I note that NDTV has a recipe section, and if they can, I can. Their latest recipe is for a chicken sandwich, and I’m certain that I can tell you how to make a better chicken sandwich. After all, as the famous saying goes, “It is not chicken that makes the chicken sandwich tasty, but mother’s blogger’s love.” So, without much ado, and with immense warning to read no further if you want your friends to remain your friends, I present the India Uncut Chicken Sandwich!
* * *
Chef
Amit Varma
Ingredients
Chicken
Bread
Method
Part One
Read more...
Posted by Amit Varma on 30 May, 2007 in
Personal
There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours — but they don’t deliver lunch.
-- Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury, a dabbawalla, as quoted in the New York Times.
(Link via email from Gautam John.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 30 May, 2007 in
India
What do you think of the advertisement below? Is it exploitative, or is it brave and powerful? What do you feel about the matching purples? Comments are open…
There’s more from Arun Venugopal at SAJA Forum and Anna at Sepia Mutiny.
UPDATE: It’s a hoax. Salon reveals that this ad is not by Benetton, as does Jill Miller Zimon. (Courtesy Quizman in comment 20 and Sumant in comment 21. This update posted after comment 22.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 30 May, 2007 in
Miscellaneous
Check out The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun. Much joy emerges.
I worry that if you take No. 6 too seriously, you’ll stop reading India Uncut.
Or I might stop writing it!
(Link via email from JSV.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 29 May, 2007 in
Miscellaneous
I am, this test informs me. Who would have thunk?
(Link via email from Aditya Kuber.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 29 May, 2007 in
Miscellaneous
Mrinal Pande writes in Mint:
That despite their obvious physical attachment to their progeny, all new mothers (both homebodies and working ones) are petrified and exhausted by turns and may undergo periods of depression and murderous rages as a result, is one of the most under-reported facts of human history. And even though most of us remember how we were routinely yelled at, slapped, pinched or punched by hassled mothers when we drove them insane with our childhood antics and public tantrums, a host of unexamined myths about mothers’ great powers of forbearance and motherhood being its own reward continue to be circulated and nursed by families.
It is true that many husbands are sensitive and affectionate, love their children deeply and are even willing to “help out”. But families make it very clear that such an offer of help is an act of generosity and the woman must be grateful for it, because his real job is his professional work, not raising children. In contrast, if the mother of young children goes back to work, she is suspect in all eyes, most of all in her own. Is she being selfish? Is she going against nature and denying her children their natural rights?
Not being a parent, I can’t add personal testimony to this, but observation bears out what Pande writes about: I have never known a mother for whom motherhood hasn’t been excruciatingly difficult and immensely thankless. I’m sure they’d all say that the rewards are worth it, and I won’t be cynical and speculate that some of them might be rationalizing.
As for me, I subscribe to Philip Larkin’s views on this matter.
Posted by Amit Varma on 29 May, 2007 in
India |
Personal
Julian Gough explains:
Well, let’s go back a bit first. Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely human view of life (we sicken, we die). But comedy was the gods’ view, from on high: our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it. The big, drunk, flawed, horny Greek gods watched us for entertainment, like a dirty, funny, violent, repetitive cartoon. And the best of the old Greek comedy tried to give us that relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods, laughing at our own follies.
[...]
Yet western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. Brilliant comedies never win the best film Oscar. The Booker prize leans toward the tragic. In 1984, Martin Amis reinvented Rabelais in his comic masterpiece Money. The best English novel of the 1980s, it didn’t even make the shortlist. Anita Brookner won that year, for Hotel du Lac, written, as the Observer put it, “with a beautiful grave formality.”
I agree, and wonder if it has to do with our taking ourselves too seriously. Wouldn’t that be funny?
(Link via PrufrockTwo.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 May, 2007 in
Arts and entertainment
... it can also be a political statement.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with political statements, and I wish these neo-Buddhists well, and respect their decision. But I wonder what the Buddha would have thought.
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 May, 2007 in
India |
News |
Politics
It must be so much fun to play God. Ah, such fatal conceit…
(Link via email from Shrek.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 May, 2007 in
Miscellaneous
Remember the post in which I expressed incredulity about the supposed bomb disposal squad in Hyderabad not wearing any protective clothing at all? Well, CNN-IBN reveals why that was so. The bomb they were defusing wasn’t a bomb at all, but “a tiffin-box full of rice.” It appears to have been a hoax, to make the cops look good, and we are told that “[t]he four police officials involved in the drama are likely to face action.”
The cops, of course, do plenty of things to make themselves look good. At least there was no human cost involved here.
(Link via email from Gautam John.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 May, 2007 in
India |
News
