the brook

Cooking for yourself can be addictive. It’s easy after a while, doesn’t force you to think every day about finding food, makes you crave simple food if you’ve eaten out too much, but most of all it makes you do crazy things at times.

Yesterday I was feeling mighty adventurous and in the mood for trying something different. So I headed to the grocery store and came home with some cabbage.

What induced me to buy cabbage I do not know. Maybe it was some shred of memory of being advised to eat green leafy things. I don’t believe that I could identify cabbage the day before yesterday if my life depended on it. I’ve been trained to eat, not to remember and identify leaf names. In fact, on my way back I read the label on the packet and it said “Wong Bok” which nearly made me decide to get my head examined. A quick Google, however, assured me that the now ominous oval in my hand was indeed cabbage.

I describe the vegetable as ominous because I was now at a stage familiar to nervous bungee jumpers who, having made a painful climb to the top of some bridge or ravine, now ponder the wisdom of letting mindless gravity take charge of their lives. Here I was, someone who barely knows how to cook an omelette and who forgets how many cups of water are needed for one cup of rice – handling a vegetable that in everything but taste was as alien to me as multilateral diplomacy is to George W. Bush.

Like your foolish but egoistic bungee jumper, I decided to take the plunge. Let me warn fellow non-cooks – all the health benefits you may accrue from cooking and eating cabbage cannot make up for the rise in blood pressure that must occur when untrained folk try and get this herb to behave in the kitchen.

A vague intuition told me that I should probably cut this thing before trying to cook it and so I dutifully picked up a knife. If you want to analyze how to cut a raw food item, I doubt you’ll find anything as unyielding as cabbage. Apples are easy, tomatoes are messy but simple, cucumbers can be dangerous but obvious but cabbage… cabbage is a total mystery. I stood there for a few minutes, knife in hand, my mind in knots about the right approach. I was so bashful you’d be forgiven for thinking that I was planning to ask this vegetable out to dinner. Come to think of it, I was. From a certain point of view.

I managed to cook it somehow; though words cannot express how glad I am that no authorities on cooking were on hand to observe me and laugh hysterically. As for the the result – suffice to say I ate what I cooked and lived to tell the tale.

I hit the road last weekend with a few friends to travel to Melaka for a couple of days. It’s been quite a while since I travelled anywhere just for the sake of travel – so even though it was a short trip, it was a good one.

The moment you cross the border from Singapore to Malaysia, you somehow get a sense that life is more chaotic, more unpredictable, more spontaneous, more free. These guys at the Larkin bus terminal saw me with my camera and had enthusiastically asked me to capture the moment. At the time, I said I’d try and make it to the front page with the photograph :) but this will have to do.

Singapore being a small country, I really miss the endless landscapes one gets to see while traveling in India – the highways in Malaysia though offer ample amounts of the same.

Melaka has had very strong cultural influences over the years – both Islamic and European and it served as a very important port for a long time. This is reflected in a disproportionate number of buildings being architecturally aesthetic (I’m no critique, but they’re better than boxes).

St. Paul’s Church in Melaka has a very interesting history. The guy in the picture was doing an amazing job singing Knocking on Heaven’s Door – an appropriate song in more ways than one – the Church is at a high vantage point and overlooks the city.

There are some really good museums in the city – hosting art, literature and historical knowledge and artifacts. One of them, a naval museum, is inside a ship; unfortunately, it was closed for renovations when we were there.

The streets of Melaka can be very colourful and lively.

The river which runs through Melaka is a great place to enjoy a quiet evening at sunset.

Chinatown in Melaka was a really busy place on Saturday night.

The river I mentioned earlier runs throughout the city. There were lot of activities around the river on the weekend from fairs to kayaking to performances. There are also a number of houses along the river and there were families having a barbecues just outside.

Great place to go, even if only for a day.

In India, we used to celebrate the 14th of November (birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru) as Children’s Day in school. It was one of the few days when wearing our uniforms was not compulsory, and instead of classes we used to have games and fun all day long. Truly the good old days.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

– Khalil Gibran

The photo is a mosaic of snaps taken from my Flickr stream.

Occasionally I get the feeling that the universe is actually a sentient being. Like today, when I ate at Taco Bell after a really long time; the first packet of Fire sauce in my hands had this quote on it: “Ahhh… we meet again.”

Events like these greatly increase my belief in my favourite quote – “No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Taken from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, but popularized (among people I know, at least) by a very similar quote in the movie Harold and Kumar.

In other news, I’m off to India for the long weekend, where reliable sources (read: Mom) inform me kaju rolls and the first mangoes of the season await.

I think I’ll skip breakfast and lunch today; for tonight I dine in heaven.

Two years ago, I decided I was tired of Windows. I was already running Linux full time at lab, part-time at home, and nearly full-time on my trusty old Thinkpad T23. And so I did something that, back then, was quite unheard of – I started thinking about switching to a Mac.

I knew not a single person who was using a Mac, I’d never seen a Mac being used except as a 14-year old (one of my friends had a Macintosh running System 7.3). But I had heard all about it, mainly on slashdot, and was impressed with what people had to say. I spent a couple of months researching on what served for software on the Mac, attended a few seminars and workshops on the Mac; and finally wrote the following on my blog:

no, i don’t think i’m ready to buy an apple just yet. though its cool (and i was really excited at seeing all the new stuff), my work and play are going on pretty smoothly on linux and windows respectively. apple is for when i have 3K with no better use for it than to play on a new platform with.

– Me, January 18th, 2005

Less than a month later, it was all over but the squealing.

For two years plus a day or three, it’s been a great journey. Mostly, I’ve loved my Powerbook, on rare occasions hated it, occasionally compromised and yes – I did eventually make a dual-boot system with Linux on it. For a year and a half, it was my primary computer without doubt, and I did virtually everything except game on it. For the last six months, it’s been more of a useful toy – for photography, some writing and Powerpoint. But it’s something I can survive on completely if I have to.

The positives are many. The best – solid build quality. My laptop feels as good as new on my lap – keyboard response, screen brightness, speaker quality, everything – nothing feels the least bit aged. My battery was recalled and replaced sometime last year but even after 1.5 years, there was no noticeable decrease in charge retention capacity.

Next – Mac OS X. As solid, stable and good-looking an OS as one can hope to see. I’m running on a PowerPC G4 processor. The G4 architecture first debuted in 1999 – more than seven years ago – and my applications never skip a beat (well, maybe Firefox does once in a while but thats Firefox). Unless I run code benchmarks on this thing, it’s hard to tell how old a CPU my laptop is using. And of course there’s all the eye candy – which I was initially enamoured by, but don’t care for anymore. I hardly use Expose, my Dashboard is permanently turned off. But for those who like looks, OS X is as pretty as anything out there – though I haven’t seen Vista up close yet.

Finally – things just work. The best hardware/software integration I have ever seen on any platform. Wireless just works, external monitor support is nothing short of amazing, and I’ve never had to go hunting for a driver. This will probably be the one thing that will keep me stuck on the Mac platform when I upgrade my laptop.

There are a few negatives too. The biggest one is lack of hardware options. In the laptop space right now, Apple doesn’t have a laptop that I’m completely happy with. The Macbook Pros are too big – but the Macbooks have that glossy reflective screen that I can’t stand and are limited to Intel onboard graphics. In the desktop space, you either get a highly performance limited Mac Mini, or an iMac. If you already have a good monitor and are looking for a Mac tower – you have no option but to go for the ridiculously expensive Mac Pro systems.

For people who love to tweak their OS to the extreme, the Mac will feel stifling. It’s just not as hackable as Linux, and in some ways even less so than Windows. You do get a lot of customizability both out of the box and due to the BSD base – but there are limits to this.

Frankly, if Linux would become top-notch in terms of laptop hardware support (external monitors, hibernate support and so on), and get a few more applications (Photoshop, presentation, voice/video chatting apps), I would switch back to a Thinkpad. While OS X is fun, Linux is what makes me feel at home. Until then though, the Mac is a more than able replacement.

I was recently browsing DSLR camera reviews, and observed that Digital Camera Resource site has an extremely helpful little section at the bottom of its reviews.

One applauds both the thoughtfulness (you don’t invest in something like a DSLR by reading just one review), and their self-confidence without which no site would directly link to their competitors. Kudos!

I was always fascinated by the idea of photography, I recall playing with a Kodak 1000 automatic film camera when I was 14. Since then, I’ve always owned a camera.

Yet for the longest time, the camera was a gadget to take out when an occasion demanded – festivals, holidays, parties, weddings and the like. And while on these occasions I would shoot away with gusto, it was only for memories.

Recently, though, I’ve been looking at the world around and seeing plenty of photographic subjects in daily life. Since, I’ve started to carry my camera around with me on weekends and snapping away at what I see around me.

Some time ago, a camera represented a gadget to play around with. Now, I think of it more as a tool to look at the world in a different, creative way. So I thought it was time to start a photoblog.

So here is frozen moments.

I hope you enjoy it, and I hope I can improve my novice skills through this.