Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
A deeply satisfying walk
Yesterday, we visited Henry Coe State Park, after a span of nearly 18 years. It was a deeply satisfying early spring hike, with seasonal creek crossings, lunch by a lake, and sighting of abundant early blooms.
Henry Coe is second largest State Park in California at 89,000 acres. The bigger one, Anza Borrego, is over six times larger at 600,000 acres. Starting from Henry Coe HQ, we followed the Monument trail to Hobb’s road, met with the seasonal Little Coyote Creek for the first time on our way to Frog lake, had lunch at Frog lake while watching a large family fishing, then followed the Frog lake trail to Middle Ridge trail, then Fish trail to another Little Coyote Creek crossing, all the way to Corral trail and back to HQ.
Read the rest of this entry »A conversation with a museum docent
In between meetings and with a lunchbox in hand, I sometimes tune into SF Asian Art Museum’s Takeout Tuesdays: Lunchtime Conversations About Art. This week they chose to showcase their collection of betel containers from Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines and discussed the disappearing tradition of betel nut chewing.
That conversation brought back a specific memory of a multi-generational gathering of women in my family.
In India, the betel nut chewing tradition is the same as eating “paan”. (What is Paan?). The museum suggests the word “quid” to what we know as “paan”- a betel leaf (Piper betle) wrapped around a mixture of chopped areca nut (fruit of Areca catechu palm, called betel nut in general parlance, but has nothing to do with Piper betle, called Supari in India) and the slaked lime, sometimes flavored with herbs, spices, and the star, the chewing tobacco.
The piper betle leaf are the size of the palm of a hand and are heart shaped. In my culture, women’s faces are often referred to as resembling the betel leaf. I remember that for many years, parsley reminded me of betel leaf aroma. The food grade slaked lime (calcium dihydroxide or calcium hydrate) has low acute toxicity i.e., it may be a skin, eye and respiratory irritant. But don’t be alarmed, a study suggests that adding slaked lime to rice can add the necessary calcium in deficient diets. Areca palm looks like a small palm tree, and its fruit clusters look not unlike date clusters from a distance. To access the nutmeg sized nut, you have to de-husk like you would a coconut. The nuts are chopped before adding to the paan. They have a lovely red vein like pattern on the inside. Depending on how hard they are, you can chop them fine into slivers (for older and harder nuts) or leave them a little chunkier.
In the Himachal tradition, there is an unusual preparation called “Supari ka Madra” – the whole areca nut is repeatedly soaked in fresh water for 10 days and then pre-cooked in milk for 15 minutes to subsequently prepare it for a rich curry. To see more, move to the 15 minute mark on the video “Exploring Kullu: Myths, Gods, and Lost Flavors” by The Epic Channel (link). Apparently, after all that hard work, the supari tastes like mushroom. Assam, where my father was first located during the early days of his public health career, has a practice of fermenting the betel nuts (link), unfortunately, the fermentation increases the carcinogenic properties of betel nut.
My mother has consumed paan as long as I have remembered. Apparently, women get started on paan when they become pregnant. It is purported to be an excellent anti-dote to morning sickness. The chewing tobacco becomes addictive. I remember the tradition of offering paan to visitors. The museum docent had discussed ornate boxes – presumably belonging to upper class families. At home, it was a simpler affair. Brass container for the leaves, the leaves were wrapped in a moist cheesecloth to keep the leaves from drying out. A brass plate covered the container, and held a small steel box containing the slaked lime, a few areca nuts and a steel nut cutter. The offering of paan to women visitors had felt very intimate. Instead of bringing the paan out on a platter, the guests would be taken to where the paan paraphernalia was kept for made to order personalized paan. Often the kitchen and in my great grandmother’s case, it was her puja room.
I have been remembering my enigmatic great grandmother, the woman with a few words. She had lived a long and quiet life and had passed away last week many years ago.
In this memory, we are at our grandmother’s home, a lovely two storied blue house in then idyllic suburbia of Calcutta, now a busy thriving small town. The boundary of the house was surrounded by areca palm and coconut trees. You could almost reach your hand out of the window for an areca nut. My mom was raised by my great grandmother. And my great grandmother had lived with my grandmother in her old age. It was a comfortable gathering of women who had known each other intimately. They were sitting on the cool terrazzo floor de-husking the freshly harvested areca nuts. My best guess is that I was eight or nine. I had asked to taste a bit of the areca nut and was offered a tiny pebble shaped one. It had tasted like munching on wood and it had made my head swim. That was the last time I had any component of a paan. Apparently, the younger areca nuts are psychoactive and causes a buzz and my grandmother loved that buzz.
My fascination with Pirahã
I don’t remember how I tumbled onto the Pirahã people and their language. But now I can’t get them out of my head. Daniel Everett, a missionary turned atheist turned linguist, is the primary source of our knowledge of Pirahã. He spent 30 years with Pirahã people, trying to convert them. In his words, his colonial adventure managed to convert only one person, himself, from a believer to an atheist. In finding Pirahã, he also found a massive breach in Noam Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory, Dan had found a language that doesn’t have recursion, the purported “universal grammar”.
Pirahã is an oral language like many. It was a lovely surprise that the language is also spoken via humming sounds, what to my ears sound like bird calls. It didn’t matter that the language didn’t have words for colors like red and black. If I could communicate via bird like calls, I would be totally OK without words for colors! Besides, the paint companies would have me covered. I learned that they don’t have words for numbers except “a few”, ” a bit more”, and “a pile”. That made me wonder how isolated they had been. I hail from a place where there is no isolation, ever. We have voting stations in the remotest of our remote villages. Apparently in 2024 elections, the Government officials traveled for seven hours to the remote Himalayan village, Warshi, 110 miles from Leh, to seek vote from three voters (link).
Then I learned that the Pirahã people didn’t have the concept of past and future. They live in the present, something the rest of us are all trying to do frantically and failing miserably. MIT researchers described them as world’s happiest people – they laughed and smiled a lot, the scientific marker of happy people. That had felt curious until I learned something that made me pause – their observed lack of folklore. Pirahã only tell stories that they, the protagonist, experienced. By the same definition, they do not have the concept of fiction. Apparently, their response to Dan speaking about God went as follows – “Pirahã” Did you speak to God? Dan: No. Pirahã: Did your dad speak to God? Dan: No. Pirahã: Then why are you talking about him?”
In every other way, the Pirahã are like any indigenous people. This hunter-gatherer community lives spread out in four “villages” along Maici River. They can spear river fish standing up in skinny canoes. They talk in bird songs when they go hunting in the forest so their communication blends in with the background noises. They know the life cycle of a thousand species intimately, those that surround them. If you want to learn more about Pirahã, check out “Inside the Pirahã World: Deciphering the Amazon’s Most Enigmatic Language (link)”
What does it mean to not have folklore? Art of living in the moment (e.g. Stoicism) doesn’t naturally lead to lack of folklore (e.g. Roman mythologies). The physicist training has kicked in. I love anomalies. I remember my graduate study advisor, if he ever saw a data point that was an outlier, he would either suggest it was a bug or suggest that the hypothesis needed adaptation. I believe that the linguistic community now accepts that Pirahã language defies the previously accepted “universal grammar” hypothesis. In summary, Pirahã is unique which means the “universal grammar” needs adaptation and Dan has a new hypothesis, a simpler one (link).
Is lack of a folklore another unique data point or is it really saying something? Searching the internet isn’t a way to look for the unique. We have an estimated 7000 languages today (link), the internet is dominated by 10 languages of which I understand only one. Nearly 3000 of these languages are endangered (link), we are losing two languages every month. In this expanse of loss and gaps, I can’t find another example of a culture that doesn’t have folklore.
A chocolate that nudged and rocked
Bon-fiction nudged my very first memory…
If you ask my brother, his first memory is from when he was a toddler in mum’s arms. Mine is from later years, somewhere between 3-5 years old, just starting school in a place I knew as Rajahmundry. The city was named after a 11th century king and is now called Rajamahendravaram. My mum says that I was the official translator for the family – going back and forth between Telegu and Bengali. I wish I remembered even an iota of Telegu. I remember my mom’s chickens, the well in the backyard, clusters of banana hanging on the clothesline and cowdung patties drying on the mud wall of the patio. The last were commonly used as fuel, was it the maid who brought them over from nearby fields? I have two very strong memories of the home in Rajahmundry. The first is that of a climbing jasmine, that would go all up on the rooftop of an outhouse. I adored that vine. I remember climbing up to the rooftop once with another girl who was older, it could be a fake memory, arising from a wanting. The other memory is somewhat disturbing, it is that of a pig being captured and tied to the bicycle. It was squealing loudly and I had imagined the pig knowing that it was on its way to getting butchered.
Enter Bon-fiction – found at our neighborhood green grocers, Sigona’s. We are adventurers when it comes to chocolate bars, you can get us to try a brand at least once. The whimsical art on the packaging caught our eye. Looking at fine print hooked us. Bon-fiction had won an award by Academy of Chocolate, we didn’t know the awarder or the awardee. When we were growing up in India, the home grown cacao and chocolate wasn’t worth writing about, let alone win anything. We soon learned that the cacao in Bon-fiction is grown in Rajahmahendravaram and in surrounding Godavari river basin (link). The other day, we had the opportunity of eating Federation of Odd, Bon-fiction’s “milk” chocolate, side by side with Thomas Keller and Armando Manni’s (K+M) Golden Milk chocolate, and I was delighted to find that Federation of Odd stood its ground firmly. Once we noticed one award winning chocolate that boasted of India’s terroir, we found more. Along with Bon-fiction, there are a growing number of tree-to-bar chocolates that boast of the Indian terroir – Paul and Mike, Kocoatrait, Soklet, Manam, Naviluna, Mason & Co, Anuttama, and Chitram. We can’t source the others yet.
Bon-fiction rocked my boat …
Have you noticed sinister things lurking around in the air that you don’t pay attention to, until you do. And I admit that I have the habit of burying my head in the sand to avoid bad news. When I started reading about cacao in Godavari basin, these sinister things came tumbling out. According to US Department of Labor, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, together, produce 60% of the world’s cocoa each year. Estimated 1.56 million children are engaged in child labor on cocoa farms in these two countries (link). US chocolate giant Mars, producers of the popular M&M, 3 Musketeers, Twix and Snickers, uses cacao harvested by kids (link). Hershey, Cargill, Mondelēz (Cadbury, Toblerone) and Nestle (KitKat) are also in the same boat (link). In view of child slave labor, cacao farmers getting less than minimum wage ($3/day) and farming related deforestation in Africa feel like lesser crimes.
If I were a potter
I have always imagined myself to be a potter.
Couple decades ago, I had access to a wheel on and off for a few years. It turned out that I could only ever make heavy bottom pottery. By that I don’t mean pear shaped, I mean clay that lays heavy at the bottom of the pot. And my lump of clay was the master of me. If I wanted the clay to turn into a vase, it would turn into a bowl. When I wanted a bowl, it would want to be a mug. At first it was frustrating, then it became amusing. How often do you get your life lessons on the wheel? Failure on the potter’s wheel was my first experience with failure. Up until that time, I had assume that practice makes one perfect. No, no, no…. Practice is just that, at best, it is a form of meditation. Eventually this protagonist learned that she is good at a couple of things and bad at a very large number of things. She is good at not letting failure come in the way of passion. She also has a great imagination that is not limited by reality.
In that imagination, I own a studio in the Napa valley.
Could it be the hack of the century?
I remember a time when I had re-discovered eggs and soldiers. That was a world before recommendation engines, and before influencers. I had just learned to make reproducible soft boiled eggs and had just started becoming carb conscious thereby wanting to stretch the slice of bread. I hope this isn’t another re-discovery of epic proportions.
Passage of 25 yrs
A quarter of a century ago, we were married in St Helena. It was a wet day in Feb. This Feb, we found ourselves in St Helena again, this time to see a close friend during his post-op recovery at the acute care Adventist Hospital. Feb in St Helena is just the same as it was a quarter of a century ago – the fog laden tree tops, moss covered trees, the grape fields submerged in water, and the raging Napa river.
Read the rest of this entry »A (tenuous) link to Thikse monastery
Summer of 2009, we were in Leh and Thikse was one of the first monastery we had visited. Imagine my surprise when I caught a glimpse of Thikse again, this time in Berkeley. This was another gem of a finding at the Cultured Pickle Shop.
Cultured Pickle had a few books at the serving table. And one of them was Elysian Kitchens. It caught my eye and I flipped through the recipes. I came across the poppy seed tsampa pancakes with apricot syrup, a recipe from the monks of Thikse monastry. I could not be more intrigued!
An everyday surprise
The scarp broth is a new habit inspired by a cup of scrap broth that was the first course at Cultured Pickle in Berkeley. We drink ours like a clear broth with a touch of salt, pepper and vinegar. Any leftover goes into next day’s savory porridge or soup.
Wilderness nourishes the soul
Last November, in honor of Native American Heritage month, I ended up buying manoomin from Bineshii. I am not fond of cultivated wild rice but chef Sean Sherman can be particularly inspiring and I was inspired to explore wild wild rice. Where cultivated wild rice is tough, the foraged manoomin, a true wild rice, is delicate. Manoomin cooks in 15 minutes and its aroma is the confluence of earth and wood. Around Nov/Dec, when chestnuts and mushrooms can be foraged, and cranberry is star of the festivals, a perfect union is ready to form. See Sherman’s recipe for wild rice pilaf, with mushrooms, chestnuts and cranberries.
I have since ordered my second batch of manoomin from Bineshii.
Read the rest of this entry »Exploring connections (or life lessons from fungi)
I am starting to develop new traditions and fungi has a role to play in that development.
For those of us who leave home to migrate elsewhere, whether by choice or not, the traditions can never be what they once were. I have finally accepted the loss of my yesteryear Bengali traditions. One of my favorite was to wake up with my mother and years later, with my grandmother to tune into Mahisasurmardini at the advent of Durga Puja. We would tune into All India Radio at 4 am from the comfort of our bed to listen to Birendra Krishna Bhadra chant the prayer(link). Mahisasurmardini goes back to the dawn of Hindu religion and Birendra Bhadra’s voice goes back to 1931. Back when I was a child, sleep was precious and yet, the connection I felt with my elders pulled me into joining the family ritual and Bhadra’s primal vocals, chosen to wake up goddess Durga year after year, invariably woke me up. Now, my elders are no longer close to me and sleep is no longer precious. The powerful and moving voice of Bhadra gives me the goosebumps still. One year I experimented with tuning in when it was 4 am in India, in order to join million others in Bengal. The wakeful of the mid-afternoon California, with its bright lights and busyness, took me even further away from the pre-dawn experience.
The traditions co-evolve with the environment – like the fungi to its terroir.
Read the rest of this entry »Exploring the in-between ideas, the plum blossom
This is work of Qi Baishi (Chinese, 1864–1957), an artist who revitalized traditional Chinese ink painting. The particular piece was displayed at the Asian Art Museum and is titled “Plum Blossoms”. The accompanying description read: “Plum blossoms were praised for their fearless spirit in the face of harsh cold due to their early blooming period. Instead of competing for attention with peach and pear blossoms in spring, they bloom during the coldest weather. Their fragrance is subtle and cool, symbolizing the auspicious arrrival of spring. ” The art inscription reads:
"In the quiet moonlight, glimpses of the true essence,
A celestial figure, elegant and pure, is untouched by dust.
With just a single white, dominating the heavens,
Overshadow a thousand flowers, which dare not bloom"
A lookback at 2024
Last year, the afternoon of the 31st, our cruise ship had landed on the Half Moon island of the South Shetland Islands in the Antarctic peninsula. A lot happened in 2024, I was expecting it to feel like a long year (link to Radiolab episode The Secret to a Long Life), but that didn’t happen.
Read the rest of this entry »A quiet farewell
Baba slipped away quietly, his sannyasam concluded (link). His ashes were scattered by the family in river Hooghly, by the ghat, where he would come by for evening snack of tea and jhal-muri (link), Goddess Durga visarjans, and small boat rides (link). I imagine his spirit swimming alongside swarms of Hilsa (Ilish), his favorite fish that come up the Hooghly to breed between Vijay Dashami (end-Oct) and Saraswati puja (end-Jan).
In life, he was vibrant, and laughed easily (link). He had bearings of an educator – straight as an arrow and fond of rules. In his personal life, his needs were simple – aside from his fondness for all things fish (link), and diverse plant based Bengali food (link), I don’t recall him wanting much. In his professional life, he was more accomplished than most. He had grown up in post-partition Bengal, born to impoverished migrant parents who were driven away from their home and belongings in Bangladesh. When I was growing up, he was part of what is now known as National Center for Disease Control, India’s version of CDC, formerly known as National Institute of Communicable Diseases (1963), and founded as Central Malaria Bureau (1909). He eventually rose up the ranks to direct NICD for several years. I remember growing up with vocabulary of communicable diseases like malaria, HIV and plague. In retirement, he moved to Kolkata and to my mom’s surprise became busier than ever. The last two decades of his active life he provided pro-bono services – he provided physician services to villagers, founded a shelter for the elderly and helped establish a new pharmaceutical university. The rest of his family could hardly keep up with his enthusiasm for service to humankind.
I have missed him for a while and will continue to miss him, he was my north star.
Slot canyons, part I – Anza Borrego SP
Slot canyons of Anza Borrego are perhaps one of the best attractions of the park. To get to it, you have to take the easy to miss Butte Pass. At places, the canyon is so narrow that you have to take off your backpack to pass through. It is always amazing to see nature’s artwork – what she does over a millenium or three. In human scale, perhaps Anselm Kiefer comes close. He works on his extra large works of art over years, sometimes over decades, adding little bits over time.
A slug rises
A headline caught my eye a few weeks ago – Assembly Bill(AB 1850) passed recognizing the banana slug as the official state slug. It took a bill – not scientists! A slug joined other well known symbols, like the California grizzly bear and the California poppy. That is when I looked up the list of California State symbols and learned about the lesser known symbols such as the California quail (1932) and Golden trout (1947). Call me silly, but I was expecting to find weed on the list. Anyways, I adore this slug, it is yellow, it is large, and it lives on our forest floors. They are caretakers of the giant Redwoods, our state tree. They eat plants that compete with the Redwood seedlings but never the Redwood seedlings. Somehow they know that these little Redwood seedlings one day will become the giants that will give them back the moist forest floor.
Read the rest of this entry »
A body scan
Very recently, I read the book “When Breath Becomes Air“. It is a slim book written by a young neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi, during the terminal year of his cancer journey. What I heard is a doctor explore the question of identity – how it changes when significant health related events happen. He talks at length about his own identity, the one that is inseparable from his vocation, when he is weakened by cancer and can’t be the neurosurgeon any more. The book made me question how my own identity has shifted in time, with changes in my health after five decades of trodding on this planet. I have already lived longer than Paul, much longer. I am healthy. A little worn out perhaps, but who isn’t. Today, I invite you to join me as I undertake a body scan meditation, to observe this health-identity relationship.
Foraged chestnuts
A cabin shaded by tamarisk trees
The tamarisk grove campground is at the intersection of two roads, S3 and Hwy 78, and shaded by large tamarisk trees, an invasive species. There are some nice short hikes in the vicinity including the Yaqui Wells trail. From the Bill Kenyon overlook, you can see the broad San Felipe wash by 78. The famous slot canyons are only 10 miles away.
A mesa in Cuyama Badlands
A camping trip
For most people, a camping trip is common place. Not for us. We are city people, having grown up and lived most of our lives in metropolitan areas. We know how to visit museums and eat at restaurants. We appreciate books and movies. We can even attend festivals – jazz, coffee. When it comes to life skills, it is summarized by our ability to hike a few miles and our ability to cook up a meal anywhere. Have we changed a car tire or pooped in the wild? No sir, but theoretically speaking, we knew how to. With that in our back pocket, we decided to go camping.
Most people camp in summers – the days are long and nights are warm. But we love the deserts. There is something romantic about deserts that no other place captures for us. Our last desert trip was Joshua Tree. And compared to that trip, we had Antarctic ready winter gear. This Thanksgiving, we decided to camp at Tamarisk Grove in Anza Borrego with a camping head start in Cuyama Badlands.
Read the rest of this entry »An incongruous Halloween this year
This year has progressed at a breakneck speed and I am catching myself unprepared every day. Halloween felt equally unprepared. Imagine a politically charged year with the election day less than a week away. Then imagine trick o’ treating, which has struggled in the aftermath of pandemic. Add to it the fact that the day coincided with Diwali, a festive and vibrant festival of lights. The incongruity of it all added to the confusion, I wasn’t quite sure how to celebrate.
But I was determined to improve upon last year. I watched Babish eat and rank 60 candies (link) to rank his personal favorites. Last minute scouring the web for four of his favorites, we managed to get our hands on nerds and sour patch. Result, the kids declared our house, the best house ever. Check.
I scrambled last minute to set up the decorations. After racking my brain between Halloween and Diwali, I decided to go on a tangent with Buddhist prayer flags. Check.
If you prick us, do we not …
…bleed? That is the question. This moment is dedicated to my sister-in-law who posits that Haldiram’s bhujia flows through our veins.
This was the year of attending a panjabi wedding, our cousin’s, the youngest in the cohort. Monsoon rain was falling outside and inside the home, we were being rained on by boxes of high quality sweets and namkeens. It would have been rude not to eat even if one could self control. There is no self control so we arrived at a compromise. First, I convinced myself that ethical and environmental impact of wasting all the good stuff far outweighed health hazards. Second, some good people on the internet suggested that sweets can be frozen and revived. So, we ate the namkeens and froze the sweets. If you have never tried a mathri chaat and egg for breakfast, I highly recommend that you do. We are now on a monthly ration of sweets. Typically on the first of the month, a rationally rationed vaccum sealed bag is being opened.
Locomotoring 