statesman house vs. shivajinagar

it has long been maintained by authorities more knowledgeable than me that the only two gharanas of biriyani are the lucknowi and the hyderabadi. and that if all the rest of indian civilisation went to pot, we would still have justified our existance by having invented biriyani. there has to be a little aside at this point, were i make my personal claim that the only people who know how to make a perfect roganjosh are kashmiri muslims. just the way an ilishmachher jhol attempted by anyone who is not a Sen, Ghosh, Ganguly, Bhattacharya, Mukherjee, etc is doomed to failure, the perfect biriyani is best left to the people who have had centuries of institutional experience making it. a digression into the rather innovative calcutta biriyani which somehow transcends mere biriyanis, but then, its not a classic biriyani. in fact, if the pun involved were not so ridiculous, i would have said that the calcutta biriyani is not kosher!!


statesman house: this building near chouringhee you can walk to either from the esplanade, or in our case, on a bunk from college from presidency. kinjal, my esteemed friend is the bloke who knows the ins and outs of calcutta in a way that i do not know. yet. so we walked to the statesman house. where we, impoverished and hungry(this was during my second year in college, when most people experience of leftist revival) stumbled into a roadside dokan which smelled like heaven. beef biriyani in its best form, with a dash of achar(pickle). rubbing shoulders with wannabe journalists dreaming about copy which will sell(statesman house), random dalals("take, take, take, no take to no take, one time to see!") and people employed by random dalals(still trying to equate the city to their mental idea of the chhapra zila, "chhapra zila mein gharwa, to kaun cheez ka darwa?"). the best biriyani i ever had in the holy city. aminia and sabir didnt come close. forget bedwin, bawarchi and the johnny come latelys hich are springing up near colleges in south calcutta. ok,, so my grandma used to make some awesome biriyani, but it wasnt kosher!!!!!


bangalore: three years later. me and debuda hunting shivajinagar for plastic wine glasses. why? cos when jonathan brewster is about to drink elderberry wine from the wine glass, someone comes in and he drops it. or something to that effect. noone had ever seen or heard of elderberry wine before, but we assumed that at thirty feet, the audience wouldnt know the difference between elderberry wine and grape juice from the chowdeswari juice centre. and buri(inspector rathod) had threatened to do nasty things to debuda and me if plastic wine glasses were not forthcoming. so here we were, hunting through the shivajinagar market where on a thursday afternoon, you are likely to hear english, kannada, hindi, tamil, malayalam and the two of us speaking bangla. its fun, everyone curses everyone, and no one seems to mind. until then, i had dismissed bangalore as a hopeless land of vegetarians where rasam was the best substitute for food. till we smelled something, from this somewhat hidden alley. almost like it was an entrance into the magical world. the gazes of the folk walking back and forth seemed to just slide off it. with a cry of "fire burn and cauldron bubble!!!!!" we leapt into the alley.(ok, i just made that up). halfway through, we were stopped by a bunch of rather huge, ill tempered goats. a quick correlation analysis said: livestock-smells-ahaha! we edged our way by the goats and walked down. we eventually reached this shop where for the minor sum of 10 Rs, we could have a whole plate of sheekh kabab or masala kabab or biriyani. negotiations with the stallowners involved us talking in bangla and hindi and him replying in kannada and ultimately hand gestures won the day. we sat down to kabab of the kind which is not served in random expensive places. you have to go there, forget about hygene and all that. and take your own water bottle. and then finish with a up of sweet tea at the stall at the corner of the market, near the bus stop, with a classic mild shared between us.

attack of the insane idli

who sez that we are the only sentient beings on this planet? i mean, fine everyone from unnamed hindu philosophers to doug adams have pondered about this, but has anyone thought about idlis? the life cycle of a typical southie revolves around the worship of the idli, and its equally inscrutable brethren, the dosa. there are minor deities like sambhar, chutney and rasam which are equally inescapable. so if you have had the fortune to actually observe a genuine tam-brahm dip his(or her) idli into the little bowl of sambhar at approximately that hour when we are struggling with our last dream, you have seen a miracle happen. that is their weakest moment. the ideal time to ask them to cough up a couple of hundred rupees, lend you their scooties and perhaps to pop the question is right when they are contemplating the essential unity of idly and sambhar, the earth and the skies, the soul and the universe.... so the question would be phrased as.. "care to have idlis with me for every morning after this?"... a question, which, i am sure, will bring eternal happiness. and if it doesn't, what the heck, you can go back to chhole bature!!

maths and me

most physicists have a love and hate attitude towards maths. we love it when we get it right, and we hate it when we dont. the anecdotes regarding us and maths and mathematicians are endless and entirely unfunny, except, of course to we of the befuddled thought processes.
once upon a time, back home, in the land of the true believers, one prasad sengupta, a truly talented faculty in our dept was perspiring over the solution of laplace's equation in some hideous geometry. after about two boardfuls, all of us sweating(summer in calcutta) and some of us rendered somnolent tends to comatose by the scratch of chalk and the regular click click click of the rather inadequate fan, he turned to us and proclaimed "lost in a jungle of algebra". words that i remember with laughter and some tears(laplace's equation, is, under thebest of circumstances, a beast).

so, here i am, trying to put together product operators for the last answer to a hw. and product operators have an alarming habit of inflating under each pulse or time evolution. if one keeps track of the signs and the sines and the cosines faithfully,, one will not go wrong, but then one does. and then retracing the path followed by half a page of math is approximatly as tricky as negotiating your way out of a south american temple while the wals are begining to crumble around you.

another thing that only the foolish, the masochistic and the supremely confident attempt is to solve problems for the general case, and then plug in values and get answers. i leave it to your imagination as to what i am. but the sheer joy of seeing all the terms collapse into the one ypou expect is the highest level of happiness that a mathematically challenged individual like me can ever hope to achieve. its like seeing the beast collapse; maybe it was a lucky shot, but who cares!!!!!!

the width of the internet

there are moments in life when i feel mathematically challenged. which is a rather common state for a person who puports to be a physics student. but i am not talking about being mathematically challenged while trying to balance my expenses at the end of the month(that is a hopeless task, somewhat on the scale of enforcing peace in certain parts of the world where people try to enforce peace, or like explaining the concept of "work culture" to certain members of that class of parasites known as "homo politicianus" back home), but while thinking about random problem which crop up in life. take this statement made by a friend of mine(name avik). sorry statements: "you can navigate from anysite on the internet to any other by just twelve clicks and you can navigate from any site to a porn site in six clicks". now how do i check the veracity of these statements. one must, you do realise, i hope. there are quite a few interesting phds in network theory here, if one is interested. and if one is willing to risk the possibility of total insanity as a result of trying to check these statements, the experiments themselves should be interesting indeed. and when one got bored, one could write a simple code to start at a designated website and automatically click at random points and then trace the navigation history. should be good work. i have copyright. any filially challenged individuals(read bastards) who steal my idea will suffer the consequences of being eternally cursed.

much obliged

the last time i was badly clautrophobic was about a hundred years ago when i had locked myself in the cupboard. so this is what happened today morning. Y and i were dragging a cart with some stuff upstairs and chose, entirely by happenstance the oldest lift in the building. and halfway up, it stopped moving, the door came slightly open and there were strange creaking noises. we were slightly unsettled. so i called the emergency services, and they said that someone will be over. then the lift started moving down in small jerky steps. we were more than slightly unsettled at this point. i mean, being stuck in a lift is not terrible. there are things you can do, like count all the prime numbers slowly, stare at your fingernails, write that louvv letter which you should have sent, compose your own cenotaph, if you have pen and paper to write on it "I have just proved the Riemann Hypothesis but there isnt enough space to write it down". or something. i might stick with or something.

insert finger here

from the crashes the system shall be woken
a light from the shadows shall spring
renewed shall be keyboard that was broken
the crownless again shall be king

public speaking

there is something about standing up and speaking to people with a powerpoint or something which fills me with unease. a feeling of total dread would be better. that way you know where to look. this vague, undefined feeling of messing up is not too good. anyway, so i had to give a talk this thursday. and as expected, i realised that i had to on tuesday. thats me, brilliantly organised and all in place. but i got the powerpoint in time, hating myself for not using prosper like i should. but prosper is like biriyani, takes a lot of time, and usually gives great results. and it is based on tex. and i ended up more or less enunciating clearly, but not quite speaking like i usually do. and i have to thank the audience for not tearing into me. i know that people at iisc would not have been so nice. after unprepared talks, the speaker's friends are usually called in for the last rites. so i lived and walked through somewhat chastened. the next one will be better.