To market! To market! (HT Brunch - Sun Aug 22)

The Hindustan Times did a lovely story this weekend, on "Hidden Cities" - little known delights of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore.

I thoroughly enjoyed taking Mignonne, the writer who covered the story, on a walking exploration of Bhuleshwar and Kalbadevi.

These vibrant areas of the city constantly surprise me - even when I think I know it all, they throw something new at me. This time, on the walk, it was a little signboard in Mangaldas Market, that said "Extra Gully".

Mangaldas Market is one of the largest wholesale fabric markets in this area - a somewhat addictive experience if, like me, you have a thing about fabrics. It is divided into little lanes, and each lane has a number that helps orient you in the maze. I've been there several times, but this was the first time I saw this little board - Mignonne pointed it out to me. An Extra Gully - a builder's quirk, perhaps, but firmly declaring its presence :) We are here too! say the shops in this lane! All you have to do is follow this arrow!

I had to squint up to look at the board. Hard to spot!

The sign is in English, Devnagri and Gujarati. By its very nature it reminds me of the multi-cultural mix of traders who have made this area their home. Muslim, Parsi, Hindu and Jain traders, all use the Gujarati script. Marathi-speaking dealers use Devnagri. English is commonly used by all these communities...notice that the word Extra is English; and so is the word Gully...that doesn't stop anyone from understanding it and writing it in whatever script they want!

On the walk, I also took Mignnone to one of my new favourites - a fantastic little bindi shop near the TBZ store, called Tanvi.

What fascinates me about this shop is how they constantly have new products. How does one innovate in something as simple as a bindi? Apparently, the possibilities are endless.

For example, I spotted this bright orange box amidst other bright boxes, and asked "What is it?" Kya hai? "Khol ke dekho madam", said the guy at the shop. Open it and see.

The box that caught my fancy

So I open it, and ta-da! It's a Bindi Wallet, with a little mirror on top for me to admire my forehead.

Given how expensive fancy bindis are, a wallet to keep them all in order is a practical idea, but what evokes my admiration is the design effort that has gone into making the wallet attractive and appealing. Clearly, this is designed so that it is perfect as a part of a bridal set, or maybe just a wonderful embellishment to a woman's dresser.

And if you find the bindi wallet too large to carry around, here's a tinier version, to slip into your purse :) Notice how the design is more no-nonsense, perhaps it is meant to appeal to the working woman of Bombay? :)

Go wow 'em at the office, girl!

And that's not all. The world of bindis extends beyond the forehead, to hair ornaments, anklets, tattoos for the arm and back...and all manner of body art.

Body art in every colour you can dream of

There are new designs every couple of months.

I see the stocks of bindis and tattoos constantly changing, and marvel at the design impetus behind it. It is the market itself that drives this design. The Indian woman - with her love for all things colourful, and her readiness to try new things - is at the heart of these products.

Photo of me which appeared in HT Brunch - at Tanvi Bindi Shop.

Tanvi is a wholesale shop, but you can see how the entire business is geared towards appealing to the women of the city. "Yeh chalega kya"? Will this work in the market? This is the single-minded question that drives all of Kalbadevi and Bhuleshwar into a frenzy of innovation and change. More power to this machine, then! May it thrive and prosper!

P.S. If you want to read the full article then it is here, with many interesting other tidbits about Bhuleshwar.

What's it with women and cameras

I was chatting with my friend Derek this morning when he said, hey I bought a new camera lens.

What is it, I asked him, what did you buy?

It's a SIGMA something something, he said.

Actually, that's not what he said. He correctly named the exact model. But I usually get a dazed look whenever anyone reels off any numbers. So only the Sigma registered and I kinda lost the rest of the plot there :)

Anyway, Derek is off happily experimenting with this new super-zoom lens.

Talking to him, I felt that sharp familiar twinge I always get when I hear about cameras. When are you going to buy a better one, Deepa, I asked myself.

For two years now, I've been wanting something better than my point-and-shoot. But I haven't gotten around to buying it.

It's not that I cannot afford it.

As I was chatting today, I finally realised the real reason I haven't bought a camera in two years.

Guilt. With a capital G.

My ultra-conservative-about-money upbringing doesn't allow me to spend a hundred thousand rupees on a gadget.

And it's more than that. I also realise the real problem is that I'm unwilling to spend on a gadget that is purely for me. No one else in the family will use that camera. It's going to be just my own personal toy.

An expensive toy. That will lead to further expenses as I get into accessories, more lenses, photography lessons...

Guilt, guilt, guilt.

A peculiarly female thing? I guess a sociologist would have a field day over this. After all, this is a country where women eat last, after they have fed the rest of the household. Where women consistently undervalue themselves and their interests.

But is my guilt over an expensive purchase a female thing? I know many women who indulge themselves to death; usually in the form of jewellery or clothes or shoes or purses. They're buying fancy mobile phones these days as well; and cars and laptops. Many of these are women who don't have careers; it is the husband who brings home the bacon, so to speak. There is no guilt over these purchases - instead there is just pride and vanity, blessed by social sanction. Clothing and jewellery are a woman's way of telling another woman how rich she really is.

Unfortunately, that logic doesn't extend to womens' cameras. You can't show them off to other women, you see? :) Fancy mobile phones, even laptops and cars, you can show off. But the only people who seem to really understand cameras are men :)

Men really understand expensive toys, don't they? My male friends almost always egg me on to buy that new camera, and most of them offer advice on what model to buy.

My husband definitely has fewer qualms about expensive toys than I do. As I type this, the Bose he bought sits there twinkling at me. Before that, there was the custom-configured Wharfedale. But hey - to be fair to him, it's just two things in all our years together. So does he have guilt too? I *think* so. He certainly has the same ultra-conservative-about-money upbringing! Maybe that's why we don't squabble about money matters :)

Anyway, I think my camera story is drawing to an end. Why? Two things have happened - first, a new Croma store just opened near my house. Which means I am just ten minutes away from my camera. And second, we finally exchanged our credit card points for 35,000 rupees of Croma vouchers. Which means my guilt trip just substantially lessened :) Watch this space!

P.S. All advice welcome! Budget is anything upto Rs 100,000 for relatively light camera and decent zoom lens.

A Dummies Guide to Sabudana Khichdi

Let's face it. Sabudana khichdi is the easiest thing to make.

Strangely, I totally *suck* at it, producing a gooey mess every single time, instead of a happy light breakfast. It's a complete mystery, because I am otherwise a competent and creative cook.

Thankfully, with the arrival of my new maid, the sabudana khichdi in our household has morphed into a work of art. Since Shravan is here, in all its supposed holiness, and people are buying sabudana by the kilo, I thought this a good time to produce this Sabudana Khichdi for Dummies.

Note that I am merely recording what my maid is doing, I'm not cooking. I'm convinced I'm jinxed when it comes to this sabudana thing :)

Step 1: Sabudana soaked overnight

Aha. Hang on there, because this is the first stumbling block. Most recipes will tell you this soak overnight stuff. The real trick though, is to Know Thy Sabudana. The right amount of soaking (1 hour in our household, but 30 minutes in some others) is required. After this, you drain all the water out, using a colander, and you leave the wet sabudana in the colander overnight. When you come back in the morning you'll find that the sago globules have morphed into fat moist little delights, waiting to be cooked.

Step 2: The Ingredients - Cumin, Lemon, Chillies, Peanuts coarsely ground, coriander for garnishing

There's a missing ingredient in this photo, which is a boiled potato (optional, strictly speaking, but hey, who doesn't like potatoes? And it adds a nice extra texture). By the way, the ground peanut thingy? The more you add the nicer the whole darn thing tastes.

Step 3 - Heat oil in kadhai, add cumin.

Easy, no? The thing is not to burn the seasonings, so keep the flame low, wait for the oil to heat up, then add the cumin.

Step 4: Slice chillies lengthwise

If you're in a household of brave men and women, you can chop the chillies into chunks, or chop them really fine for a spicier dish. I prefer not to be surprised into biting chillies, so we slice them this way to spot it easily.

Step 5: Watch green chillies sizzling in oil. Careful. The pods tend to pop when hot.

Step 6: Add the sago. No, it doesn't stick to the sides of the pan, but cut the flame to as low as you can.

Step 7: Squeeze lemon

My maid and I don't see eye to eye on this lemon business. To me, lemon is something you squeeze at the very end, like a garnish, after you take this thing off the flame. My maid doesn't have any such qualms, and adds lemon anywhere anyhow. Given that her food is outstanding, I should just sit back and let her do what she likes, right?

Step 8: Add salt to taste

How much, really, is "salt to taste"? Different salts have different saltiness, so this one, my friend, only works by trial and error. The golden rule is of course, Less is More. Go easy on the salt. Err on the side of caution. And so on.

Step 9: Bring on the ground peanuts. The more the merrier.

This is also the time my maid brings out the boiled potato, cuts it into tiny squares and pops it into the mix. I've also seen potatoes added at the beginning, just after the green chillies. That seems more sensible to me, but hey, what do *I* know.

Step 10: Give it a good stir. Watch it go from white to a happy brown.

Sabudana cooks quickly. In about 5 minutes, the sago turns translucent, which is when you know it's done. But it also sticks a bit to the sides of the pan, so you have to keep stirring.

Step 11: Chop coriander into bits for garnishing

Step 12: Serve hot

This is important. Cold sabudana is like biting into very dead fish. Hot, steaming, spicy, with the fantastic smells of coriander, lemon and chilli, that's how to eat this thing.

And the best way to eat it is plain. Maharashtrians ruin it, according to me, with a ridiculous sweet yoghurt dip to go with it. But hey. Whatever floats your boat.

And now to breakfast....

Men, women and bonding

My friend Raju posted a link to an article from the Wall Street Journal about how men and women have different types of friendships: Friendship for Guys (No Tears!).

Women, according to that article, bond by talking. They share personal information, ups-and-downs and relationship difficulties, bonding over long conversations with their female friends.

Men, according to the same article, prefer to "do" rather than talk; playing sports together, or going on adventure treks and so on.

The article primarily refers to an American population. But I'm wondering if it applies to Indian men and women as well.

My husband doesn't have a all-male buddy gang that takes off for the hills once a year in macho style, but he definitely likes "doing". His idea of a fun day with a friend is "Let's go to the club and play tennis." Or scuba-dive. Or try para-gliding. Or some such thing. We went to Greece on holiday; and all he wanted to do was the 17-kilometer Samaria Gorge trek. Thankfully, he's blessed with a sporty daughter; so the two of them went for a whole day's grueling trek, while I spent the day snorkeling and taking a boat cruise around the island.

We often holiday together with my sister's family. Somehow in these holidays we're always "doing" things. Whether it's Borneo, or Africa or Ranthambhore, we always seem to be up and on the go. This suits the men quite well, although they'd really like to do less wimpy things than shepherd us around in "safe" activities.

Rafting in Borneo. Example of low-challenge wimpy stuff :)

But in spite of all the sporty stuff, my husband isn't averse to "talking" either. He certainly is loads better at talking than I am. I don't really talk to anyone about my personal relationships, or any problems / difficulties that I might have. When I have trouble at work, or want to vent, I call my husband :) But mostly I just think about how to fix the problem, or - if I think it can't be fixed - how to cope with it. If I'm exceptionally hassled, I go to sleep and hope the next day will be better. Or I go off and shed a few private tears in the bathroom. I usually don't call up other women and talk about it.

Maybe I just haven't had a bad enough crisis in life, eh? Or maybe my regular weekly Sunday sessions with mom and sis are already quite enough of a release valve :) This morning the three of us sat around and did the usual laments about maids, traffic, and the lack of civic sense in the city. We discussed exams, children, new recipes and upcoming family weddings. Dad wandered in and out of the room; half chatting, half supervising some masonry work.

None of us did any soul-baring, but this sort of idle morning chat is enough to recharge batteries and let you get on with the week ahead. Quite therapeutic! Can women bond over trivia, then? It would seem so, at least with family.

- Deepa

P.S. My cousin Satish wrote this piece today called Male Bonding (curious co-incidence, both of us writing about the same stuff!!)

Want to come on a bazaar walk this Saturday?

I was looking through my photos of Bhuleshwar, and I remembered this basket in the Flower Market which I photographed three years ago.

I couldn't identify several things in it, so I asked the lady and she told me. The long maize-like thing is actually kewra. Who knew?

Anyway, I'm inspired by this kewra photo to go see more new things in Bhuleshwar, so I'm organising a walk this Saturday.

Does anyone want to come?

The Invite for the walk is here: Mumbai Magic on Facebook

Let me know if you want to come. I was originally going to do it this Saturday (24th), but given that it's pouring rain this week, maybe we'll do it next Saturday instead. Please email me at deepa at mumbaimagic dot com to check.

Frommers India 4th Edition - Mumbai Magic

Frankly folks, I don't know whether to grin or blush or what.

You guys simply *have* to read this review that just appeared in the latest Frommers India guide!!

For those who want to know what the 3-star rating means - here's the guide to Frommer's ratings:

According their website: "the Frommer's star rating is meant to quantify the kind of intangible, experiential elements that help travelers make informed decisions.

The "baseline" recommendation is zero stars - every hotel, restaurant, attraction, shop, and nightlife establishment that Frommer's chooses to review is recommended; otherwise, we simply wouldn't include it."

I'm soooooooo very pleased with this review! Actually, even that's an understatement. At the moment, I want to twirl around and hug someone at Frommers (if only I knew who wrote this!). Unfortunately, after being labelled "super-sophisticated", twirling is out, so I am forced to offer a more sedate thanks.

How do you survey a billion people?

Two diminutive women showed up at the door this week.

They said - in Marathi - "Janaganana karaycha aahe"

Jan-a-gan-a-naa (a neat tongue-twister, try saying that fast!), is a compound formed from two Sanskrit words:

janaH = people
gan.H = to count or consider

After they rattled off that tongue-twister again, I figured it out (thank god for Sanskrit lessons in school).

"Ah" I said to them, sounding ridiculously Anglophone and hopelessly upperclass. "Census-saathi aale ka?" Are you here for the Census?

It was a hot summer afternoon. I invited the ladies in, and offered refreshments. It was then that I saw their big black bag - CENSUS OF INDIA 2011.

The black Census Bag

From the depths of the bag, the women produced large forms. I had expected tacky forms on bad paper, the sort you see at the Post Office. Instead, the forms were aesthetically pleasing, printed on thick, good quality paper, and colour-coded for ease of use. Later I found out that the forms would be scanned through character recognition software, and that there would be no manual data entry.

The Enumerators with their form and custom-designed pad.

There are 2.7 millon Enumerators roaming all over the country at this moment, surveying 240 million households. They've been given 45 days in which to do it. Since this is India, where people speak 450 languages, the Powers that Be have sensibly restricted the Census forms to 16 primary languages. The Postal Department - another giant Indian undertaking - has been kept busy shipping these forms to multiple data collection centres across the country.

For anyone who has run any kind of project, the challenges of tackling such a gigantic logistics effort are quite obvious. For example, how do you train 2.7 million Enumerators? The Census team follows a cascading system, of course, starting with a mere 90 trainers at the top of the pyramid, but geometrically progressing to 2.7 million in three crazy big steps.

90 National Trainers,
who train

725 Master Trainer Facilitators,
who in turn train

54,000 Master Trainers,
who then train

all the 2.7 milllion Enumerators!

Sigh. Sheer poetry. The math is beautiful. Honestly, this is the kind of big leap of ambitious "can-do" that impresses me no end. Here are some other impressive numbers:

• Number of villages being surveyed: More than 600,000
• Number of towns being surveyed: 7700
• Total population being surveyed: 1.2 billion
• Number of "how-to" manuals printed: 8 million
  
• Amount of paper that's being used: 12,000 metric tonnes (ha! I can believe that!)
• The cost of this exercise: US$ 130 million
  

I sat down to answer the questions, but I was also very keen to see the whole process in action.

There seemed to be two types of forms - one type that collected basic data about the household and its members, and another that collected information about the quality of housing and amenities, assets, and other lifestyle questions.

The basic data will go into the National Population Register - an ambitious project that is being done for the first time ever in India, to produce accurate information about people living in each area. The National Population Register will contain a "List of Usual Residents" for each area, along with socio-economic profile (gender, education, occupation etc). From this list, duplicates will be weeded out across the country, and every Indian will be issued a Unique ID.

Answering questions for the National Population Register

I'm waiting now, to see what they're going to do with our names. The women wrote them down in Marathi, ruining the pronounciation and spelling. What further destruction the character recognition software will do to our names, I don't know.

But I have (strangely), a lot of faith in the bureaucracy. Slow and plodding it might be, but it usually gets things done, and is capable of getting things done on a very large scale. Let's wait and watch.

On CNNGo today - Mumbai Magic Bazaar Walk

There's a review of my Bhuleshwar bazaar walk on CNNGo today:

Trivial pursuit: In search of god, gold and pieces of history at Mumbai's old markets
by Tarini Awatramani

We take a tour of the city's pulse centers -- the by-lanes of old bazaars -- and discover five things we never knew about this beguiling city.

The original epicenter of commercial life in the city, Crawford Market, Zaveri Bazaar and Buleshwar are like living museums. Mumbai Magic knows these interconnected markets in a way that gives you a glimpse of a time past, which you would easily miss trying to navigate through the crowds on your own.

Here are five of the many great things you didn’t know about your city, that you can learn from its markets.

Read more: Mumbai Magic: Discovering the real Mumbai in its markets | CNNGo.com

Mumbai dying?

The Hindustan Times Brunch had an interesting article, comparing Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta.

The article suggests that while the 19th century belonged to Calcutta and the 20th to Bombay, the 21st century belongs to Delhi.

Do you think this is true? Is Mumbai on a downward slide? Does the 21st century belong to Delhi?

I summarised the article here; would love to hear comments: Delhi - 21st century city?

Flamingoes at Sewri - unexpected bonus

- by Deepa Krishnan

I went to Sewri on Friday, and stumbled, literally stumbled upon *thousands* of flamingoes.

What a spectacle.

I've been to Lake Nakuru in Kenya, where they gather in larger numbers, but seeing these birds in my own backyard, so to say, was a totally different feeling.

Of course, this little photo does no justice at all to the scene. But if you click on it, I think you'll see a larger image, which is a little better.

In any case, what you see in the photo is only 20% of what I saw. What I saw was a total 360 degree scene, flamingoes everywhere on all sides and on the far shore as well.

It was all the more fabulous because it was completely unexpected. I thought the birds would be gone in May.

I am so pleased!