It’s been a long while, but this inspired me to resurrect these noble, quintessentially Chennai birds.
ps: Kashmiri Pulao – a very fancy pulao from Kashmir whose recipe includes a huge assortment of dry fruits and nuts. It is a dish that every one loves to see in a restaurant menu, but nobody actually orders it, and even if they do, people rarely finish eating it.
The wordpress editor feels like heaven right now, with angels playing Beethoven on ethereal harps and other things like that. It feels like crisp onion rava masala from Saravana Bhavan. It feels like the “Ga Ma Ni Da Ma” section of Reeti Gowlai. It feels like how Andy Dufresne felt when he escapes from Shawshank prison.
Stop. Rewind. Explain
So why all this unbridled adulation?
Astute readers might have noticed a complete lack of activity on the blog since July 20th. That was the day that I woke up in Toronto, Canada and found that two very bad things had happened.
I could use some more drastic similies to describe what I felt like, but I’ll spare you. So the last 4 days have been a desperate exercise in (trying to) contact Google support to find out what on earth happened. Now, trying to find the Gmail ticket submission form is sort of like a mirage in the desert. One thinks it’s out there, right there, but it’s actually pretty hard to find. Eventually I did log a ticket and pretty much got an instantaneous response, fully sealed in aluminium.
Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information about this account.
So essentially I was being told that in order to protect the privacy of my (recently deceased) account, no further information will be revealed to the owner of the account. Sort of like the Military telling parents that they are unable reveal whether their son is dead or alive because of national security reasons, but in any case, he won’t be returning home.
That was Google. I don’t blame them. One cannot provide free support for free email. But what about WordPress? They are free and open source to boot. How good was their support?
For a change, I got to talk to human beings, not bots packaging responses in aluminium. Antony, Noel and Heather from WordPress support took the pains to read my lengthy, verbose emails explaining why I was the real Krish Ashok, and that somebody from a suspicious domain had hijacked my account recently, and today, they restored my access. I quickly changed my password to a string that contains, among other things, Hieroglyphics, Klingon and musical notes in addition to alphanumeric characters, and I am back posting.
I recently finished playing what I think is one of the greatest video games of all time – Portal, and the villanous GLaDOS cheats me in the end by not giving me the cake that was due to me, but to the WordPress support team, here you go. You deserve it.
Update: July 28th – Google restored my account, and all the data. Thank you Vish and Thaths for helping out from the inside. So this black forest cake is for everyone involved.
Thank you WordPress.
ps: Note changed email/gtalk. Plisxcuse and update your contacts.
One would expect
Pronto: –adverb Informal. promptly; quickly.
Right?
In Toronto,
Pronto: –noun A flatbread that originated in the Indian subcontinent. It is usually made with whole-wheat flour, pan fried in ghee or cooking oil, and often stuffed with vegetables, especially boiled potatoes, radish or cauliflower and/or paneer (Indian cheese).
So I find myself in Toronto, Ontario, which is actually an extension of Amritsar (sort of like Niagarey wale Gali) and it has more Pnjaabi restaurants per square millimetre than any other place in North America. And where Pnjaabis are to be found, can their accent be far behind? For instance,
I sport congrass
does not refer to a person wearing a new kind of grass called “con”. It actually refers to throwing ones lot in with a particular political party in India.
The rules of Pnjaabi English are ridiculously simple and logical.
Accents and flatbreads aside, I finally saw the Niagara Falls from the Canadian side, and the view, I must say, is nothing short of amaklamatically spectacular. Apparently Niagara dumps 154 million litres of fresh water every minute, enough to make every unscrupulous Thanni lorry operator in the history of Thanni lorry operators salivate. Like Ian Salisbury standing next to Shane Warne, there is a distinctly unawesome “American Falls” next to the Canadian Horseshoe, but it’s just there to allow Canadians to gloat.
And that brings me to Canada itself. A curious country. It’s a formerly British, adamantly French, culturally American and soon-to-be entirely Pnjaabi country that’s mostly empty once you drive a 100 miles (sorry, 160 km) north of the border with the US. Like its behemoth neighbour, it too has a glorious tradition of exterminating Native American tribes and naming places after them (Saskatchewan, Ontario, Manitoba etc). With a population slightly larger than North Usman road (Ok. Slightly more that, I’ll admit) and enough land area to swallow India quite a few times over, it is a beautiful, green country with vast open spaces only occassionally dotted by Brar’s Pnjaabi Kitchens. It is also almost entirely covered, as you might expect, with Maple trees.
Since it’s summer here, the sun rises at unholy hours and sets at unearthly hours and that tends to put us near-the-equator types, a bit off. But since I can sleep even with strobe lights and heavy metal music around, it doesn’t bother me much.
The Canadian economy is mostly sustained by desi tourists from the US paying speeding fines due to the non-realization of the fact that the “90″ on Canadian speed-limit signs refers to km/h. Canada is metric while the US is psychotic (they use miles, gallons and other non-intuitive units).
Here is a question for all of you. When Carnatic artistes tour Canada and sing “Alaipayudhey”, do you think the audience will snigger when the raaga’s name is mentioned?
Anyway, more when I get back to Madras.
Update: This post is not an open invitation for a Paratha vs Parotta war as armistice has already been declared. I would like to distract all of you from this with a new feature on the blog – the avatar chronology
Update 2: Photos of Niagara, thanks to my colleague, co-traveller and friend Bala
It is a bright, hot day in July, and the clocks were striking for better pay. I have been busy watching, in one go, 3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica, and today morning, while putting on a shirt that felt distinctly uncottony, I was wondering whether Battlestar Cottonica was at war with the Nylons. Not good at all. And in this state of mind , I find myself apartment hunting in Chennai.
It’s not easy. Apartments in the city cost an arm, a leg, and another arm. Where have all the “L”s gone? It’s all “C”s now. A 1200 sqft apartment in Adyar will cost x + iy(where x is what I can afford, and y is the imaginary component I need to cough up extra). Car parking extra. Water charges extra. Registration extra. Oxygen extra. It turns out that I have a choice between a dog kennel in T Nagar and a luxurious apartment in the outskirts of Palayamkottai.
But in this process, I have now achieved the equivalent of an SCJP certification in REPML (Real Estate Peter Markup Language), and I can now, without even blinking, figure out what a 1450 3BHK CCP 1C near Adyar BS means. But REPML is for beginners. Real pros talk REVML (Real Estate Visual Markup Language) and I am still a beginner at that.
REVML was invented by our ancestors in Africa, millions of years ago. It was when mankind had to move out of his ancient homes to seek newer pastures and set in motion the wheels of human history that the first real estate agencies were setup, and presumably, somewhere in the Central Africa, long ago, a real estate broker was planning to advertise new “projects” that were being developed in Jericho, near modern day Jerusalem.
That was when the world’s first real estate advertisement was drawn up after lengthy deliberations, such as,
Boss, Israel is too far away. How do we convince people to move to our new projects there?
Ah. No worries. All we need to do is draw a map that is not to scale, and simply forget to tell everyone that it isn’t. Just move the horn of Africa a little up, and no one will notice. After that, we just add a few attractive landmarks nearby, rephrase certain unfortunately named nearby lakes, stress on the centrality of its location, and we are done.
So now you know. Moving forward in history, REVML was handed down from generation to generation, as it continued to adapt to the times and boldly maintain its status as the bastion of real estate obfuscation over the ages.
So today, in modern day Tamil Nadu, REVML continues to evolve, and one can find many fine examples in the newspapers. The Hindu Property Plus is a particularly keen patron of this ancient art.
So what’s next? Advertising Alpha Centauri as being just a “stone’s throw” away from the sun? Advertising the risky star system next to the Cygnus X-1 black hole as “Just on the outskirts of the Event Horizon”?
