Eat cake

Published on September 20, 2012 in Good things and You live, you learn. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I’ve always envied people who know how to bake. My boss’s wife makes this amazing home-made cakes, which he usually brings for us during his birthdays and they are always yummylicious. I, on the other hand once tried baking a cake 5 years back and accidentally set the oven to microwave instead of convection – a realization which took place only after I smelled the cake burning and was horrified to find the so-called chocolate cake take a shape that looked identical to dog shit. I still made my guests that day eat the central, unburnt portion of the “cake” and that was the last time those guests ate at my place ever since.

Of late, a colleague and expert master cake-baker recently inducted me into the world of pressure cooker baking, which I didn’t even know was possible. She makes these delicious sponge cake in her pressure cooker, which I find is way better than the commercial cakes you find in the market. She gave me the recipe and soon, I made my first eggy-smelling, centre-portion-undercooked cake but I didn’t lose heart and even after that disaster, I made four cakes in a row – each of which turned out to be better than the previous ones.

This one was a simple, sponge cake made in the pressure cooker, thanks to my microwave oven conking out for a long time now. I didn’t know that you could use the pressure cooker instead of an oven and thanks to another of my colleague lending me a separator and a baking dish, I could bake many cakes in a row.

 

The recipe for this sponge cake is pretty simple:

Beat 3 eggs (I am so lazy, I did this directly in a blender of the mixi), 3/4 cup sugar, 3/4 cup refined oil, 1/4 cup melted butter and 1 tea spoon vanilla essence.

Sift 1 cup flour and add 1 teaspoon baking powder. Add this to the blender and let the mixi do your dirty work for a bit. Add milk if it gets too dry down there (milk is protein, not lubricant – sorry, this is due to too many “Finding Nemo 3D” ads I’ve seen on the internet these days)

Line your baking tin with oil or butter. Add the contents of your blender. Put the separator at the base of the pressure cooker and place your tin on top. DO NOT add water inside the pressure cooker although if you want to ignore this warning sign I saw everywhere on the internet, you can go ahead and tell me how things go.

Bake on high flame for 5 minutes, then lower the heat and bake for another 35 to 40 minutes. Turn off the gas (can you believe LPG cylinder is now going to cost Rs 750 in India! No wonder Mamata walked out of the UPA 2, I would have done the same :D ) and don’t open the lid for another ten minutes.

Do that usual toothpick/knife in the centre thing, although 45 minutes is waaayy too long enough to cook a lousy cake – and if it comes out clean, your cake is ready to eat – although you might want to let it cool down first, if you don’t want a burnt tongue to begin with.

This was the second chocolate cake I baked and although it looks like a brownie, it was pretty moist and yummy, if I say so myself:

I forgot to take a picture of the cake and had to make do with taking a photo of the cut pieces inside the tupperware jar. Thats why the depth in the photo, if you are perceptive enough ;) If you want to make a chocolate cake, my guru said that you have to reduce the flour to half a cup and add another half cup cocoa powder. This cake cooked sooner than the earlier one, and thats because of less flour, my guru again said.

The next cake I baked was a Marble Cake. Now, this was my favorite cake back in college days and although it didn’t taste nearly as perfect as the delicious Kerala bakery ones, I still feel happy with all the swirls, which is done simply by making figure 8′s with a knife.

So now that I became fairly confident in my ability to bake, at the very least an edible cake, I decided to try, what was originally a banana bread, which later turned out to be a banana pound cake of sorts. Either way, the crust was the best part and now I am looking forward to making other cakes, especially a rum soaked raisin cake of which I am told, takes at least a week’s time for the soaking to be done.

Now, these are no way, by far the best cakes you have seen on most blogs. But for me, I have come a long way from baking a dog-shit lookalike cake to edible, yummy home-made cakes. The next thing I want to learn is how to put the icing on the cake, of which I am sure my first few attempts will look like a real car accident. But here’s to learning from mistakes, of which at least, I am an expert.

My dear students

Published on September 5, 2012 in Good things, hopes & dreams, Life as it happens and Making it better. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Thank you all for your good wishes today on Teacher’s Day. Thank you for celebrating and acknowledging the role that we play in teaching you for these three short years, a time that gets over in the blink of an eye. Candidly speaking, I may not have always behaved my best with you – god only knows how many times I had to lecture you out of the classroom on random topics under the sun but it was done in the best of intentions. I only wanted you to not to make the same mistakes that I did when I was a student. It is so easy to get carried away by other things that you tend to lose sight of the important things in life.

As a student, it is not only your duty to make the best of facilities life has to offer you but also to glean as much knowledge from your teachers as you can so that you get the best education while your young minds are still fresh and capable of learning. Some may misconstrue this sense of push negatively but this is a small price to pay for setting you in the right direction, a realization which you may develop later on as you all grow older, just as I did.

As a teacher, it is not only my job to impart education but also to inculcate a sense of responsibility to your society in more ways than one. Discipline to yourself and the people around you contributes to your growing up into a mature adult and becoming a credit to your society. Punctuality, respect to elders, politeness, cleanliness, decency, growing a positive attitude and being helpful to one another goes a long way in developing your character as an individual.

Today, I remember a lot of  my students with whom I have been fortunate enough to interact with all these years and maybe leave a trace of impression for the better in their lives. I had a student who studied with us only for a year and besides being the class topper, he was fortunate enough to get a job in the Indian Navy and he now sails around the country but never fails to call me up whenever he visits home. When he left the college, his mother had come to collect his certificates and when we told her about how good a student her son was, that he was such an intelligent boy and we are sorry to lose him even though he was surely leaving us for better opportunities, she had tears in her eyes – this is a memory which I have not forgotten to this day.

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The North-East Divide

Published on August 17, 2012 in No good and Sikkim. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

In the aftermath of India turning into a senior citizen, we witness a terrorism of a new kind – the chasing of the North East clan away from Bengaluru. And the mass exodus proves just this point – that we, the people from North East India don’t really feel either safe or secure in our homeland aka the non-Chinky part of India. Its bad enough that we don’t look like regular Indians so much so that the remaining North Easterners (whoever are left back in Bengaluru) are easily walking bulls-eye target for such kind of threats to be executed.

And the worst part is, no one really knows or cares about the difference between an Assamese or a Manipuri or between a Sikkimese or say, a Naga. Just like to the rest of us, there is really no difference between say, a Malayali and a Tamilian. Call it racism, thats just how it is in a typical 28-state third world country like ours.

I love Bengaluru, I have been there umpteen times. My best friends live there and I go there to visit them every couple of years. I find it hard to imagine the fear and terror invoked in just a couple of days when people just like me are fleeing back to their respective states in a state of mental panic. Who would blame them when we continue to live in such a world where terror attacks have become a common enough thing.

The fact that the TV is full of images of people thronging away in the railway platform is borderline ridiculous. I cannot imagine their plight as they look forward to make the three to four day journey back home in what could perhaps be described best as (Shashi Tharoor’s) cattle class situation.

So as my North Eastern clan return like flocking migratory birds to their respective states, I can only imagine that an eye for an eye would make our country finally immigration-free. Imagine a world where Sikkim is full of only Sikkimese people – we would have to forget how to speak Hindi and probably English too. Of course, the travel industry would have to commit mass suicide rather than face a lifetime of unemployment. Considering that most of us are lazy buggers who only want cushy government jobs, all work involving menial jobs would pile up while on the flip side, the infinite construction work converting Sikkim into a concrete jungle state would finally and no doubt, thankfully see its end.

Safe journey to all the people traveling home. And good luck to those who stayed behind. Hope you all stay safe.

Happy birthday, dad

Published on August 14, 2012 in Good things and memoirs. Closed Tags: , .

Today was my dad’s birthday. He would have been 59 had he not left us for his home up above in the heavenly skies eight years back. My dad was born Youngden Norbu Dorjee in a remote village called Kewzing, South Sikkim, the eldest of eight children. He once told me that there had been another Youngden in his school so he chopped off his first name to “Young” and thats how he became – Young Norbu Dorjee, forever young at heart!

He finished his primary education in Kewzing’s government school where the teachers used to teach them their ABC’s like this: “A bhan” which means ”say A” in Nepali. So the entire primary students used to chant – “A bhan!”. This was followed by “B bhan” and the students on auto pilot chanted “B bhan!” You get the idea.

My late grandfather had been the mandal of the village. This translates to being the headman/ head honcho/ Big Boss of the village, give or take. My dad used to tell us stories about their old wooden house being burnt to the ground once during election time when the then chief minister didn’t take very kindly to their support of the opposition – you know, like those old pot-broilers of politically challenged Bollywood movies. Thankfully no one got hurt and the entire family shifted to a different location and constructed a new house in which my cousins and I spent many years of our childhood together. When I went back to attend a family gathering some years back, I was amazed to see the old house, which somehow seemed so big to me back then, was actually a modest two storied wooden building somehow remembered to be larger than life by all those childhood memories.

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Mommy diaries

Published on August 1, 2012 in Lee and Life as it happens. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Alternatively, \m/ for mommy

You know you are almost a stranger to your own blog when you forget your username and password. Blame it on the post 33 grey cells (yes, THIRTY THREE! And to think I once lamented turning 28!) And in case anyone was wondering, this is exactly how we grow old.

Being a mommy to a two and half year old means a whirlwind of activities most of which involve having to wipe instant crocodile tears and dancing along with Mickey freaking Mouse and his friends on TV. I sometimes find myself humming cartoon show tunes at work and quickly stop before anyone realizes I am a huge Doraemon fan. Who wouldn’t love a robot from the future sent back in time by the creator to improve the quality of life of his 10 year old great, great grandfather! I could use a robot slave or two myself right now.

Not that I want to indulge in Baby Olympics but Lee can now recite the entire English as well as Hindi alphabets and has recently learnt how to write ‘A’. I find this incredible because as a kid, I played throughout the year during nursery, learned big alphabets in LKG and small alphabets only in UKG! So now we have the walls of our house covered in weirdly misshapen A’s – let me tell you – whoever paints their house in anticipation of a child is really just throwing money down the drain!

These toddlers seem to live on air and biscuits, I swear. Feeding time is a battle in itself and so is night time. Today, I had to spend exactly an hour trying to put her to sleep when she was willing to anything but sleep. Bedtime rituals involve telling the story of “The TV and that fan and that table and the lizard on the wall” and almost anything she can spot in the night light. Sometimes I doze off and she in turn sings me a lullaby, “Hush lil mummy, don’t say a word…”. I have to try not to laugh out loud or else she’s up in an instant and up to her wide-awake tricks such as shaking head and shoulders, pretty much Exorcist-style.

It has been years since I have been to watch a movie and have forgotten how pop corn tastes like. The last one I watched had been Avatar which means the exiled humans have reached halfway back to earth by now. Also, contrary to popular belief, its not because of motherhood that I have stayed away from blogging much to the disappointment of my reader(s). Its just that I’m plain lazy. Therefore, I will:

(a) Either continue writing on random topics henceforth, as and when I can; or

(b) See you all in another year

… whichever is sooner.

Yours, to take the Mickey

Rinchen \m/

 

Sikkim’s worst earthquake

Published on September 20, 2011 in Life as it happens and Sikkim. 1 Comment Tags: , .

It was a rainy sunday morning on the 18th and since we’d woken up late, we’d nearly put off our plans for sightseeing to Namchi’s Samdruptse and Solophok which is about two and a half hours from my place. We reached Namchi, South Sikkim about midday and spent the rest of the day there. We headed back home to Singtam in the evening when an earthquake of 6.8 richter scale hit our small state of Sikkim at around 6 pm. Ironically, we didnt really feel the quake since we were in the vehicle but we did see many people on the way running out of their homes in panic and several people outdoors along the highway. I assumed that a fight had broken out and we didnt bother to stop by and ask what was happening.

A few kilometres ahead, several vehicles came to a stand still and we had to stop because of the traffic jam. It was then terrified people all around us started talking about a huge earthquake that rocked the entire place and also caused a landslide right in the middle of the road. I could make out from the people’s petrified faces that they were really scared out of their wits and one lady even said that the quake had washed away her small wooden house in a landslide. The drivers of the vehicles ahead of us gathered the men and they ended up removing a small portion of the rocks which allowed us enough leeway to cross the road. We then proceeded our journey while I started frantically dialing our families to ensure they were ok.

Unfortunately, the mobile networks were totally jammed and none of us could get through to anyone. Then out of nowhere, my colleague got through my phone and said that the earthquake was so devastating that couple of buildings in Singtam had buckled down and that some people had succumbed to their deaths and several were injured who were being taken to the nearest hospitals. He also informed that the quake had hit Gangtok equally hard and that the devastation was state-wide.

I sent a silent prayer to god to keep our families safe and tried calling them again and again but to no avail. That was perhaps the darkest moment of our lives, when we didnt know if our loved ones were safe or not. It was only after about half an hour later that our phones started working and we talked with our families in Gangtok and were reassured that they were safe.

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Looking back

Published on August 14, 2011 in Good things and memoirs. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

 

A friend tagged me in this old school pic today in Facebook. This was probably taken way back in 1990, last day of school, class V – St. Thomas, Gangtok.  I’m in touch with a lot of my friends in this photo, thanks to Facebook. Unfortunately, I also dont remember some people in the picture and have no recollection of interacting with them. I think of them and hope they have done well in their lives. I wish them happiness and if we should ever meet again in the future, I hope we get to talk at least once and recall this wonderful moment of carefree childhood.

I see many friends in this picture whom I’ve lost touch with completely and even Facebook could not bring us together. I remember the brief moments when we interacted, said a few words, spent a few moments together and I now wonder where they are. I remember them fondly and wish them well. I hope to meet them again someday and recollect those simpler times when we were kids.

I remember my teachers in this photo and how two decades flit by in the blink of an eye. I dont know where they are but I want to thank them with all my heart for making me the person that I am today.

And to the rest of  my friends with whom I had the wonderful opportunity to spend those glorious years of childhood together AND have the privilege of strolling down memory lane, thanks to this pic, salüt!

Goodbyes are not forever, goodbyes are not the end. They simply mean we’ll miss you, until we meet again ~ Author Unknown.

Make some noise

Published on August 6, 2011 in Lee and Life as it happens. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

Like I was saying here, I dont know when it was that we all started becoming so quiet. Even I never intended to abandon my blog, seeing as my last post was in Jan 2011. I know I was busy with The Baby but to be honest, I was all too busy downloading and watching Dexter, Prison Break and Modern Family. I must admit, this stuff is pretty addictive. Kinda like the methamphetamine shit thats being brewed in the Super Meth Lab in Breaking Bad. But thats for you to experience for yourself.

(Tips for movie-addict new moms: Invest in a super-awesome headphone, in my case I got the Sennheiser one with a 3 metre cable so that I could watch TV at night. 9pm to midnight and beyond. Remember, although if you overdo it for more than a few times and consequently walk around like a zombie for the rest of the office day, you only have yourself to blame and not me)

Post my Pondicherry vacation last December, I havent been anywhere. Shuttling between work and home pretty much consumes our lives, doesnt it? I’ve even started seriously noting my petrol consumption and that crap which I’ve never bothered with before. Something I remember my dad used to do so back in the days. I used to get pulled up quite a lot because I used to also include the last moving unit to the total tally and get the mileage in lakhs. Real funny now. Growing old sucks.

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Vacation – 2010

Published on January 22, 2011 in Good things, Lee, Life as it happens and Wanderlust. 14 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Auroville beach - December 2010

I love the beach. As I walked on the warm sands of Auroville beach, I realized that it took me 10 years to come back to the ocean. Imagine. How in the world did I ever let that happen? This does not bode well. Pencilling in “New year 2012 at Goa” immediately before I forget. Also waiting for Sidin Vadakut to reply once again to my email but I guess thats pushing it too far.

So back in August this year, I had been wondering where to spend my precious winter vacation. Precious because this was my first vacation post baby girl Lee as well as post M-Tech 1st semester, my brain had sufficiently stopped working and needed a kickstart in order to usher in the next semester. Oh yes, the M-tech thing. We go further back to May this year.

I was happily on my long extended maternity leave when a colleague suggested applying for further studies from July at SMIT, Majhitar. It all seemed impossible at that time, what with going back to studies after (gasp) 9 years and that too, with a baby and (gasp gasp) I still hadnt got a maid to help around the house. But like all good movies, everything started to fall back into place and before long, I gathered enough courage to leave my baby with the maid at home while I went about gallivanting around for stuff like work and studies.

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RIP Steven Namchyo

Published on July 14, 2010 in Uncategorized. Closed

Photograph courtesy: Karchoong

The one thing I will always remember about Steve is his smile, his handshake and how he always had a few good words for everybody. A talented guitarist, one who played with the likes of Parikrama in the 90′s, his humility and above all, his gentleness endeared him to many, including even those who didnt know him well.

41 is no age to die. He had high fever for the past few days, which rapidly turned fatal and he passed away yesterday. I will always remember him playing with his band Route 66 in Little Italy, Gangtok where many of us spent wonderful evenings made memorable with their music and his guitar.

Rest in peace, Steven daju. Words are not enough.

Thank you for the music. We will miss you.

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