Bad Bad Girl in Bad Bad Shanghai

- It is Sunday night, the moon is high and pale. Weeping willows rustle, their shadows playing hide and seek with mice sulking in bushes and rodents striking with canines. Somewhere, a black cat cries out, and shadows cast their ominous hijab on passing men. I huddle in my black coat, holding it close, eyes just slits. A solitary violinist stands in the corner with sheet music written by the Big Man. The moon whispers poetry written by the Big Man. And so it is, that this blog is being watched and halted and blocked by Big Boy. Excuse me as I slink back into a web of shrubs called proxy servers.

Joys of Waterboarding, Sleep Deprivation and other Acts of Charity

Recent CIA memos reveal the extent to which the CIA designed and engineered methods to extract truth i.e torture protocols from Al Qaeda prisoners. See this article at : http://www.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2009/04/torture-memos-link-lawyers-and-psychologists.html
It appears that even in the murky, interconnected world of military tactics and prisoners of war, everyone copies everyone else. There are no more new weapons and counter-missiles are as good as missiles. So, torture tactics of the CIA are "reverse engineered tactics used by Soviet Union, North Korea". Such flattery to the axis of Evil! More importantly, in true American style, nothing can be designed, sold, deployed till an army of Ph.Dickers have blessed with their own words of wisdom. So, 2 psychologists (noted, interesting, as Mormons by VF) said blithely that these torture would not cause long term damage or trauma. Yet a few months earlier Christopher Hitchens contacted the venerable SERE ((Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) Agency and under went an anonymously delivered waterboarding. He came back with a single conclusion: "The CIA states that waterboarding simulates drowning. Well, it does not. It IS drowning!".

An an engineer, I wonder what the teams would looks around the delivery of a torture method. Er, guys, need to get angle and geometry of the board right, calculate the shear forces on a torso of 50 kg and its tangential velocity, amount of oxygen depletion under a wet towel with diffusivity being...you get the drift.
What a hopeless world!

Once Upon a Hangzhou Time

One negotiates a curve, turns upwards, the path narrows and then widens into a plain. It is then that you see it. It does not overwhelm at first. It shyly announced itself, like a bride. The West Lake in Hangzhou, where travel means to embrace it. Of all places I have traveled to, remember or hope to travel, the beauty of Hangzhou seeps in with its viscous moistness into your mind. In Spring, even more delightfully so. The lake is laced with tenderest greens of weeping willows, magnolias, oaks, bleeding red flowers, shock of pink here and a quieter white there. To love the lake is to walk around it, as in worship. So we did. Walk and walk around. At each turn, one comes upon a Sung dynasty building, with circular arches, peaked domes with its granite in determined contrast to the vivacity of the spring flowers around. A gentle mist sinks down and Chinese poetry comes to mind, and one wonders at the futility of the English language. All across the vast lake are several islands and the most impressive is the Solitary Island, with even more magical forest trees, walkways, brooks and bridges. Poetry is the only vehicle and several Chinese poets lived in Hangzhou. Lin Bu was one who lived in seclusion on the Solitary Island, with plum blossoms and cranes for company. A painting of Lin Bu by Du Jin has an an inscription:

Leisurely walking with the moon,

both my stick and my shoes are slow;

It is particularly suited for my half-awakened mood.

Finishing a verse on the sparse shadow and the cool fragrance,

I would like to know if the plum blossoms will understand.

Lin Bu goes on to share his moments with Hangzhou and plum blossoms centuries later in a song:

How Plum Flowers Embarrass a Garden

When everything has faded they alone shine forth

encroaching on the charms of smaller gardens

their scattered shadows fall lightly on clear water

their subtle scent pervades the moonlit dusk

snowbirds look again before they land

butterflies would faint if they but knew

thankfully I can flirt in whispered verse

I don't need a sounding board or wine cup

(Source : http://www.silkqin.com/02qnpu/16xltq/xl048msy.htm)

It is the primacy of nature, the generous alleys that man can walk through, peaks of tea houses and now cafes, its dream like sequences that would make me come back again and again.

Mushrooms

Mushrooms are by far my favourite foods. It is a pleasure to trawl the wet markets here in Shanghai and get all manners of mushrooms. Some regular button ones, Enokis, wood, none of which I recognize.

The best way to eat mushrooms is to add minimal spices.

I like to saute them in olive oil at high heat, toss freshly ground (mortal and pestled pepper corns are great; green pepper corn is even tastier, some salt, that's it. Occasionally, I would add some scallions.

I have yet to learn the myriad soups made with mushrooms in the Shanghainese cuisine. But there are some wonderful soups with Enokis.

There are several fan clubs of this humble not quite vegetarian yet not an animal fungus, and I found this website as great read when you know you just have to let life slip by http://forums.mycotopia.net/

Xinjiang Food and Human Spirit

Every day to work, right off the subway on Maotai Lu, I see the hubbub of activity in a small Xinjiang Muslim restaurant called Xinjiang Flavour. The tandoor or coal oven has just been lit and large masses of dough are being made into a foot diameter Nan bread and poked by metal skewers inside the tandoor. The cooks and waiters in this restaurant are distinctly exotic looking, quite unlike the incredible Han homogeneity you see all over China. High cheek bones, a pale pink complexion, eyes drawn straight out of a Marco Polo history book and a language absolutely unknown outside of Urumqi. On my way back, I always stop for 2 nans for dinner (Cost: 6 RMB or less than a dollar). These are delicious, coated with sesame seeds and I have to tear off pieces and eat even before I have hit the subway. Frequently, I have lunch there. The star of the place is undoubtedly Achmet. He is the sunshine of the place, full of bonhomie, chattering away in a language a mish mash of Shanghainese, Uighur, Mandarin and some English thrown in for good measure. He is acutely aware of me, and my rare looks (very few Indians in this part of town). He greets one with a smile broader than his face, clapping his hands, with words tumbling like a waterfall. He takes orders while nearly forcing you to choose the ones he recommends and of course you do because he is still smiling and talking non stop, while barking orders in between tiny pauses between sentences. The food is simply delicious if you are a carnivore and quite good even for a vegetarian. chunks of lamb skewered to perfection in a single spice mix of salt and cumin. Eggplant stewed in another singular flavour of lime and cardamom. In between, he never fails to hold forth from a corner to the entire restaurant audience, for audience it surely is, on some subject or other. Yesterday, he kept pointing to me and I guessed he was spinning some yarns about me: I recognized words like Yinduren (Indians), pinguo (friend) and many minutes later, it was translated to me that he spoke about the extraordinary closeness between Indians and Uighur people, historically, through travel by Central Asians. I was dumbfounded. How does a simple chef and waiter at a Xinjiang restaurant have such an understanding...but this is how Achmet is. Everyday, he calls out to me from across the street with his ever present grin , waving his towel and nan. Such a simple joy to be Achmet.

Stuff White People and Environmentalists Like

Incredible hilarious cover issue of Plenty Magazine, find it at http://www.plentymag.com/ - needless to say, they have friends in high places - the writers of http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/, about, well, Stuff White People Like.

This is another site I follow occasionally - with 60 million blog hits, and Chinese IP like mine, it rolls on my screen only after I have finished dinner. But, it is ruthlessly self-deprecating, and if it was called Stuff Black/Jewish/Asian/Cabo Verdean People Like, the humour would be lost on you, or it would border on a litigation on an allegation of racism.

But, it is exactly about the very things white people like which confound most of us. The last posting is on the famed Moleskine notebooks - expensive , made-to-look-classic-ancient that have a near-cult following amongst journos and writers and hence, followed by Whites. What is not mentioned is that it is a special White demographic , not all white. i.e no trailer trash, Polish White, Zimbabwean Whites, etc. But, that is carping. This is a great , readable site. I wish I could start one called Stuff Ghati People Like: on my ethnicity of Maharashtrian. Poha and those annoying scarves and woolen sari blouses and literature by women writers all suspiciously called Manda Kulkarni would be part of that....but I digress.

Living Brightly In The Dark

Susheela Jadhav was 94 when she passed away of cancer on March 2 2009.

I never knew much about her, my Grand Aunt except that she was different. The word "different" was not that well regarded in the Matungan middle class Maharshtrian morality. In her fifties in 1970's, she was a picture of firmness combined with a wry sense of humour and correctness. But, above all "correctness" defined her - everything had to be in line, correct and must be completed. She was the last generation not grafted genetically into the internet and indeed the modern media. She had no Facebook, she did not blog or declare something to be del.i.cious or digg anything nor did she flickr. Yet , being the I_Am-Standing_Erect_And_Correct , she managed to live life beautifully, traveled far, and spent time and pleasured in the company of family and friends, what we call "hanging out". She loved travel, she carried her masale ande and tikhat puri, added Indian Railways to her Favourites list as she criss crossed India. Her mutton biryani was something of a family treasure and if she was better humoured, she could be the Julia Child of Matunga. Her end was a time warp, a sudden silence , save for a flickering eyelash and a deep breath of the mountains. This she could not have sent on a twitter.