Sleep time. I am almost there in dreams and all of a sudden, I am reminded of KFC Hot Wings and I cannot go back to sleep now! Presto, here is my addiction to food and the habit to form memories associating with it.
My interest in food is so much that I can remember school friends with their usual school lunches! Like how I met my friend Sithara after 4 years and immediately craved for her mom's perfect combination of mulaga podi and sugar or the amazing Channa (and the fight for it like famished African kids) that KC used to bring. Still fresh in my mind is Shruthi's absolutely crunchy fried idlis, a recipe that I forced my mom to try as well!
As I try to sort and rank these memories in my head, I find myself closing my eyes and smacking my lips a-la Ratatouille style! Like most people, I have this treasured memory of me and my cousins seated around my grandmother watching the movie Anjali for the umpteenth time with her patiently feeding us mashed curd rice with vadagam and pickles. We used to keep eating even after we were full and once all the food hit us, we used to fall flat on her lap!
During my school, eating out was not quite uncommon and I always used to make a fuss to eat at mealtimes! There was the rarest of rare occasions, when we had relatives from US and we went pizza dining with them. The simplistic times when choosing a base did not mean saying cheese multiple times till you ran out of breath! It was a luxury to splurge your hard saved cash on the canteen sambhar and the bakery-next-to-school puffs. More often than not we spent time hanging around the bakery only as it was the most happening social spot of our school life - the one place where we could check out the senior guys without appearing like stalking juniors which we most definitely were.
One of my special moments with my dad would be cooking with him when I was 5 years old - the first and last time we did it! The most basic of all mashed potatoes with some pepper which I relished so much and aggressively demanded to be christened with a proper recipe-like name. After much debate, I agreed to the name 'Alu Kashima'. One of the good points of being a Chennaite is Saravana Bhavan - the only Sambhar I can stand is theirs! Equally beautiful was their raitha with so finely chopped onions which I started admiring all the more after having the horrible hostel raitha with onions murdered than cut properly!
College was a nightmare and joy for a glutton like me! I was not the one for 'missing home food' moods but month end always meant a compromise for hostel food or hot water soaked Maggi noodles. Still there was hope with Tango's amazing tomato pickle and Lucy's amazing beef pickle! But weekends were always the best with the value-for-money Leiden burgers, Aunty Stores' soya puff, RV's carrot halwa and my special order of CCD's chocolate fantasy with extra extra hot chocolate sauce! So much food memories with college swarm my head, so much that I wonder did I go to Coimbatore to eat or study!
I used to drag friends along on food trips on the occasional evening when classes finished early.Our trip would start with the inevitable ATM visit, a 12-rupee plate of Gobi Manchurian, ice-creams at Boomerang and then a hasty run back to hostel when we realized that we were close to the curfew time! Still we or rather I could not stop on the way to have the Hot Chocolate from the PSG hospital canteen.
The luxury of having a day-scholar friend was the unwritten right to walk in for food anytime! I used to travel 2 hours to and fro on weekends to my friend's place just to have his mom's lovely rasam and spinach. That was also the place where I started my culinary experiment with a birthday cake for my room mate Divya. A sure shot disaster averted by Ramya and converted into a cake with two floors!
How can any discussion of food not mention ice-creams and chocolate! The most amazing choco bar I have had is the one shared with my dog. Curled in a cane swing, with my dog on the lap we shared an entire ice-cream so good manneredly!
Why talk about the past when my every day in Bangalore seems to revolve around food! The standard momos at Taste of Tibet, Apollo Fish at Meghna, BJN lunch buffets(followed by chai and coffee to stay awake), Thai dinners and the icing on the cake - CORNERHOUSE and DBC(a sure way to chocolate heaven)!
Coming back to where I started, KFC Hot Wings would be the perfect thing to lull me into sleep now. My only memory of my childhood trip to Bangalore is the visit to KFC on Brigade Road. I was so fascinated by their penguin shaped sauce bottles and made my dad promise to come again on our next trip. Since at this time of the night I can have nothing out of this endless food choices - I will curse myself to sleep with Snickers and Lays! RIP all those memories!
P.S Significant memories that I missed in my hunger to sleep are the Tiramisu at the Google Hyd cafeteria, exam special night tea at hostel that perfectly helped our Pirates of Caribbean movie screening, my extra special birthday lunch at Little Italy, the health conscious sandwiches at Seasons, a-lot-can-happen-over-coffee sessions at Cafe Vallatey, special Greenland parotta, Saikrupa's sambhar and today's dinner A2B's Onion Thokku.
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Friday, 1 April 2011
The movie experience
Just back after catching King's Speech at INOX, I am comparing in my head what counts as a good movie experience. For some people, a Friday night movie is quite the natural occurence, for some movies are mere entertainment and for some movies are pointless waste of time, money and effort.
Well for most part of my life I was in the last category as a direct consequence of my parents' tending to zero association with movies. Through childhood and school, the only movies I would have seen would be critically acclaimed arty movies by Mani Ratnam, Parthiban and their likes. There was of course the occasional night show with cousins during the summer holidays.
But entering college was such a eye-opener, I spent so many hours catching movies of all kinds - popcorn-and-masala, obsessed-with-authenticity, zilch-originality, dark-abstracty! Thanks to our laptops in hostel, all of us had a huge collection of DVDs perpetually in circulation. We used to have these crowd favorite movies - scenes out of which we used to watch during lunch breaks and group study sessions(to break away from the books routine).
Though the movie allure had hit me hard by then, I was still not into the theater and popcorn mindset. I was(and always will be) in favour of movie watching on the good ol' VLC Player. Nothing like the satisfaction of being able to skip the sickly lovey dovey and blood soaked violence scenes. Most Indian movies would take merely an hour and half max when we leave out these predicatable timeless scenes.
And to throw this movie-on-laptop obsession out of the window came my final semester! It all started with Abhiyum Naanum with a group of six girls and a poor lone guy! Then was the first day first show 'Unnai Pol Oruvan', the 'horror' of Eeram, the mass bunk 'Ninaithale Innikum', the post-semester 'Ayan' and so on. It was quite an experience to catch a movie with friends as the focus was solely in howling and whistling and not listening to dialogues and appreacting the camera angles!
My vote is still for the laptop movies - the fun of five people huddled around a laptop in pin-drop silence with the constant fear of being caught by the warden or the pause after every dialogue for the translation for the Telugu films cannot be compared. There was this time when we saw this eastman colour old movie 'Vennira Aadai' with endless laughter at the snail's pace of the characters in movement and dialogue delivery. Seeing the movie even at 2X speed was like seeing a slow motion movie!
The other time that I cannot forget is when we all oohed and aahed over Johnny Depp in Pirates of Caribeean. The most studious amongst us also could not resist ditching the exam preparation for checking out the cheeky actor. Equally wonderful to these illegal movie watching was the legal movie screening we used to have six months old movies in hostel grounds. Those nights were the perfect excuse for all the girls to turn to rowdyism and whistling and comments to every cliched dialogues! After all these movie screening nights, I used to wake up with a croaking voice like a toad - courtesy: all the screaming I had to do in favour of my class and department!
Now Bangalore with its INOX and PVR has spoilt me for choices and barely is there a week without seeing a new movie! Also my personal favourite in this city is the pirated DVD guys at every corner where I end up buying ten DVDs every weekend! It now looks like I have finally bitten the movie bug and am successfully on my way to being an addict.
Well for most part of my life I was in the last category as a direct consequence of my parents' tending to zero association with movies. Through childhood and school, the only movies I would have seen would be critically acclaimed arty movies by Mani Ratnam, Parthiban and their likes. There was of course the occasional night show with cousins during the summer holidays.
But entering college was such a eye-opener, I spent so many hours catching movies of all kinds - popcorn-and-masala, obsessed-with-authenticity, zilch-originality, dark-abstracty! Thanks to our laptops in hostel, all of us had a huge collection of DVDs perpetually in circulation. We used to have these crowd favorite movies - scenes out of which we used to watch during lunch breaks and group study sessions(to break away from the books routine).
Though the movie allure had hit me hard by then, I was still not into the theater and popcorn mindset. I was(and always will be) in favour of movie watching on the good ol' VLC Player. Nothing like the satisfaction of being able to skip the sickly lovey dovey and blood soaked violence scenes. Most Indian movies would take merely an hour and half max when we leave out these predicatable timeless scenes.
And to throw this movie-on-laptop obsession out of the window came my final semester! It all started with Abhiyum Naanum with a group of six girls and a poor lone guy! Then was the first day first show 'Unnai Pol Oruvan', the 'horror' of Eeram, the mass bunk 'Ninaithale Innikum', the post-semester 'Ayan' and so on. It was quite an experience to catch a movie with friends as the focus was solely in howling and whistling and not listening to dialogues and appreacting the camera angles!
My vote is still for the laptop movies - the fun of five people huddled around a laptop in pin-drop silence with the constant fear of being caught by the warden or the pause after every dialogue for the translation for the Telugu films cannot be compared. There was this time when we saw this eastman colour old movie 'Vennira Aadai' with endless laughter at the snail's pace of the characters in movement and dialogue delivery. Seeing the movie even at 2X speed was like seeing a slow motion movie!
The other time that I cannot forget is when we all oohed and aahed over Johnny Depp in Pirates of Caribeean. The most studious amongst us also could not resist ditching the exam preparation for checking out the cheeky actor. Equally wonderful to these illegal movie watching was the legal movie screening we used to have six months old movies in hostel grounds. Those nights were the perfect excuse for all the girls to turn to rowdyism and whistling and comments to every cliched dialogues! After all these movie screening nights, I used to wake up with a croaking voice like a toad - courtesy: all the screaming I had to do in favour of my class and department!
Now Bangalore with its INOX and PVR has spoilt me for choices and barely is there a week without seeing a new movie! Also my personal favourite in this city is the pirated DVD guys at every corner where I end up buying ten DVDs every weekend! It now looks like I have finally bitten the movie bug and am successfully on my way to being an addict.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)