Southern Spice
Down south, a person's life is planned almost the moment he or she is born. If you are a boy, you have to go through school for a specified number of years, which is usually quite a lot. You then find yourself a job that would require you not to move a muscle except to get to workplace and involve minimal brain activity. It's a wonder that there actually exist so many jobs of this kind. This job would then give you the licence to go up the path of matrimony. More often then not, you let your parents decide, either due to sheer laziness of having to find someone or low morale after a few rejects.
If you are a girl though, your life goes like this. You go through school for the same number of years(people are rather broad-minded here you know) and then you go through a second school, one that prepares you to make the life of the guy you marry comfortable. This school is run mainly by your mother, with guest lectures from the grandmother, the numerous women relatives and ofcourse, the friendly neighbourhood aunties. This school begins when you graduate and runs for the rest of your life. Here you learn interior decoration, people skills (how to keep your man under the impression that he runs the house) and ofcourse, cooking. It is this palatable branch that I took upon myself to master in the time between my graduation and the life after it.
It started about 2 weeks ago. An hour into the activity and my respect for the cooks in the hostel mess, on who I had showered my choicest blessings at every possible opportunity, increased exponentially. Cooking, as I saw it, was applied mathematics at its toughest. Making plain rice involved a million calculations; the number of times you clean it, the amount of water you cook it with so it doesnt become mush or feel like fishbones down your throat....whoa!!! Though my mind cried that I had had enough, I trudged on, hoping that practice would indeed make me perfect.
The days went by, me trying desperately to get a hang of things with all of destiny against me. The last straw came on a day not too long ago, when I thought I was good enough to make breakfast by myself. Not over-estimating my capacities I set myself the task of making rava idli and chutney. What followed could go down in the annals of history as a tragedy of slightly less magnitude than the Gas tragedy or the 9/11 attack. That only with regards to the number of people who were hurt. The pressure inside the cooker defied all laws I knew and the cooker decided to open up by itself. Things flew around, including the half-baked idlis that I had painstakingly made. I didnt even have a chance to get to the chutney part of it.
I suffered a few physical burns, but it was my morale that had been battered beyond repair. My mum put up a smiling face even as she tried hard to conceal the disappointment she felt. The classes continued. But did I get any better? What can I say. Ever since I entered the kitchen, my brother decided to go on a diet. And well, I've never before seen him stick to it this long.
If you are a girl though, your life goes like this. You go through school for the same number of years(people are rather broad-minded here you know) and then you go through a second school, one that prepares you to make the life of the guy you marry comfortable. This school is run mainly by your mother, with guest lectures from the grandmother, the numerous women relatives and ofcourse, the friendly neighbourhood aunties. This school begins when you graduate and runs for the rest of your life. Here you learn interior decoration, people skills (how to keep your man under the impression that he runs the house) and ofcourse, cooking. It is this palatable branch that I took upon myself to master in the time between my graduation and the life after it.
It started about 2 weeks ago. An hour into the activity and my respect for the cooks in the hostel mess, on who I had showered my choicest blessings at every possible opportunity, increased exponentially. Cooking, as I saw it, was applied mathematics at its toughest. Making plain rice involved a million calculations; the number of times you clean it, the amount of water you cook it with so it doesnt become mush or feel like fishbones down your throat....whoa!!! Though my mind cried that I had had enough, I trudged on, hoping that practice would indeed make me perfect.
The days went by, me trying desperately to get a hang of things with all of destiny against me. The last straw came on a day not too long ago, when I thought I was good enough to make breakfast by myself. Not over-estimating my capacities I set myself the task of making rava idli and chutney. What followed could go down in the annals of history as a tragedy of slightly less magnitude than the Gas tragedy or the 9/11 attack. That only with regards to the number of people who were hurt. The pressure inside the cooker defied all laws I knew and the cooker decided to open up by itself. Things flew around, including the half-baked idlis that I had painstakingly made. I didnt even have a chance to get to the chutney part of it.
I suffered a few physical burns, but it was my morale that had been battered beyond repair. My mum put up a smiling face even as she tried hard to conceal the disappointment she felt. The classes continued. But did I get any better? What can I say. Ever since I entered the kitchen, my brother decided to go on a diet. And well, I've never before seen him stick to it this long.
posted by Satyashree Srikanth at 7:18 PM
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