious contender to the title "Most Unedible Dish Ever Cooked".Well you'd think he could come clean and tell her how much he hated her cooking. But then he thought opening his mouth long enough to tell her that would bring a fresh wave of nausea.

And to think he had brought it all on himself!!

It seemed like just another ordinary sunshiny day. They were out dining at the brand new Italian bistro in the city. The food was delicious but the helpings were appallingly small. Both stomach and wallet felt empty on the walk back home. That was when Ajay was seized by the bright idea of asking her to make a fancy dinner the following weekend. Diya took up the project zealously. Her earlier culinary ventures had been restricted to toast, rotis and noodles. She was out shopping all Friday afternoon and came back late laden with so many parcels that he wondered that if she had plundered an entire shopping district.

"Hey I thought we are having dinner alone. Did you invite people over tomorrow?"

"Nope.Its just gonna be the two of us. Shyama is working this weekend and you know Rob's at his folks". (Shyama was a particularly irritating friend of Diya's, and Ravindran aka 'Rob' was Shyama's smart-aleck husband. They frequently hung out together, the four of them, boring the hell out of Ajay.)

"Then what's with all this food?"

"Well silly! Remember its gonna be a fancy dinner. I bought a new dinner set, some beautiful napkins and a really lovely centerpiece .....and ooooooooh you are gonna love the candles!"

"What was wrong with old china and what happened to all those lacy frilly things you put out every-time somebody uses the word 'fancy occasion'?"

"Well you never can have too much off these babies..." Diya said lovingly fingering the lace napkins and delicate bone china dinner plates.

Ajay knew better than to argue with his better half.

Just three months into their marriage and it was about time somebody lit the kitchen stove for something slightly more elaborate than morning tea. So he decided to let her get excited about making that 'fancy dinner' of hers.

Saturday afternoon was spent in a flurry of grinding, mincing, pounding and baking. He was banned from entering the kitchen until everything was set and perfect. He decided to dutifully play the role of loving husband and adroitly adhered to his wife's commands about the kitchen being strictly off-limits. He decided to spend the evening in delicious anticipation of the upcoming feast and watching cricket highlights on the sidelines. Nagging suspicions about Diya's culinary expertise were serenely subdued by a stealthy sip or two of his finest scotch.

The first faint tinkling of the alarm mechanism in his brains were set off when his nose caught something wafting out of the kitchen that suspiciously reminded him of old cabbages. Then he caught the drift of a telephonic conversation that metamorphosed the faint tinkling in his head to distinct jangles of the proverbial alarm bells....'well the aubergines and ash gourds have been stewed. Do I have to add asparagus and basil after sauteing the onions or before?' .....Ajay was seriously worried now. The choice of vegetables seemed ominous to say the least. He called out to Diya when she was off the call:
"What's with all those weird vegetables? Asparagus and basil? I thought we were supposed to be having a nice, delicious, romantic dinner."

"Well, of course silly....that's what's cooking. Plus, don't you know that asparagus and basil have aphrodisiac properties?" Diya added with that alluring smile of hers. Ajay felt immensely hopeful. Well maybe tonight might be about more than culinary delights. Old cabbage smell and weird sounding veggies notwithstanding.

9 o'clock. Dinner time. The scene had been set for the feast that was to go down in the marital history as a major milestone. The new table cloth, centerpiece and dinner set were all in place. The lady of the house looked tired but happy. Diya proudly rattled off the menu to a bewildered Ajay. 'There's a fabulous leek and cabbage soup and that's Veg-a-la-mode, there's bread stick and special blue cheese dipping sauce. There's fettuccini alfredo with chicken and broccoli. And here's a special dish of baked oysters."

And then transpired the most agonizing 40 minutes in Ajay's living memory. By comparison it made his last visit to the dentist seem like a trip to Disney Land. The culinary experiment had yielded fascinating products which were just pushing the limits of being categorized as toxic waste. Ajay developed a new found respect for lab rats. The last time he had been so profoundly nauseous was when he had met Diya's father, a retired brigadier of the Indian Army, for the first time. At that point in history he had believed that only third degree torture would be more disagreeable to a dude's constitution. Happier times.

Focus.
Just try to keep the food down.
Chew and swallow.
Do not try to taste.
He kept mentally repeating to himself. Diya happily munched on her surprisingly delicious looking salad and kept asking him if he liked the food. He managed a credible number of enthusiastic nods between painful swallows.

"And now for the best part....it's sour cream apple pie for dessert! You are so lucky that you are not on a diet!"

Ajay's face had turned a sickly shade of green and his forehead was liberally studded with beads of perspiration. He grimly thought of the day he had doled out pearls of wisdom to one of his friends who was facing a relationship crisis: "Sometimes a relationship is like a horrible joke your father-in-law just cracked. You just pretend to find it hilarious. You see, you have to constantly work towards making a commitment work. Relationships can be like bitter pills; sometimes you just gotta swallow them." Well,tonight, Ajay felt as if he were eating his own words.

Maybe you might be wondering why Ajay was just such a big wuss. He could have just told Diya that the food was terrible. But he realized that it would just break her heart. All the more so because she had put her heart and soul into the effort of cooking a 'special meal'. But most of all, he realized, guided by a certain wisdom much beyond his years that ticking his wife off would leave him with the very unattractive prospect of doing the dishes after a disastrous meal. Maybe he would subtly slip it in during their next truth or dare game. But definitely not tonight.

**********************
He was jolted from his thoughts by the ring of the telephone. Diya took the call and came back beaming. "It was Shyama. She had suggested the menu and the recipe for the dinner last night. She'd called to find out how it turned out."

"So what did you tell her?"

"I told her that it was a phenomenal success and that you'd liked it immensely!"

"Hmmm-mmm."

"She was so happy to hear that!"

"Hmmm-mmm"

"By the way, I have invited Shyama and Rob for dinner this weekend. I'm making a special dinner to celebrate the success of my first fancy dinner. Hope you are OK with that."

"You bet!" Ajay's heart suddenly soared.

He chuckled silently. The future held immense possibilities.

He looked out of the window and he could have sworn there was faint rainbow.

Funny Side Up!

Life has this infinite propensity to throw up situations where you have only two genuine options before you:

1) You throw up your hands in exasperation and start working up a fit of anger.

2) You throw in the towel (metaphorically) and start laughing at the silliness of it all.

Recently certain events transpired in my life where I was tempted to take up option 1 but fortunately better sense prevailed and I ended up subscribing to option 2.

I wish I could reveal the entire sequence of events but perhaps the world is too small and more importantly, the people associated with the events are even smaller! That being the case let me try to sift sense from all the nonsense that happened in the recent past.

My job gives me the rare chance to interact with a wide range of people....allegedly the country's best and brightest. I won't challenge that contention, but I have to state that the nation's latest brood of intellectual stalwarts have incredible potential for absolute nonsense.

It's disturbing to observe that intelligent , competent individuals who have obviously scored so high in examinations, score so low in life's finer details. Competition is good as long as you are a good sport. Talent is a great thing as long as you don't fancy yourself as talented. And confidence, alas, is a world apart from arrogance. When all these unfortunate attributes add up you have the perfect prescription for absurdity.

In today's age of social networking there is a very virulent visual display of absurdity all over the digital realm. Narcissism takes an evolutionary leap thanks to Facebook....you see it in the form of pictures, videos and updates of all kinds. Recently I was exposed a particularly strong dose of this digital display which made me digitally sigh a couple of times on FB in the form of status updates:

1. 'Subtlety is a sublime art that is either lost on most or wasted on the rest!'

2. 'Some people really fool themselves that they are in paradise, others are fools in paradise who neither realize that they are fools nor that they are in paradise!! Is it irony of some divine origin?'

Nobody is immune to this phenomenon. Most of us have succumbed to the obvious attraction of posting updates which show us in the most flattering light. It is pardonable, we are only human.

But the matter becomes serious when a person internalizes the notion of superiority. When 'holier-than-thou' comes as naturally to you as breathing or sleeping. Then knowingly or unknowingly you create fences round yourself and before you know it you are all alone in your fortress. You may have built the fence to keep out others. But the tragedy is that they may not have wanted to come in at all in the first place! In the process of choosing your friends you risk the chance of ending up with none at all. Read Oscar Wilde's short story 'The Selfish Giant'. It makes this point so beautifully.

Which brings me back to my original conjecture. When we are up against somebody who is so obviously convinced of his/her superiority there are only 2 real options. And if you are gifted with a sense of humor, try to laugh at the pointlessness of it all. Anger, hurt and resentment can at the best give you a nasty bout of indigestion. Whereas when you laugh out loud, you are not only denying the person the opportunity of hurting but also ridding yourself of all negativity.

So laugh guys, even if the joke's on you. Eat your eggs sunny side up and live your life funny side up!