Dissatisfied Indians(?)

No don’t worry this is not one those posts where I will bore you with examples saying how bad this country is and topping it with some high voltage intellectual gibberish. It’s just that while performing my morning ritual,(no silly not the toxin cleansing ritual)i.e. going through the homepage of Facebook and checking out what my ‘friends’ are upto, I saw this piece of news posted by a friend which said, “Two Dalit girls stripped in examination hall in Madhya Pradesh.” You must be thinking nothing new right? We are horrified at this heinous act but we know this happens in India, the age old caste system will not be wished away by reservations or The Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. But what grabbed my attention and made me write this post was the comment by the friend, “Proud to be an Indian, think twice.”

She is not the only one even the ‘Prince of India’ in the aftermath of the Bhatta-Parsaul violence declared that, "I feel ashamed of being an INDIAN after seeing what has happened here in UP." The only difference between my friend and Rahul Gandhi (apart from the fact that he is a prince and she is just the aam aurat), is that he was lambasted for this comment while my friend is getting all the likes and comments saying, “I agree with you”, “This is disgusting” and so on.

The problem is I am affected by the question, because I know if not proud I am quite happy to have been born Indian rather than Ugandian where either you become a child soldier or a sex slave to warlords like Joseph Kony. I know all the critics of the Indian nation will give me all sorts of logic that how India is one god forsaken country (Mr/Ms Critic want to get a Saudi Arabian passport?). I do sound caustic but believe me I am tired of the same old rhetoric, “I am ashamed of being an Indian, a country where blah blah atrocities/ etc etc injustice happens.”

To tell you the truth I do say sometimes , “Nothing is going to change in this country”, but it comes from exasperation but I find it very silly to declare publicly that I am not proud to be an Indian because I know even the most developed countries have their own set of problems. Americans are occupying Wall Street, the Germans are protesting in Berlin against nuclear energy and the UK, well don’t get me started about that country, from the editorials in The Guardian or The Telegraph one will feel that it is a nation of unhappy ladies and gentlemen. So, the point is even if I change countries I will be unhappy and question my love for that country.

Human beings are imperfect and by that logic we can safely conclude that no country is perfect. Being proud of our country is beyond us because essentially all of us suffer from chronic dissatisfaction.  Some  of us strive forward in order to ease this dissatisfaction while the rest sit down in a corner think about it and some of them fill pages with mundane pseudo-intellectual rhetoric.

Now that 500 words or more have been said I feel it is time to make the closing statement. To all my friends who are not proud to be Indians, please do something about your nonsensical blah blahs or say something new. I have had enough of your age old dissatisfaction to top up my not-so-perfect life.

PS: I am not sure whether I am a patriotic Indian or whether I am ready to lay my life for this country, but somehow I can’t control my lacrimal glands when I hear the National Anthem. It is quite embarrassing to admit this but sometimes I watch the opening of India vs Any Country cricket match just to hear the orchestrated rendition of the song.

                                                  I couldn't post the version that I love :( 

Recycling something that didn’t go well on my taste-buds

Like any other art form cooking has its own share of disasters, it is natural as the artists are human beings, who are beautifully imperfect. So, talking about such a cooking disaster let me rewind a week earlier. It was my   brother’s Upanayan ceremony(holy thread ceremony), as societal mores dictated we had to organise a reception to mark the day after which he could partake non-vegetarian food (which includes onion and masoor dal as well).

One of the items on the menu was a ‘sorse paneer’(cottage cheese cubes in mustard sauce) , it was brilliantly disastrous as the mustard was undercooked. Imagine 800 gms of paneer wasted just because the cook thought that ‘people would prefer eating fish, so never mind that humble paneer’.

I am used to recycling bad food, it is something I had to learn owing to the hazards that usually occur  when one is living away from home and hearth. But let me delve into the crux of the matter the Bhattacharjee’s as a rule prefer mustard in their fish and not in their paneer, and on top of that Papa Bhattacharjee doesn’t eat paneer! So, after a few minutes of brainstorming( while carefully examining the disaster in question) I decided to make something which looked like a plebeian  relative of the Shahi Paneer.

The disastrous Sorse Paneer

I am not sure of this impromptu recipe, if you want to try it, I would suggest you make a few additions of your own.
 Here it goes :

WARNING: This so called recipe should not be read by people who do not know that to heat oil in a pan you have to put oil and before that light the gas. (There was one girl who asked me whether onions can be fried in unheated oil!)

Tentative ingredients:

1.       Potatoes for Papa Bhattacharjee: Which were boiled, peeled and fried. Of course cut it into halves before boiling them.

2.       A paste of poppy seeds and onions (separately); I did this after having look at the amount of paneer. *Always trust your instinct it is your best friend in the kitchen.

3.       Ground little bit of dry roasted garam masala and black pepper. (We have this fantastic mini-hand pestle at Tezpur,it is better than any machine grinder.)

Poppy seed paste(below) and onion paste(above)

Garam masala and black pepper powdered in a hand pestle

Cooking time: 15 minutes or more (frankly speaking I don’t remember).

How I did it:
I fried the potatoes, kept them aside and didn’t eat them, no matter how hungry I was!

Naturally I had to heat oil, in this case, white oil in a deep bottomed pan. Then I fried the onion paste till it had that lovely lilac colour ( yes, lilac and not pink as Sanjeev Kapoor says).If you do not have nasal congestion you will get that lovely smell…wow!

After this, I put the delicate poppy seed paste into the pan, fried it together till my common sense told me to stop( *also taste it and trust your taste-buds). Then I put the segregated paneer, i.e. the paneer which was separated from the undercooked mustard paste.

 I did not wash off the mustard totally kept some of it, as the colour suggests

 But I also made sure that some amount of the mustard was still clinging on to the paneer.
At some point of time I also put in the fried potatoes.

Got hold of two small cups of milk. Oh! Yes milk oops forgot to mention it above, anyway it’s an impromptu recipe forgive my unmindfulness. After that I poured in the milk and let it simmer till the gravy thickened to my liking.                                     

* Optional: For corrupted East Bengalis like myself you can put some sugar to balance the taste.

At last I put the ground garam masala-black pepper powder and mixed it well.

We had it with rice in the afternoon and with paranthas at night; tasted good both ways.

PS: I might have missed a few steps but I hope that you don’t have to try it out, because seriously folks undercooked mustard paneer is one pain in the ‘you-know-where’.

Served hot! My favourite cook- my mom gave me full marks for this