A leprechaun in Bombay???!!… I must be dreaming..

Everyone has dreams. The dreams I’m talking about aren’t so much the day kind, the ones your hopes and wishes aspire to, but the kind your subconscious self provides you with at night.

I’ve always wondered about them. Several distinguished persons of philosophy and science have different theories about dreams and why and how they happen. Most believe it a manifestation of something you aren’t dealing with or aren’t recognising during your conscious hours. I just can’t believe it.

To me, dreams are like a television set on a timer that comes on at the most ridiculous moments, like halfway through the night at the end of which it wakes me up. I finally fall asleep after that only to be woken up rudely by the dulcet tones of my alarm clock (which I swear must have been created by a torture specialist on LSD. I’d smash it to smithereens if it wasn’t a gift. Who knew Aunt S had a sadistic streak??).

And it’s not like they tell you anything at all. Most times, mine torture me with things that I’m very much thinking about in my awake state, mostly put funny hats or clothes on the major players and no one says anything I don’t know already don’t know. In essence, the dream ends up ruining my only break from something that has been running in my head most of the day. And the strangeness of attire, well, that just probably means that I see everything like a big giant circus.

The dreams I feel would have meant something are the ones I can never remember in the morning. I wake up and I know something momentous went on in my head in the night. But for the life of me, I don’t know what it was! Ever tried to remember a dream like that? Just trying before breakfast can give you a headache quicker than you can say “Pancakes!”

My dream this morning was me on a flight to London. It sort of felt like I was going there for good. But nothing was specific. I was carrying waaaa-aay to much hand luggage than I believe has ever been allowed to a passenger in airline history. I had my own king-size Tempurpedic pillow which I was toting around. I don’t what is scarier about that, the fact that I had it and kept dropping it or the fact that one time it popped out if it’s case, was covered in mould, and I didn’t seem to care. There were strangers and people I knew on the flight and the stewardess seemed to have no problem I was wandering around dropping icky grey covered stuff. And it seemed to be a finder keepers situation where you could sit wherever you wanted. There were conversations that I recall were hilarious but nothing else. And I remember having that strong feeling of forgetting something (I always have this feeling when I leave for a trip). I couldn’t place what it was. Must have been my husband, who was nowhere in sight, something I realised upon waking.

The thing about dreams like this is in that fleeting time, when you are between asleep and awake, when you don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy, when for just then you feel sure that the dream is reality. Then you wake up and are disoriented for a bit before it all falls into place.

I wonder if that flight landed. Thanks to the blasted alarm clock, I’ll  never know.

Spice is nice

Coming to the US was new and exciting. And while I enjoyed grad school in Texas, I missed home. Among many other things, I missed Bombay and it’s food. I discovered some new cuisines but sorely missed my mom’s cooking and simply, Indian food. The restaurant offering any kind of Indian food offered an awful watered down version of it, unpalatable to a dog, thereby only making me more homesick. Bombay is a food lovers paradise. There is only one restaurant in College Station that had a claim to serving good grub. But unfortunately for my home food cravings, it served American fare. This made me tremendously keen on my infrequent jaunts to Houston which has tons of Indian restaurants. I longed for my home city with a restaurant on literally every block. The first time I left home and nothing was familiar. It was hard to find my comfort food after a long day at school, when I was in no mood to cook. I think some of the worst fights I’ve had in my life ever occurred in those first six months of leaving home.

Then I moved to San Francisco. The city, while not New York or LA, is a food lovers paradise. You can find something here for the most discerning palette, any cuisine you want. I’ve been to some fabulous restaurants here. And lot of the Indian cuisine you’ll find here is truly authentic. But therein lies the rub.

Indian food here has what I call the ‘Indian sub-continent phenomenon’. Indian food here is recognisable as a type of cuisine.  Say Indian food to someone and they know what you are talking about. Say Pakistani or Bangladeshi food to them and may take a few seconds to sink in, even though in essence it’s the same kind of food. I think restaurants decided not to take the risk and so you will frequently see signs on restaurants that say Pakistani Indian food, just so there is no ambiguity. Most countries that share the sub-continent show similar signs in descriptions and menus. Burmese food that borrows from Indian and Chinese cuisines often tries to do justice to both in its descriptions.

Locals here feel strongly about Indian food. Either they love it or hate it. And most of those who hate it do so because they know (or believe) that it is too spicy for them. (Hey, I’ve eaten Mexican and Thai food here that is way spicier than any Indian food I ever ate, other than my aunts Prawn Pulao). Very few living in the city realise what they are eating is, in fact, North Indian food. India has as much sub-divisions of cuisine as it has states. Sure there’s an overlap, but there’s also a strong sense of place and history that is unique to the food of a region. But Indian food in the American sense is North Indian food. Only those living around the Southern parts of San Francisco Bay and Silicon Valley may know the difference. There are large concentrations of Indians there and more examples of Indian cuisine. Chinese food here has evolved to differentiate and be recognised by it’s region. Someday soon I hope, Indian food will be too.

On the spice factor, Indian food in the restaurants here isn’t spicy enough! But then considering what I think of as spicy has my husband ripping apart a pipe to get to water if required, I wouldn’t consider that a popular Indian opinion here, just mine. There is so much Indian food this country hasn’t discovered yet. And it’s all sooo good.

“Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it.”

Leftovers are not my plate of dinner (lunch, breakfast, afternoon tea….). There are people I know who take great pride in cooking enough so that it makes two dinners and a lunch. No matter how much I loved something at lunch, chances are that I will not love it at dinner. So cooking in quantities isn’t my thing either.

My mom was brilliant at dealing with food in the household in general. She was a master at the art of freeze and thaw and at dressing up leftovers well enough to disguise their original intent, aside from being an awesome cook to begin with. Maybe because she had three picky kids to feed, she had some fantastic ideas to turn anything into a taste fest. And it didn’t help that the kids were picky in different ways. Also, one of her beliefs is that eating the same thing for two meals the same day isn’t good for your stomach. So we’d see the leftover turn up maybe a day later. My two sisters always seemed involved in some sort of health kick (the younger one especially) so the food had to be healthy. And I was just your regular pain-in-just-every-possible-place feeding nightmare to any mom.

Her recurring nightmare was being the mom in a coastal culture family where everyone worshipped seafood, except her middle one. After a few years in toddler-kindergarten phase of trying to hide the fish in rice and veggies and curry, only to have me promptly spit it out, she eventually backed out of trying to get me to eat it, though it’s in my memory so she must have tried pretty hard. On a related completely bizarre note, the smell of pomfret, myfamily’s favourite fish, frying, is one of my favourite smells in the world. Maybe that cousin of mine was on to something when he said I could be an excellent example for the word ‘weirdo’.

So now this meant the rest of the family wanted fish all the time and I’d gag if I saw it anywhere near it. So she was forced to prepare something seperate for me. And mom being mom, had to make sure my meal was as home-cooked as the rest of the meal. I can honestly say I never had a microwaved meal of any sort ever and didn’t get permission to eat anything from plastic or cans until I was about fourteen. And then only because I could put a pot on the stove and make it for myself and the only way to stop me would be to throw away cooked food. Which  brings me to another of mom’s principles, do not throw away food at all costs. There are people starving on the streets.

For the longest time, she made sure we had the fresh food, and she ate the leftovers, maybe shared with Pop (he didn’t care what he ate as long as she cooked it, he loves her cooking). Because of principle three, growing kids need good, fresh, nutritious food. Unless new life had been infused into the leftovers by say, adding vegetables to it, or making cutlets, it wouldn’t show up anywhere near us.

I get up, go to work and come home. My husband is a very good cook and is more than willing to cook most of the time. I love food but I find myself too dead at the end of the day. I’d happily eat cereal at that point. If I had one kid like my sisters, let alone like me, I might be climbing the wall. How did she do it? I don’t think I’d have the inclination even if I was a stay-at-home mom, which she became after I was born.

All I know is that after all the grief I’ve given her over food, I dread to think of what’s going to happen to me when I’m wearing the mom shoes. Because on e of my beliefs is what goes around, comes around. There’s no way to eat around that one.

- The title of this post isn’t my original statement. I don’t know who said it and I don’t stake any claim on it -

The ridiculous Invasion

Nicole Kidman…..Daniel Craig…..I’d expected more from this movie. Clearly, my expectations were as doomed to drown as that ant on the hydrant along the favoured dog route.

This is apparently a movie remade after several remakes. Which means it’s not original. Which means that it had all the information it needed to be a good movie. What happened here is anyone’s guess. I hear it went through all kinds of producer, director, screenplay issues. Apparently even the Wachowski brothers of The Matrix fame were involved. Yet the move runs out like a run-of-the-mill, waste-of-tape production destined for the back racks of the DVD.

The alien spore from space piggybacks in on Space Shuttle Patriot that crashes all over south and eastern United States. The ‘invasion’ starts with Nicole Kidman’s ex-husband and proceeds to flourish. Nicole Kidman is a psychiatrist, though I have to question how good she is. A patient tells her that he husband proceeded to break the neck of a beloved dog in front of her eyes and then tossed him into the garbage and all she does is change the patient’s medication. I’m not a doctor, but I have to say how will this help. Is it supposed to make her blind so she doesn’t see what her husband does?

Chaos reigns free as everyone around starts to change. Nicole Kidman and her best friend Dr. Daniel Craig, start investigating the strange goings-on with a mysterious tissue that they come into contact with. Nicole Kidman’s son Oliver is immune to the alien spore…(I have to confess I never quite understood why…something to do with a prior illness he had which I think affects his sleep patterns….something the alien spore needs to be normal to affect the change in an infected person. Infection is carried out by contact with bodily fluids, something that is achieved by throwing up on people here (The Poltergeist would be proud) and REM sleep completes the cycle. Part of the struggle for Nicole Kidman is not to fall asleep after she has been infected by her ex-husband. And it is NK and her kid against the infected world once Daniel Craig becomes one with the others.

Daniel Craig is so wasted in this movie, I could cry. Though Nicole Kidman dominates the movie, she is as wasted too. All she gets is screen time in a movie that probably should have been scrapped from the beginning. But it does have that trance-like effect on you when you are watching it that makes you see it through. The aliens seem to be a sorry lot…..but the humans even sorrier.

My rating: Why …oh why …oh why?!?!?

And this helps me how?

Into every professional’s life a little licensure woe must fall. The lawyers have their bar exams, doctors have their set of hoops they have to jump through, and the architects have their trials with three little letters called the ARE. The Architect Registration Examination, a blot on our world if there ever was one. Unlike the lawyers and the doctors who spend a lot on their exams and see it returned megafold if they pass, the ARE does nothing of the sort for the architects. There is rarely a large increase in our pay, something we desperately need given that the tests ensured that we are broke for a looong time.

Architecture has to be the most underpaid profession for the amount of time, effort and money invested into being one. And then after you’ve slogged through everything, you find you have to get through nine other exams. If you live in California like I do, add an oral exam to the bag of joy. Your first-born child would come into this world for less money than the cost of taking these exams, even if you threw in the cost of the after-birth diaper genie.

And there is the fabulous grey area of what it gets you. It gets you a piece of paper that now allows you to call yourself an architect. It gets you a fabulous rubber stamp that means you can now build on your own. And that’s that. If you work for someone else, it earns you the empathy of the architects who went through it before you. They feel for you and your pocket book. It earns you the awe of the younger ones who haven’t gone through it (the older ones who haven’t gone through it don’t care, they know it doesn’t make any difference anyway). Some firms couldn’t care less if you are licensed, some say that it matters tremendously to them if you, the employee, are licensed. Working for an architectural firm means there’s a very small chance that you will ever be stamping drawings, the only true time it would matter if you were licensed.

To me it is a matter of despair. I am licensed where I come from. Speaking to various people who studied architecture in several different countries, I know I had a tougher syllabus and more gruelling studying to become an architect than others. Yet, my license is not recognised in this country. Which means I’m forced to do all of it all over again and pay for it yet again.

I know you pay a price for your calling but this is ridiculous.