How Momos Have Come to Rule the Indian Streets

For a few years now, in India, two types of food become popular: those with health benefits and those without health hazards. Momo is a beneficiary of the later. It is not known to offer any health benefit, but the steamed momos containing minced meat or vegetables stuffing hardly can pose any health hazard.

Roughly, momos appeared on mainstream Indian foodscape about 15 to 16 years ago. Since then, they have grown in popularity to become one of the most preferred snacks of urban India. As a result of this phenomenal popularity, today momos are available everywhere, from interesting small joints and street stalls run by guys from the North Eastern states of India (they make the cheapest and best momos) to costly Chinese restaurants.

But what is interesting about this is not so much momos’ success as a restaurant offering but their emergence as a popular street food. Their acceptability as street food is so high that even people who are prude about street foods flock to street momo corners.

There are a few reasons for momos’ success as a street food. Momos are the most transparent food: their simple contents (some meat or vegetables and flour) assure you that there is no scope to adulterate them and get away with it. Momos, at least the steamed ones, are always ready to eat; just pluck them from their pans and serve them with red chili sauce, no preparatory period is involved unless you eat the fried versions. This is a significant advantage as it makes momos something you can eat on the go.  

But the most trust-inspiring thing about momos is that we find it easy to trust anything that is well-heated – and in this respect, momos stand on a very firm ground. They are always being heated in their multi-storey aluminum containers and are served to you piping hot.

So how can you not trust the momos? But are they great to eat?

They can be quite bland without auxiliaries but mop up some sauce and you can’t have enough of them, as with any food with South East Asian provenance.

I bit into momos for the first time in Calcutta where you are served momos with hot soup (the small joints serve chicken stalk even if you order veg momos) and you add sauce separately. But after I moved to Bangalore, I was surprised to find momos served without soup and only with sauce.

It reminded me of what my sister had once told me following a short visit to Gangtok, that, in Gangtok, they couple their momos only with home-made chilli-garlic sauce. The guys running street momo stalls, in Bangalore, mostly come from Darjeeling, which shares cultural similarities with Gangtok.

Driven by an investigative zeal, I quickly went to Wikipedia to find out how momos have changed since they descended from their places of origin and whether ‘what they are served with’ differs from place to place.

I found that momos have traditionally had meat stuffing. Varied animal meats are used depending on local preferences and availability. So the conclusion: veg versions are later attempts at localizations, like Chicken Achari Pizzas.

Wikipedia couldn’t inform me particularly on whether momo accompaniments differ from place to place, but it told that momo is served with soup in Nepal. As for the other places which the momo traces its origin to, there is no consistency of practice.

But frankly, who cares?

Piku - telling a tale with subtlety and grace

There was a time when Bollywood was obsessed with Punjabi culture. Even if a plot was located far off Punjab shores (London, New York etc), it had to have a Punjabi family at its heart. Now, at least this year, that obsession seems to have moved to Bengali culture. Piku is the second big movie this year to have a Bengali setting. But, unlike those Punjabi-oriented movies which were culturally Punjabi but geographically elsewhere (or everywhere), the Bengali-oriented ones are either fully set in Calcutta (Detective Byomkesh Bakshi) or partly but substantially set there.

But that’s not the only thing I liked about Piku. The movie is a refreshing take on a father-daughter relationship. Again, in a departure from filial relationships shown in Hindi movies in earlier decades, the relationship Piku has depicted is realistic with mutual love, concern and respect and without unquestioning reverence. While Piku objects to someone expressing contempt for her father’s senility, she shows understanding and accommodation when someone is genuinely annoyed with Bhaskar Banerji. Sujit Sirkar has skillfully avoided the clichés of parent-child relationship and has caught its nuances beautifully.  

Bhaskar Banerji (Amitabh Bachchan), a widower, stays with his daughter, Piku (Deepika Padukone), in a Bengali neighborhood of Delhi. Bhaskar is old and grumpy and suffers from constipation; the daughter is a working girl who takes care of her father and is a little exasperated by his old-age tantrums, just as everybody else inhabiting the world of Banerjis is, domestic helps, family friends, relatives etc.  Apart from constipation, another old-age affliction keeps Bhaskar occupied: his belief that he has some serious health issue, although for a seventy year old he is quite fit and healthy.

The family travels to Calcutta (Bhaskar’s home town) and there, unbeknown to Piku, Bhaskar goes for an extensive nostalgic cycle ride taking the viewer through the narrow alleyways of North Calcutta and such famous landmarks as Dalhousie. The cycle ride gives Bhaskar more than a nostalgic relief; after the ride, he relieves himself to his heart’s content. The next day Bhaskar dies, his last wish fulfilled.

The performances are masterful. Bachchan is excellent playing different shades of the character, his age and crankiness, to perfection…but where he has particularly scored is in emulating Bengali mannerisms. Deepika is very natural as Piku and Irfan has almost made it a habit to be  excellent movie after movie.

Another notable feature of Piku is it maintains a good pace without too many twists and turns in the tale. With a subject like constipation it was easy to resort to front bench slapstick; instead Sujit Sirkar has dealt with the subject gracefully without missing an opportunity to tickle your funny bone reminiscent of the Basu Chatterjee movies of the 70s. And like those Basu Chatterjee movies, Piku has its share of social commentary, concerning women and relationships, made in an understated manner.  

The Tell Tale Brain - Unlocking the Mysteries of the Mind

That our brain works in a complex way is a grand understatement. The labyrinthine of neuroscience can completely overwhelm the ordinary reader. Even after an understanding has crystallized, the ordinary reader may feel a nuanced appreciation has remained elusive. In The Tell Tale Brain, VS Ramachandran has attempted to explain the intricacies (and sometimes absurdities) of how our brain functions to the uninitiated reader.

And although he may not have completely succeeded in doing so, his attempt has surely resulted in a fascinating read - bringing to the average reader such intellectually stimulating things as how art evolved, why does an autistic child draws better than a French master, why does a person feel the presence of a missing limb, why seeing colour is special and what seeing different colours means – and much more.

Theories in neuro science are always evolving with old theories getting reviewed, changed, challenged and sometimes replaced by new ones. Similarly, there is no single theory on anything – scientists disagree almost on everything leading to the existence of multiple theories on everything. Ramachandran has discussed every contemporary and past stream of thought and argument on every issue he has dealt with in The Tell Tale Brain.

The Tell Tale Brain, a title inspired from Edger Allen Poe’s Tell Tale Heart, also explores every angle of a brain problem – discussing not just the technical aspects (with respect to brain functionalities) but also their evolution, evolutionary purpose and how differently something has evolved for non-humans, and thus arriving at what makes us unique among those we share the planet with.

Ramachandran says the ability to copy, among other things, an ability mirror neurons are responsible for, makes humans unique. This ability is not available in animals or at least at a level as sophisticated as in humans. So while a cub can learn from its mother how to hunt, it can never learn subtler skills, like language, from its parents or from other animals. Ramachandran says this ability to learn from others (or copy) is at the heart of accomplishments that are unique to humans, like culture, language (unless you are among those who believe dolphins have a language) etc. And this ability is also responsible for empathy, which again is among the core abilities required for something which is uniquely human – art.

A survey was conducted where the participants were given two sketches of a running horse, one done by an autistic child and the other by a French master without telling the participants which one is sketched by whom. And the majority found the one done by the autistic child better than the one by the French master!

Ramachandran says there are two parts in our brain (broadly), one of them is responsible for artistic output and the other deals with logic-based activities. Since the autistic child’s other side is completely dysfunctional (since autism causes loss of social or any other skill) all his mental energies flow unconsumed into the part that’s concerned with art, unlike in the case of the French master with whom some of the energy is consumed by the non-artistic part of the brain. Read the book for more such insights on how our brain works.

The Tell Tale Brain reads like a thriller V.V Ramachandran’s erudition notwithstanding.

Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin

If you read Thomas Hardy’s life you will know how the prose overshadows verse. Thomas Hardy’s first love was poetry and he had taken to novel writing only to earn a living. But most of us know him as a novelist, existence of several poetry collections to his credit notwithstanding. Of all the biographies of writers I have read or those I know about Thomas Hardy comes from a most unlikely background for a novelist. 

Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy “The Time Torn Man “ traces the life of the famous British Victorian writer his birth onwards going a little further back in time, in fact, for a snapshot of his parents’ life and their circumstances through his finding of literary fame, his love affairs (most of them one-sided) and the trials and tribulations Hardy had to go through to establish himself as a writer.

Thomas Hardy was born to poor parents in English countryside, in Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester. His mother, Jemima, was a domestic maid with literary inclinations. She had access to the libraries of the educated and read some classics.  She had modest ambitions beyond her station but never achieved them. Understandably, Hardy took his first steps towards literature holding his mother’s hand. Hardy’s father was a stonemason and local builder.

Hardy married the woman he loved and it was a steady marriage, although they didn’t have any kids and despite Hardy’s life-long mental philandering where he had romantic feelings for women both older and younger than him and most of them much married even as he remained loyal to his wife avoiding any mutually acknowledged romantic or physical relationship with any other woman, although failing to hide his mental infidelities from his wife, who, understandably, bitterly detested it but also silently suffered it. Hardy married twice; the second time when he was in his 70s and his wife, mid 20s.

Hardy extended this Jackal and Hyde character to his attitude towards religion. He had fallen off Christian faith as a young man but maintained the outwardly signs of devoutness (he visited church regularly), so that upon his death the local cleric told that Hardy had lived life like a true Christian. Several times his beliefs revealed residues of Christian beliefs.   

It was not until slightly later in life, when he was in early 20s, that Hardy started taking interest in writing, unlike those who wake up to their literary call as children. There is no denying the fact that, though, the seeds were sowed much earlier, only that they took time to sprout up and be seen. The sprouting happened when Hardy worked in London as an architect, a profession he was initiated into by his father and a craft he was not too bad at.

His days in London exposed him to a larger world and a wider range of experience and became a canvas to compare his rural life with. He wrote a book based on this experience but didn’t get a publisher. A few publishers showed some interest only to back out later. Thomas Hardy’s first book, serialized like many others’ in his days and before, was Under the Greenwood Tree.

Among his novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, much ahead of its time in terms of the values it dealt with, was closest to Hardy’s heart.

Like the other famous writers of his time, Hardy’s novels were serialized. But unlike his contemporaries and they are equally mammoth-like figures in literature, like Henry James, EM Foster (a little junior to Hardy), Rudyard Kipling etc, Thomas Hardy specialized in rural England,  fact which in proximity to Dickens; both dealt with poverty, one with rural, the other with urban.  The people surrounded by whom Hardy grew up became his characters; the rural scene he had grown up amidst became the landscape of his novels.

Gradually fame came to him and he came to be recognized as a great. Claire Tomalin has said Hardy had a melancholic personality (confirmed by many who saw the writer) but hasn’t drawn any connection between his personality and the melancholic nature of his novels.

Who was Luckier - Lee or Singapore?

Recently, Lee Kuan Yew, the person responsible for making Singapore what it is today, died. We in India, particularly those with scant awareness about foreign affairs, were familiar with Singapore as a place of prosperity and aspiration, lights and glitz, long before we woke up to the global significance of China and the vulnerability of America as a super power.  

In India, various political leaders at different times have told us they would be making our cities like Singapore if brought to power but none have.

But the bigger question is why Asian countries aspire to be like Singapore? It is not just Singapore’s economic success but the fact that it combines all the virtues of a desirable place: cleanliness, discipline and great law and order.  Even the great Western democracies fall foul on some of these counts.

Law and order may be different and even cleanliness is achievable in many places but discipline , as many of us know, may not be easy to bring about in a democratic society, which is by nature chaotic. In fact, the existence of such societies depends on absence of discipline. There is little doubt that Singaporeans had to pay a price for the kind of economic success Singapore achieved, for which you have to both thank Lee Kuan Yew and call him lucky.

Thank Lee for Singapore’s success because after its independence from Britain and following its ouster from Malaysia in 1963, he steered his nation in the direction which was unique in those days, the 60s, and also frowned upon by others. Among the countries that won freedom at the time Singapore did, Singapore was the only one to embrace market-economy, in its most unapologetic form.

Call Lee lucky because even with Lee’s sure-handed capitalism, Singapore would not be possible without Singapore’s advantages – a largely homogeneous society, a city state, etc –quite unique to Singapore.  

But many of these attributes were disadvantages to start with. When Singapore had been dispelled by Malaysia because of racial tensions (Lee its premier was in his early 40s then), it didn’t have any army to defend its borders; it didn’t have any economy to speak of. Its small size – and therefore less significance - would have made it vulnerable to a takeover – or at least an invasion - by a bigger power, particularly one from the Soviet bloc. Fearing it, Lee befriended the US.

To make Singapore militarily strong, Lee sought the help of Israel. He created a police-judiciary to eliminate corruption. To the same end, he raised the salaries of officials to the level of those in high positions in private sector – and said, “If you pay pee nuts, you attract monkeys.” He removed political opposition by reducing Singapore to a single-party polity.

He made spitting on road, littering chewing gums on road etc. punishable offenses. 

(Remember, we heard, in our growing up years, that in Singapore you would be punished for throwing chewing gum on road?) He told Singaporeans to speak good English and develop clean habits.

He completely muzzled the press. Singapore Herald’s license was seized because of a critical article it had carried about Lee’s government and three years later the government amended its constitution to make it mandatory for media houses publishing out of Singapore to renew their license yearly. And publications of foreign media houses critical of the Singapore government but without any production base in Singapore were simply banned.

Although Singapore never saw the likes of Tienanmen Square or Capture Wall Street, winds of change are blowing in the island nation. Living costs are very high in Singapore and the gap between poor and rich has grown over the years.

There is a groundswell for more inclusive policies. It led to a slump in Lee’s party’s (People's Action Party of Singapore) popular vote, following which Lee stepped down making way for his son. Any nation, however successful, yearns for change in a passage of 40 to 50 years. Singapore, however different it may be from the rest, should not be an exception. But Singapore will always consider itself lucky to have had Lee in its formative years and not the other way around. 

Absence of India Conservative Intellectuals - By Ramachandra Guha

Caravan has carried a very interesting article by Ramachandra Guha, Where Are India’s Conservative Intellectual? The article addresses what has long worried people who see merit in the economic policies of conservative politics, in India, but at the same time disapprove of their religious agenda.

If you remove the Muslim majority countries from the mix, India is the only major democracy where religion finds an important place in conservative politics. Guha attributes this to the fact that those who espoused this brand of politics in India, mainly in pre-independence era, a time when the conservative voice was quite strong, were affiliates of organizations with a deeply Hindu character.

In a post-independence India, Guha observes, conservatives gradually lost their prominence in Indian politics as mainstream Indian politics gravitated towards the Left – where both the ruling party – the Congress – and its principal opponents – Nehru and his detractors (Jay Prakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and the Communists) - represented socialist, liberal political orientation.  This left-orientation was also found in academia.

Guha dismisses the current lot of columnists and opinion makers with a soft spot for conservatism on the ground that their body of published work is limited to 300 to 400 word articles. This absence of conservative intellectuals in India, Guha concludes, is responsible for religion being a major part of the conservative thought.

Conversely, he says, the West has always had intellectuals in conservative politics who have always kept religion out of it. Western conservative thinkers, Guha says, base their idea of identity around which conservative politics revolves on cultural and geographical similarities. 

To press his argument that the presence of conservative intellectuals would have helped Indian conservative politics keep religious extremism at a distance, Guha cites the example of Jagdish Bhagwati, the conservative economist who is an economic adviser to the current conservative government in India, for advising the BJP government to reign in the religious fringe if it wanted to carry on with its development agenda.

Guha poses Rajaji (C. Rajagopalachari) as a model conservative intellectual. Guha says Rajaji was patriotic who could rise above his personal differences with his political opponents and unite with them in national interest, like he had supported Nehru on the Kashmir problem despite his personal personal differences with Nehru. Rajaji was religious but far from being an orthodox. His economic outlook was conservative in nature and therefore opposed to Nehru’s. Rajai had argued for more openness in economy but Nehru had dismissed his views calling them reactionary and unsuitable for India only to be proved wrong a few decades later.

Guha’s analysis of Western conservatism is mainly theoretical and that’s why it misses an important point. Although theoretically Western conservative parties have kept religion out of their identity mix, the tendency of conservative politics to be majoritarian, even if based on demographics, automatically excludes communities following minority religions in Western societies. Identity and religion are hard to separate, especially due to rising religious radicalism however desirable it may be.

Byomkesh Bakshi - a Detective with a Difference

A detective novel deals with a dual challenge: one is to examine human nature and tie up its tendencies with requirements of an air-tight plot and the second is to simplify it beyond any shred of ambiguity for the reader…who, unlike the reader of a literary novel, will not settle for anything less than complete clarity. In other words, ensure instant intellectual gratification, no slow-seeping comprehension acquired long after the novel is read and shut. This is true of any detective novels.

But however homogeneous detective novels may otherwise be, the author endows something unique on every imaginary investigator, in terms of style of investigation, dressing, even background. And while the homogeneity that characterizes mystery novels – a tight plot with the culprit lurking behind a maze of facts and the detective removing them one by one to bring him to the reader – makes you want to read another mystery, you want your mysteries solved by the distinct style of the detective you like.

Ever since the Byomkesh Bakshi bug bit me some time in December, I have been mulling over the uniqueness of Byomkesh Bakshi vis a vis others in his fraternity. What is that I will read a Byomkesh novel for? I watched several episodes of Byomkesh Bakshi serials and then a few weeks back I bought a Puffin Classic, a compilation of three Byomkesh whodunits. And I find myself yearning for more.

The Rhythm of Riddles is about a building full of tenants. The tenant staying on the ground floor suddenly gets murdered. The killer leaves some clues but they together lead, if anything, to confusion. Slowly Byomkesh unravels the mystery discovering threads leading to pre independence Bangladesh and blackmail. In Byomkesh and Barada, Bakshi exposes a man appearing in the guise of ghost to scare away the occupant of a house so that he can get his hands on the diamonds hidden in it.

Dibakar Banerjee the film director whose movie on Byomkesh is going to release shortly has written a very good introduction telling why a certain atmosphere – an uncle’s house located in a small town - is important to enjoy Byomkesh and that he discovered the charms of Boymkesh in a similar setting in the 60s while visiting an uncle’s house and has remained a fan since.

The one I liked the most is the last story in the collection, The Death of Amorto. A complex plot, it is set in the period after world war two. American soldiers, after staying for some time in interiors of Bengal, have left leaving behind their arms and ammunitions which have fallen into the hands of locals to the concern of law-enforcement authorities. A boy, who had ventured into a forest, has been found dead by his friends who had gone into the forest search of him following a gunshot. The death of Amroto is followed by the death of another local, this one a gruesome murder. Byomkesh removes lot of red herrings, details, contradicting facts to demystify matters and shine a light on the killer and his motivations.

One of the things I find unique about Byomkesh is that among all Bengali detectives I know, Byomkesh is most rooted, a complete Bengali middle class without any trace of cosmopolitanism undermining his Bengaliness, unlike Faluda, for whose creator - Ray - Sherlock Homes was a major influence, and Kakababu by Sunil Gangapadhay, who is more obsessed with worlds affairs than the neighborhood murder. 

Feluda and Kakababu had to be made cosmopolitan in keeping with changing taste of audiences in a post-independence India, but Byomkesh, having been written into existence by Saradindu Bandyopadhay many years before independence, didn’t have to meet the requirements of changing taste in a post-independence India.

Another way in which Byomkesh is different from other literary detectives is that Byomkesh is a more rounded character than the average literary detective. We know Byomkesh had once fallen in love and married a lady, Satyabati. Byomkesh’s father was a math teacher and Byomkesh holds a degree in physics, etc. We also know Byomkesh calls himself Satyanweshi, a seeker of truth, and not an investigator or detective.

On the other hand, we know very little about other famous detectives beyond the fact that they have an analytical bent of mind. In fact, Conan Doyle had revealed very little about Sherlock Homes as a person (the pipe-smoking thing is not a personality trait or a circumstantial detail, just a style) in his early novels and not until Doyle matured as a writer, many years later, that he realized that what he had drawn was a mere character sketch and not the entire character – and to make Homes more human he revealed more bits of Homes personality and background in his later Homes novels. (In fact, some critics have observed that the reason why Homes is one of the easiest literary characters to adopt for movies is that Doyle wrote very little about Homes as a person, which allows the film maker to interpret Homes however he wants.)

Similarly, we know very little about Feluda as a person and about many, many more detectives who may dazzle us with their investigative skills and sharp repartees but still be scantly known even if we read their exploits in novel after novel.  

Even after being adopted for several movies and once by Satyajit Ray too,  Byomkesh was largely a parochial affair until Rajit Kapoor made Byomkesh Bakshi a household name by playing the sleuth to perfection in an eponymous tele serial on Doordarshan, Byomkesh Bakshi, in the late 80s and early 90s (before cable TV arrived). Since then although many have enacted the detective on TV, I have not been able to separate Rajit Kapoor from Byomkesh. When I think of one the other automatically springs to mind.   

Again there is a renewed interest in Byomkesh Bakshi. Many new actors are bringing the sleuth to life on television, in Bengali. I hope they will endear the new generation to Byomkesh. And just as Arthur Conan Doyle is remembered as the creator of Homes, the numerous film-adoptions notwithstanding,   I hope  Saradindu Bandyopadhay will be remembered as the creator of Byomkesh Bakshi regardless of how many times Byomkesh is adopted for TV and movies.