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.

Maid for You

The great thing about Asia is the availibility of domestic labour - maids, cooks, gardeners, sweepers, drivers, etc. The not so grat thing about China is that none have any language skills. The cook is vital to my existence since the past several years. Being practically vegetarian, the food at the office is a mish mash of some horrible meat, fermented, with eyes and all and par boiled vegetables. But it is not ujust this and I kind of reserve the argument for my Western friends who find the idea of a maid shocking, to say the least. If you have a maid, you eat fresh food, not out of a ocntainer with a million watts of global warming. Everything can be cooked from a scratch. Plus, the idea of a trickle down economy means you can share your wealth and create employment. A maid is not the same as servant but more like a modern day well-protected construction worker - life is hard, but you are well compensated.

I went through multiple interview and finally located a maid who also cooks and cleans (15 RMB/Hour) plus I got another specialty maid (30 RMB/Hour) who has worked for an Indian family and knows how to cook Indian food. This combination of maids (called "Ayi") works well for us so far. Ayi 1 comes at 8 AM. She takes fast instructions from me for cooking which goes something like a process flow diagram from my area of expertise, Process Engineering:

Step A: Chao Guo(frying pan)+Yi Shao You (1 teaspoon oil)+(point to cumin)+cong qie (cut onion)+ suan(garlic)+jiang(ginger)+la jiao (chili) _ Yi dian Jiao (fry till brown)

Step B: Jia (add) ga li fen (garam masala)+ jiang huang (turmeric)+fan qie (cut tomato)+yan (salt) ---> Wu fun Shu (cook for 5 minutes)

Step C: Add X vegetable and cover and simmer!

This is all accompanied by a beautiful pantomime, as many Indian ingredients don't have Mandarin equivalents.

Yesterday, I had her grill eggplants - this was done really well. Occasionally, if I am getting late for work, I ask her to "Chao Zhongguo" or Cook Chinese. This itself is confusing as there is no such things as "All things Chinese". There is Shanghainese cuisine, the Beijing food, Sichaun, and finally my favorite Hunan and Muslim Xinchuang --> very few Ayi know the latter type of cuisine as most hail from Anhui province. Shanghainese food is bland, hospital food, incredibly healthy, mostly poaching and steaming with a lot of the inevitable meat.

Some days I come home at night to doctor the food into something palatable. But, this is fine , the journey being the destination and all that. Either way, there is food on the table. That is good for now. I pack it for work together with some great tiny oranges called Clementines.

Sentient Science

Last week, yet another business trip to Bangkok, one of hundreds so that now Bangkok is somewhere between a second home and paradise. Anyhow, this time it was a gruelling one as I was part of a team of R&D professionals trying to solve a mysterious problem in one of our products. I spent quite a few days prior to the visit boning up on past work, and there were plenty of old R&D reports I could lay my hands on. Boss informed to ensure we could reproduce the problem i.e illuminate the problem so that the causative factors can be identified. I thought that was Catch 22, if I knew what the causative factors were, we could at least plan technical approaches to solving the problem. This is the funny thing about science. In some ways, it touts to rely on facts, facts and facts, but too often we have hypotheses or correlating factors. These are not root causes. In an industry like ours, the correlating factors are many, facts fewer to identify. This is not because there is not enough science, there is plenty but the systems are hard, non-equilibrium structures that cannot be tested non-destructively. Anyhow, so armed with hypotheses , I did a square dance with other R&D folks. We brain stormed and found some vague solutions. In the afternoon, we met up with business and we managed to push all the right buttoms , ask the real leading questions which miraculously shed light on some unforeseen issues - something about how we transport the products , store them, the chugs and halting stops and delays in a long, unpredictable supply chain...and viola we had a much smarter solution strategy than just "science" could suggest.

We dont know if it works but in some sense the skies cleared a bit.

I think over my career and life as a scientist engineer, I am always humbled by how simple solutions can be if we shed the flab and examine the lucid details and look at problems holistically - if we only shed the pomposity of jargon and hiding behind strained constructs.
Same true of life, I suspect, though I am much too warped in my cloudy veil of unawareness: If Life can be viewed as series of "quality" problems that can only be solved when one views these in a context. These can be overcome and a more chiselled chapter of life can reveal itself if we realise how astonishingly simple thought should be.

Googling Yourself

You have to admit it: We all google ourselves. The reaction ranges from embarassment (I wrote THAT?) to pleasure (I wrote that!) to surprise (I wrote that?!). More often than not, I always learn something new. For instance, I went through a phase in graduiate school where I loved liqueurs - Bailey's, Grand Marnier, etc. Not being able to afford these, I hunted down the recipes to actually make them at home. I perfected the recipes and posted them on the fledgling online community at Carnegie Mellon called usenets. Over the years, these recipes have been used and reproduced at a million sites, all without permission of course! So here is one for Kahlua, that delicious coffee liqueur:


Ersatz Kahlua

Source: Yashodhara Pawar (yp02+@andrew.cmu.edu) <--- Note the expired student email Id!
6/12/92

Ingredients:

3 ounces, medium to dark roast coffee, finely ground
2 3/4 cups, Vodka, 80 proof
3/4 cups, Brandy, 80 proof
4 teaspoons, Good quality instant coffee
1 tablespoon, Vanilla extract
1 teaspoon, Chocolate extract
1 teaspoon, Glycerine (at most pharmacies)
1 drop, Red food colouring (optional)
7/8 cups, Distilled water
1--3/4 cups, Granulated sugar

Procedure:

Place the ground coffee in a large wide-mouthed glass bottle. Add the
vodka and the brandy. Allow the mixture to sit approximately 18 to 20
hours. Use coffee filters to remove the coffee from the alcohol --
discard the spent grounds. Add the instant coffee, the extracts, the
glycerine, and the food colour to the mixture. Set aside.

In a scrupulously clean pan, boil the water. Add the sugar, stirring
rapidly. When the sugar is dissolved, remove from heat. Allow the sugar
syrup to return to room temperature.

Add the syrup to the alcohol mixture. Store in a tightly capped glass
bottle. The liqueur is better when aged for 3 or more months.

John Updike, March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009 - Rest in Peace

Perfection Wasted

John Updike

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

The Neurology of the Etymology of Everything or, Meaning of Life

As a serious, committed and fundamentalist athiest, I am always looking out for the neuro-something explanation for everything. Not that we non-believers not believe in the quotidian, the joyous, the inexplicable sorrows, the FEE-EElings, you know. Often times when I drum, I enter a zone - a space, hard to describe, what a line of cocaine must feel like? what sleep feels like? a transportation where only fingers and sound matter. Mind you, I am not a great drummer but I have rhythm inside me. But, out of an inexplicable fear, I retract from this endless space and enter a drone and then stop entirely and wrap up the drumming. I found this interesting piece of news by Dr Barry Bittman (see Here), a neurologist practicing alternative healing medicine together with traditional medicine. He and his colleagues conducted several clinical studies on drummers and measured plasma stress hormones - cortisol. He found drops in cortisol, as well as heightened immune responses with no change in normal parameters (Inetrleukin 2, etc.) But, this describes "wellness", what a good run would do. What I experinece is something, well, more profound, a trance like state.

But, if I put on my scientist hat, does even this wellness thing really mean much? As a previous boss used to say: "Absence of Evidence is not evidence of absence". To paraphrase it, "Evidence of Presence is not presence of evidence". So, now even findings by Dr. Bittman are doubted by Steven Pinker. (see Here)

I am quoting Dr. Pinker entirely:
None of that impresses MIT's Steven Pinker. "I think people who argue that music is an adaptation have confused theeveryday meaning of the term - meaning something that is beneficial or salubrious - with the biological meaning of the term,which is something that causally increases the rate of reproduction or survival," he says. "Now, it's not enough just to showthat something is correlated with reproduction. Wearing a linen suit or driving a Porsche might help you find a sex partner,but that doesn't mean it's an adaptation. What you need to do is show, on sheer engineering grounds and in terms of causeand effect, that some particular trait would lead to an adaptive outcome".

The "trance state" on drumming is beautifully described in a non-scientific book - but a beautifully written experiential book, The Shamanic Drum , by Michael Drake, now on Google Books. It describes the altered states adrummer can enter, allowing her to be malleable, transform and experience a state rarely touched upon, all this with no faith or belief chnages. This I can relate to.

A geeky comic

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/im_an_idiot.png

Check this one out...any others. site's great!

Colour Red

Red used to be my favourite colour. I have red shoes, red handbags, red skirts. Many red lipsticks. Red stone ear rings. But now I am living in China, where red is an auspicious colour and dominates the landscape. At this particular time of the year, the Chinese New Year, the urbanscape grows the red fungus in barely varying hues of gold, black, green but always the bull-angering-blood-infra red. And so, well, I find myself...conforming uncomfortably and blending into the masses of humanity everywhere, the subway, shopping, office. What a shameful juncture for one who seeks to be different, add her own truffle to the soup, brush that different stroke, strike a drum note to their violins, etc etc.So, I am now on a prowl - for a different colour to call my own. A colour that says Me, and unequivocally calls out my name. Red did and still does, but not when owned by a billion people. This hunt for a new Colour is not so easy because pretty soon I realized that the entire visible wavelength spectrum is already owned by entities , some revered, some crackpot. The Orange is called Saffron and owned by the hindu fundamentalists. The yellow is owned by the Thai monarchy. The green is owned and paraded by Islam - on its mosques, on its prayer books, on their leaflets. The blue is owned by the United Nation disunited in their shared blues. The colour pink is owned by feminists and 'women's issues' type people. White is owned by the clergy and the Catholic diocese for which I have deep childhood-coerced regard. So, there you go. No colour is available. In fact, I soon realized I am not the only one. Several people, persons or organizations realized the limitations of the rainbow coalition. So...they started co-opting the colours. So, now environmental NGO's have adopted green, the colour of Islam. The Red has been adopted by the Red Cross. The colour pink has now been adopted by those who prefer comradeship amongst their own gender. Or, those who have cancer. The colour white is also the colour of peace organizations.

All this leaves the colour Black.

Black is good.

Black is New York.

New York is good.

Black is absence of colour. Absence of colour speaks volumes for who you are - or not.

So, 'my' new colour is Black.

Except that I am brown.

Hindustani

All languages evolve. Continuously. Sometimes they evolve with time. Or they evolve with human migration. The etymology and history of the English language and the Hindi language are endlessly fascinating. The Hindi language more so. Consider this: The land of 'Hindustan' once panned from Eastern part of present day Iran all the way to Burma. After the Seleucid Greeks over-ran the northwest part of it, the Turks migrated, partly for trade and in search of the famed wealth. They brough the Turki language and then later adopted the Farsi or the Persian language. This remained the language of Northern modern India and morphed with successive movement of the Afghan and Mughal emperors. It then merged with the ancient Sanskrit language of India into Urdu sometime in the 16th century. How Hindi emerged is not as certain and linguists actually classify both Hindu and Urdu similarly. Hindi differs primarily in its script, being Sanskrit/Devanagari driven while Urdu continues to use the Persian script. Hindi, one may argue, has differences emanating from a colloquial link to the dialects of North India, mainly Braj and avadhi. Yet, viewed from the to they are similar languages. Simply put, all Bollywood movies contain strands of both languages, with movies made in earlier part of the century much more Urdu.

So, one is always amused how language continues to be used as a tool of us vs them dialogues politically and personally. Consider today's news on http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\01\07\story_7-1-2009_pg1_12.

According to the Daily News of Pakistan, the lone terrorist held by India was interviewed in Hindi and gave his deposition in Hindi and not Urdu. So, the paper argues, he must be Indian and not Pakistani. This must be of curious satisfaction to the Pakistani readers looking for reasons that India is bluffing and all the terrorists in this heinous act, were, in fact, Indian.

Pick any language: the story is the same. The English of the Irish vs the Queen's English. The Filipino tagalog, derived from the Spanish, vs the Spanish. The magnificient Catalan language now banned from Spain for formal teaching though linked historically to the Spanish language.....