No-Sweat Bread

At long-last, I joined the club: I made my first loaf of the sensational no-knead bread, from the Jim Lahey technique popularized by Mark Bittman in the New York Times a couple years ago.

I have always been a little shy about baking. It always seemed like hard science, and I have always seen myself as more of a poet, better suited to the no-measure, dash-of-this-dash-of-that of cooking. In truth, I greatly enjoy science and have been avoiding the oven all these years more from laziness than anything.

Thanks to Lahey and Bittman, however, even laziness is an unworthy excuse. The entire “active” part of the process takes five minutes, if done with absurd deliberation – maybe eight minutes if one adds in the washing-up time. It takes me longer to ride the five kilometers and back to fetch a loaf of exquisite Transylvania Bakery peasant bread than to make one of my own, leaving aside the time the dough is doing its own thing, with no help from me – fermenting, resting, rising, or baking. Way longer.

Riding the Rails

All aboard!

I love train journeys. In India, where I reside half of each year, I make long-distance rail trips whenever I’m not pressed for time, generally snoozing-away most of the miles from a top berth in a second class bogey. I’d never traveled long distance by train in North America, however, until this week. On Thursday night, Yoo-Mi and I boarded Amtrak’s Coast Starlight Express at Oakland’s Jack London Station and headed north to Seattle, from which we’d jump the border to Vancouver on a connecting bus.

Filial Piety Awareness Day

Mother’s Day — that heinous annual celebration of last-minute, long-distance teleflorism — is once again upon our sorry selves. It is not the worst Hallmark Holiday of the year. That honor would go to Father’s Day, for which there is not even an accepted, go-to, eleventh hour gift alternative. But it is rotten to the core.

I’m sure there are a few mothers deserving of praise for their efforts, including (I grudgingly admit) the one pictured above. Probably some fathers too, at least hypothetically. Still, I’ve been to too many confessional dinner parties with people claiming to be children of parents to believe that there are so many truly outstanding (or even passably competent) child-rearers as to justify a whole day (and a prime spring weekend slot, to boot!) in their honor.

A Sad Day for Puducherry

Puducherry’s wonderful Lieutenant Governor, Govind Singh Gurjar, died yesterday of a heart attack. This is a tragic day. To understand just how awful — in its civic dimension, and not just on a personal level — consider how impossibly rare it is for an Indian politician to be plausibly garlanded with the epithet “wonderful”.

In a system where corruption, narcissism, laziness, ignorance, and incompetence are the sine qua non of political life, Govind Singh Gurjar was an astonishment: a politician whose greatest joy seemed to be doing well for the people in whose trust he served. He worked tirelessly to understand the nuance and complexity of the issues before him and, having decided on a course of action, would set the machinery of his administration in motion without temporizing. In the venal cesspool of Pondicherry government, the LG had but one aim: to help the Union Territory fulfill its obvious, abundant promise. Sadly, he leaves us at a time when that objective looks to be effectively, and perhaps irrevocably, snuffed by the greed and thoughtlessness of political-business-as-usual.

Ass as Canvas

My visit to Austin had an inauspicious beginning. Thwarted by a widespread lack of hotel availability – due to the annual South by Southwest Festival of independent film, music, and other media – and a constitutional aversion to pay big-bucks for multi-stellar lodgings, my booking for the night was at a hell-hole near the University of Texas, aptly named the Roadway Inn. I will not catalog the diverse and plentiful dysfunctions of the accommodations. I’ll mention only that my single-pane windows fronted onto Interstate 35.

Be Careful

I arrived in Austin as dusk was beginning to descend and was at loose-ends until a meeting at noon the next day. I had a relatively sedate, if not exactly sedentary, evening planned. I had mapped-out a three hour trek that would take me to a seemingly well-regarded BBQ joint, into the heart of the downtown South by Southwest Festival scene, and back through the University of Texas campus to the crappy hotel where I was staying.

Forty minutes after setting-out, I found myself on Austin’s East 12th Street, as grim and raw as any nighttime streetscape you might care to imagine. The streets were just empty enough to feel abandoned, just populated enough to exude a palpable desperation. There was almost no car traffic, despite the relative breadth of the thoroughfare. I had no intention, of course, of wandering into an area of human tragedy. Google Maps can chart one’s path to bypass such things as toll roads or highways, but it does not counsel the avoidance of poverty and hopelessness. And I was not of a mind to alter course, in any event.

I Love My Slumdog

As Oscar night draws near, Indian furor over Danny Boyle’s acclaimed film, Slumdog Millionaire, reaches a fevered pitch. India is being shown in a bad light! cry Indians who have never set foot in Dharavi or any other slum.

Indeed, they need not be familiar with the slum environment to mount their charge. Their complaint is fundamentally divorced from the question of the accuracy or fairness of Mr. Boyles’s depictions of the lives of slum-dwellers; it is about whether a foreign filmmaker is entitled to tell any story other than “India Shining”. This is a fable last told by the BJP in the 2004 elections. The Indian public didn’t buy it for a minute and, as a result, the BJP was able to snatch a stunning defeat from the jaws of victory. Congress has been running the government ever since.

Let Me Run This by My Accountant

I was among those invited last week to the Raj Nivas by the Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry, His Excellency Govind Singh Gurjar, to discuss new initiatives for creating environmentally sustainable growth in the Pondicherry region. After the meeting, the LG greeted me warmly and teased, “So, are you an Indian citizen yet?”

“Excellency,” I smiled, “I cannot begin to imagine the bureaucracy involved with attempting to become a citizen. I cannot even manage to get a PAN card issued so that I can pay my income taxes.”

“You don’t need a PAN card!” he lightly chided me. “I will give you my PAN card and you can pay my taxes.”

Accidental Environmentalism

When the Government of Pondicherry takes decisive action in favor of environmental protection, one thing is for certain: there is more to the story than meets the eye.

Here is the astounding-but-true story of the designation of Ousteri Lake, Pondicherry’s largest water body, as an “Important Bird Sanctuary,” thereby providing a significant legal tool to stop the industrial development which is ravaging its watershed.

The True Face of Heroism in India

This morning, in a Republic Day ceremony with only a smattering of the brainless pomp that usually characterizes Indian public events, Lieutenant Governor Govind Singh Gurjar honored our dear friend and colleague Probir Banerjee for his extraordinary devotion to voluntary service to the people of Pondicherry.

It is shameful that I am only now, upon the prompting of this recognition, writing about Probir. He is not only one of the extraordinary people who cause me to call Pondicherry “home” for half of each year, he is very much the ringleader of that inspiring clique.