Journal entries

In the continuing series of culinary misadventures, yesterday's was perhaps the most bittersweet of them all. With the intention of keeping a backup option for the dog days, I had resolved to make dosai maavu regularly. Last week, this was a moderate success with Karen putting the batter to good use with dosas to supplement our regular diet of chaat, blueberry milk shake, watermelon juice and stir-fried bhindi. The climax was the butter onion dosas that melted in the mouth. Buoyed (ironic that the most appropriate verbs can often be unintended word-plays) by this, I readied the urad dal, fenugreek and rice for another load. Having set them aside for a reasonable period, I fed them to our trusty blender and out came the dosa maavu. The problem though was in the quantity. I had overcalculated our desire to feed off dosas and so there was one large stew-pan full of batter not to mention a small surplus in a plastic tub with a flimsy handle. In the evening, we decided to punish my excess by trying the batter out without waiting for it to.. rise. A good thing that, for in a matter of two hours after the last of the dosas were made, the remaining batter puffed up like the rising tide -- overflowing onto the workplace, dripping into drawers and splotching on the floor below. We launched a massive clean-up operation but the foremost concern was to check the inflammation. I was reluctant to place the batter in the refrigerator for it had not soured sufficiently yet. So, we employed yet another container into which part of the stew-pan's content was drained out. My complacency in this episode had to do with the fact that every single time that I have made the dosai batter, it has never risen beyond an inch. And all of a sudden, last night we had been blessed with this largesse. The rise was good -- I told myself and decided to sample the idlis from the batter only to find little convex craters in each of the moulds.

The taxman cometh..

I have a theory about the smooth functioning of any country. It has to do with seasons. Specific periods of time when an entire people's energy is focused on achieving a single objective. In fact, I shall go so far as to say that this time-divisioning is one of the crucial ingredients to the success of a nation. The United States has this perfected -- there is the Superbowl in February, the basketball playoffs commencing immediately afterwards, elections in November every four years, even the holidays are well-coordinated (thanks largely to Richard Nixon) and then the tax season. How much of a hassle one's taxes is determines the simplicity in his lifestyle. The sparser the writing in the 1040, the more uncomplicated our living is. While I filled in my tax returns, I wondered at the myriad little clauses, bonanzas and dragnets at every line that I was so blissfully immune to -- alimony, renter's credit, interest accrued from Treasury bonds, legal blindness, property tax, EIC credit, deductions for dependents, farm income, Social Security benefits, Medicare, royalties, state lotteries. It is a shame that I never got to pay taxes in India for I should have liked to know what sort of innovative brackets I fell under there. While on the subject of comparing two nations, I came across electronic copies of both the United States and the Indian constitutions. They make for very instructive reading.

Clutching at straws

After a year of self-enforced geek-illiteracy, I shed my guard and updated the laptop to what could reasonably go as an up-to-date configuration if not bleeding-edge -- Redhat 9 with a few Fedora Core 1 packages and KDE 3.2.1. The original intention was to look for a Linux alternative to the current sucky RSS client I was using on Windows -- Feedreader. I had heard great many things about Straw but had been scared away by the steep pre-requisites it demanded of me. Having finally surmounted the steeples of PyORBit, Gnome-Python and every other imaginable acronym-reptile combination, I was heartbroken to find that Straw was still just that -- "GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: file gtype.c: line 2319 (g_type_add_interface_static): assertion `G_TYPE_IS_INSTANTIATABLE (instance_type)' failed".

In God We Trust: The U.S. Constitution

Adhinayaka Jaya He: The Indian Constitution

January 2004 - March 2004

October 2003 - January 2004

July 2003 - October 2003

May 2003 - June 2003

April 2003

January 2003 - April 2003

2002

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