RANDOM NEURON BLIPS II

2023 already ? Well, I'm sure not the new year, but this post is going to be a surprise for most of us ( Our lovely readers, also our elegant authors). Thanks to our Japanese pal, keeping the MDH masala alive in the Anime land, also surprising me with this post.

It’s been almost more than a year in this far away land from India and something I am pretty sure I will never fall in love with is cooking. Alright, it is an art in itself, a confidence booster, a stress buster to many and for a few, a science, chemistry in precise. No matter how you advertise it to me, I am not buying it. Honestly, I despise this as much as I love experimenting with my coffee. But well, thank God or whoever it is, who first made the vegetable khichdi, I am surviving, and with good health. A mix of vegetables and lentils and rice, it is what people in chemistry would call a one pot synthesis. And honestly it is. Three easy steps and you have well, what I call, a delicious recipe. Soak the rice and lentil, cut your vegetables (in my case, buy the frozen cut vegetables) and dump everything inside a cooker with all your spices, and water, there you go… Done and dusted in 15 minutes. 

Well, more than a year and if I have one thing in common on almost all days, it is khichdi. How do I live? Am I living a life of an ascetic, living on a bare minimum? Am I just detached, wherein I live with a Gandhian philosophy and think taste is in the mind and not the tongue? Well, honestly, if I have to be critical and honest about myself, I am just too lazy to do any cooking. Yet, with a little science and little philosophy, I have found a very healthy way to cope with this bland lunch of khichdi. 

I have never been a foodie. And it has been on rare occasions, the extreme cases, that I have complained about the food. I think my taste buds are slow, in the sense, before they fire some signals into the taste cortex and all the information gets processed, the food in my mouth has already made its way through the esophagus. Or maybe my insular cortex, which is responsible for storing the memories of new taste is quite goofed up (apologies in case you loathe biology). 

And so, never have I known the right taste of any of any of the delicacies, or how much of salt and how much of masala makes it a perfect recipe. Hence, a little extra sugar, or little less cumin powder or chili powder should essentially make a difference in the taste, and I practically have a little different taste on every single day going by this assumption of mine. 

Where does this lead me to? Well, as once it was mentioned by an esteemed writer on this blog, life is all about finding those little pieces of happiness.  Essentially happiness, if I have to speak like a philosopher or your next-door motivational speaker, comes in bits and pieces (it was more like in the words of Sanjay Manjrekar). 

Now, I think it is not about doing different things but probably by doing the same thing in little different ways we can get these crumbs of happiness. Sometimes, happiness may probably sprout by adding a little bit of childishness to our works, being a little immature and a little imperfect. I would rather say we all have got our ways, and probably at times, the better we are at consoling ourselves for the things we miss, the happier we are. And what else, every special occasion I make something nice to eat, it definitely feels more than just nice (for instance, Rajma Chawal feels heavenly). 

Well, I never intended to be motivational or inspirational (considering I delved into that in the last few lines) but this was more like a reflection we all sometimes push ourselves into. As the gates of new year ushers, I just wish I try cooking something new though I am highly skeptical about it. So let me see how many more stunts I can pull off with my khichdi and how many more days do I have to stay in the delusion and consolation. 

Finally, with all my heart I wish you the best of everything as the final night of the 2022 segues into the dawn of another day, of yet another year.

Wishing you all a very HAPPY NEW YEAR…