Found a unique ingredient – Spicy Tamarind Vodka!! Made by Smirnoff. I am sure my friends from India would love it. Made the first cocktail from a suggestion in Smirnoff’s website – Spicy Mangorita!
Used Tajin salt to rim the glass and 5 ounces of mango juice, quarter of lime juice and one and a half ounces of spicy tamarind vodka for the drink. Came out fairly well!!
In case you are wondering why I am three and a half months late… well, today is the New Year’s Day in West Bengal (the state I come from in India). It is the year 1428 for us.
And if you are wondering why we celebrate three and a half months late… this might help…
(adapted from a post from seven years back)
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Today is New Year’s Day for us – the Bengalis. If you were not aware, we, the Bengalis originate from a small state in the Eastern part of India intuitively called “West Bengal”.
You might be wondering why do we celebrate New Year’s in the middle of April. To understand that, you have to have a deep appreciation for who we are.
First, and foremost, we hate cold weather. “Thanda legey jaabey” (“Thou shalt catch a cold”) is the most commonly uttered full Bengali sentence. (I believe closely followed by “Ombol hoyechhe” – that is a story for another day). The mercury has to hover somewhere around 80 degrees Fahrenheit and we promptly adorn our heads with monkey caps (a prehistoric version of the ski mask). With a pompom on the top, to boot!
Most of January we are under our “lep toshok” (quilts) – and that one pair of socks we seem to have a love affair with. Way too deep to come out and even remotely consider celebrating New Year’s. Mid April, on the other hand is nice and toasty in the high 80s. Which, is the perfect weather to come out and celebrate. A “half sweater” (sleeveless vest) goes just about fine with that weather and celebrations.
Second, we are a little overwhelmed by the concept of New Year’s resolutions made on January 1st. Especially, since almost all such resolutions somehow need us to go to the gym. Gyms and us get along as well as the Kardashians and the concept of staying married. We simply don’t understand the unholy haste to sweat ourselves to death in the gym. We get enough practice in our crowded buses and trying to chase the crows away from the food on our balconies. We are doing just fine with our rice and “rosogollas”, thank you very much!
And third, we need our regular festivals and the associated one week “casual leave” from work every month. When it comes to actually working and the work hours, the French have nothing on us. We scoff at the concept that they waste their parliament’s valuable time passing laws limiting work to only 20 hours a week. On that front, we are very self reliant. We do that ourselves without needing any stupid laws to help us.
For every month we have our earmarked festival – New Year’s in January (Oh! the irony!!), “Saraswati Pujo” in February, “Dol” in March, “Pochise Boisakh” in May and so on and so forth. April is the only month we had nothing. And lo and behold!- we chose April for our New Year’s! And to be fair to the bordering months, we chose bang in the middle of the month of April to celebrate our New Year’s!
Plus it is always a great sport to debate over which saree or “kurta” to wear while our American brethren toil the midnight oil to file their taxes!!
There! You have it now!!
Came to office in Chicago this week. Walked into my cubicle and was immediately met with a good humored prank from a colleague. (The needle of suspicion points to Chris or Deval 🙂 ).
Loved it. Does the bear not look like somebody who is not happy with our recently concluded annual appraisal? 🙂
This is the kind of fun I am going to miss if everybody starts working from home forever.
Recently, in a CEO forum, I saw something that resonated strongly with me. The CEO’s quote was:
“What is the human side of work? How do you maintain a culture? That’s what we want. The Number One source of happiness in this world is having a good job, working with good people, doing good work that you enjoy. Is that going to mean sitting at your computer in the bedroom with your cat jumping on you?”
It was a great spring afternoon. The temperatures were nice, the sun was warm and not too hot and all of Atlanta was yellow with pollen. Wanted to take in some of the sunlight by the pool. Not that I was looking for something that would change my mood, but went with this cocktail – “Capricious” – from Food and Wine Magazine.
A brief background on this cocktail…
“At Tales of the Cocktail 2008, an annual festival in New Orleans, Eric Alperin created this Martini variation for a party hosted by St-Germain, the French producers of artisanal elderflower liqueur. Because vermouth and gin have lots of botanical elements, they’re natural partners for the lightly sweet, floral liqueur.”
This is 1.5 oz of gin (used Bombay Sapphire), 0.5 oz elderflower liqueur (used St. Germain), 0.5 oz dry Vermouth (used Rivata) and a couple of dashes of bitters (used Peychaud’s)
I had to devise a system to travel light during my trips to India every quarter. I did not want to check in luggage (all those flight delays and lost baggage caused too many headaches) and I did not want to lug around too much weight on my shoulders either.
So, I basically kept a whole set of stuff in India. I had shirts, shorts, jeans, night clothes, shoes, socks, running clothes, running shoes, chappals, hats, winter clothes, chargers, adapters, tripod and what have you – all neatly packed in a big bag. After every trip, my mom would get the clothes washed and ironed and keep them safe in the almirah for my next trip.
The night before I showed up, she would bring it out, get somebody to go buy toilet paper, bottles of water and a Pears glycerine soap. I have no idea why but she always got Pears glycerine soap for me.
This time, the realization dawned on me that the life span of that bag full of stuff has come to an end. I am not coming back to this house any more. And certainly, I am not coming back often enough to India to justify keeping a whole set of stuff here.
Had to dismantle the whole system. Gave away the clothes mostly to my brother, brother in law and my nephews. Threw away most of electronics stuff.
Another reminder of a chapter closing…
Back in the days, when we were kids, if we woke up in the middle of the night, the noises we would hear were fairly predictable. A couple of dogs barking without rhyme or reason, a rare vehicle going by, some security guard’s whistle in the distance and if it were closer to dawn, the birds chirping.
Then in the summer of 1980, a new sound got introduced. Tick-tock, tick-tock – you could hear amidst the general tranquillity. And if you stayed up long enough, you could hear the gentle gong of a wall clock announcing the time. The number of gongs would match the numeral value of the hour at the top of the hour but only once at the bottom of the hour.
Yes, we had a new wall clock! The one and only. Forty one years later, it still adorns the walls of my parents’ house. It stopped working long time back. Years down the line, dad got rid of the pendulum and got it retrofitted with a battery operated small box. It still gave time – but no gongs. Even that eventually ceased to work. I think mom got tired of getting up on the stool to change batteries.
As a final gesture, she put a picture of one of the religious figures (Sitaram Omkarnath) they were disciples of on the clock. That way, I guess, they kept looking up to the clock multiple times a day – just for a very different purpose.
But the three years that I was home when the clock was there – saw some exciting times. The most adventurous part was dad allowing me and my sister to wind up the clock. We used to wait patiently for Sundays to come. At exactly 11 am, we would wind it up. There were two keys – you can see the keyholes in the picture. My sister did the left one – she went clockwise and I did the right one – I went anti clockwise. After that, we put the key back in its place and made sure that the clock lined up on the edges where dad had put some markers. (else the pendulum would stop swinging).
The three siblings – we used to marvel at the precision of the clock. We used to hope that it would miss sounding the gongs once in a while. Nope, like… errr… clockwork, it would give a whirring sound for a few seconds (I assume the hammer mechanism would be set up) and then go – Gong! We were prone to counting out loudly how many gongs it sounded. Hoping against hope that one day we wouldl catch the clock slip up. It never did!!
Soon, in school, our physics teacher taught was that the time period (T) of a pendulum swing … don’t take this to the bank… my memory can play tricks on me … but I think it was two times pi times square root of length divided by gravity. In other words, how far the pendulum went on either side did not matter. It would come back to the middle exactly after the same amount of time. Apparently, Galileo had proven that first. I tried to disprove that at times trying to count my heartbeats for every swing. Not once could I get the better of Galileo.
Anyways, coming to the present, as I was scanning across the walls at my parent’s home before taking my final leave, I saw the clock quietly staring down from the wall. What great witness it has been to timeless experiences in the Roy family.
As I put my head down from the clock, I realized – that calendar, that clock, that watch… how much they strive to remind us that time is a finite thing for us.
Unfortunately, we switch batteries for the watch, wind up the clock, flip the calendar pages with an attitude that time will never end for us.
And then when the finiteness of our time actually slaps us across our faces, it hits us hard.
Very hard.
