Someday, today will be nostalgia

I am an unapologetic foodie. Though I can no longer wolf down a 7 course meal and follow it up with 7 Mysore Paks and then ask what’s for dinner, there are days where I can still resuscitate my teenage self and come close. Of course I have preferences. I have a weakness for South Indian food and I'm subconsciously always afraid that all Italian food will be bland and tasteless, even though I have been proved wrong time and again. At the end of every extravagant buffet, I dutifully round it up with a serving of curd rice. For the most part, I ate food. I sat back and waited for it to arrive. Be it at home or elsewhere. The arms and legs of my culinary skills extended to making a really delectable plate of omelette (with onion and green chilli) and Top Ramen Smoodles (with capsicum and carrot), and a drinkable cup of filter coffee (there was never any instant coffee powder in the house to fall back upon). Bred on my grandmother's impeccable and irreplaceable culinary mag...

Bob Dylan sang ‘the answer my friend, is blowing in the wind.’ But when it comes to suicide, it only leaves behind a bunch of unanswered questions. Once upon a time, cable TV was our only source of entertainment and the only sources of new music were Channel V and MTV. At the turn of the decade, there used to be a show called the Billboard top 100 which was hosted by a very pretty VJ called Asha. It aired every Saturday at 8 pm and for the longest time, it was the only peek we got into the latest in pop, rock and hip-hop. The year was 2001. One day, a song broke its way into the top 100. It featured 5 guys who looked like they were high on many things and angry with everything, venting all their anguish out in a video where there were in some sort of a tunnel. It was dark and angry, but it was different. The song was One Step Closer and that was my introduction to Linkin park.  The same album spawned a few other hits like Crawling, Papercut and In the end . Th...

Pearl Jam's haunting ballad Gone is about someone seeking to escape the rigors and limits of small town life and chart a new course. While performing the song on VH1 Storytellers, Eddie Vedder quotes another song inspired by small towns, the late Lou Reed's Small Town in which he sings ' the only good thing about a small town is you know you want to get out.'  Outside the cocoon of 24x7 wi-fi and artificially cooled air, is a world. It may lack many of the things that cities spoil us for choice with and numb our senses to, but it is definitely more real than the Truman Show lives of sameness that we lead. There are two ways to explore a small town. One is to hire an AC cab, zip through landscapes and people, finish whatever you went for and return. The other is to ditch the comforts and travel in their buses, walk on their roads, drink chai in their chai kadas and listen to their stories, hopes and dreams. We traveled to a place called Gandikotta in Andhra Prad...

The music app on my phone had a notification. It read 'Remembering Chris Cornell'. After devouring a 4 course Andhra lunch, I was a bit groggy and it took more than a few seconds for me to  it. Isn't remembering used only when you are talking about someone who is no longer there? I was listening to Soundgarden just a few days back. In an My hands, working quicker than my mind, leapt to the keyboard and typed his name. Sure enough, the flood of bad news was all over the internet and the good feelings from my 4 course lunch quickly evaporated. Soundgarden was a great band but I never obsessed over them like I did over other bands. There was a time when I listened to Black Hole Sun and later to Like a Stone on loop, two songs that harnessed Cornell's breadth of voice but the story of how his voice, among many, came into my life is what I will always remember. I like to think of it as the summer of rock. Or the summer I lost my rock virginity. There is a room in ...

Like Renee Zellwegger completes Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuire, curd rice completes me.  At first glance, it looks unpretentious. It doesn't exude the aura that an aloo tikki or dum biryani do. Even when decked up and dressed up like a bride, it doesn't assume lead star status in the line-up. It is like Rahul Dravid, steady, dependable and always playing second fiddle to the other Sehwags Laxmans and Tendulkars in the line-up. It doesn’t lend itself to poetry, give a foodstagrammer an orgasm or find mention in a 100 things to eat before you die bucket list. It has many secret admirers who outwardly pretend that they are most at home with an Italian dish they can barely pronounce and brush it off with varying degrees of embarrassment, like it is below their pretentiousness to acknowledge its existence. On a bad day, it comes to the rescue of a tummy on a bender and on a good day it can empty a bottle of mango pickle. To an outsider looking in, the fierce and unflinching...

Sunday is the last day of the wise president before the mad man takes over. It holds within it the semblance of normalcy, the last threads of sanity, before the insanity gushes in like a broken dam. Sunday is prayer before the sin. Sin because all you're doing is selling your soul and time to a cause that doesn't necessarily move you. Sunday is the shade from the unrelenting sun, the crumb of sense before the nonsense. It feels like the sun is always rising on a Sunday, when the ocean of time isn't regulated by the unforgiving minute and second, like the best is yet to come.  On Sunday, you don't feel like a lab rat in a maze, running around looking for the answers to life that always seem to elude you. Sunday isn't a mirage, it's an oasis. It holds within it the promise of a Friday and the death sentence of a Monday.  Sunday is the headache after the heartache.  While you're always waiting for the work day to end, the wa...