I AND MY WORDS

Yogurt is a favorite in almost all parts of India, and it also manages to transcend communal barriers. Some of the best yogurt sauces (called Raitas in India) are served with one of my favorite meals, the dum ki biryani at the biryani outlets. South Asia is full of examples of these raitas being served in some form or the other. Now let me be honest. I have no special love for pomegranates. I think they are one of the more boring fruits out there, and it is an extremely laborious fruit. However, they go wonderfully well with yogurt, as I am going to discuss in this recipe. Try it with anything, and I hope you like the combo. Ingredients 1 pomegranate - Kandahari ones are amazing for it, but any other will do as well. about 400-500 gm of yogurt 1/2 tsp salt - if possible use something called sendha namak , other wise used for Hindu fasts 1 tsp sugar 1 tsp shahjeera - its a shorter cumin seed, but regular cumin will do just as well Few pinches of raita masala Preparation...

Our media channels have been living in a delusion all this while. They love to deny certain facts (though it is difficult to say why). Manmohan Singh, a doctor in economics, is always looked up to as someone who has been the original reforms man, and who can be the only one who can promise reform. However, there is more to the story than what the eye can see. Most people tend to forget that Manmohan Singh was the governor of the Reserve Bank of India during the Prime Ministership of Rajiv Gandhi, where a certain Pranab Mukherjee was the finance minister. Prior to that, he was in the IMF and was also on the Planning Commission.  The crisis of 1991 was precipitated by decision making during that decade (with the Left and Right doing no good either). It was a group of people, including P V Narsimha Rao, Dr. Subramaniam Swamy and N Govindarajan, all of whom were given Cabinet Minister level ranks by Rao, the unsung hero of India, who steered the economy around from a position of nat...

The rain and the dark clouds make for a gloomy day for everyone but writers it seems. Writers are a lot like earthworms – they function only on these gloomy days, churning the earth of their minds to make it a fertile place for the crop of thoughts to grow on it. The clouds seemed to be getting darker and darker with each passing moment. The weather is a great excuse for people in India not to work. I guess it’s the gloominess of the dark clouds that play on our mind. That perhaps explains why people in certain parts of the country don’t work at all; it can be traced back to the incessant amounts of rainfall that they witness. I sat there, staring at the window outside. There were thoughts making circumambulations outside the periphery of the conscious mind. All that resonated in the mind was a song, which I kept humming along. It is a fairly popular song, though what stood out for me were the lyrics. Being a man of the word, that is what attracts my attention all the time. The r...

So much coal wash slurry has flown into the Yamuna because of the serious washing of dirty coal in public by the premier Ruling party and the principal Opposition party that the whole debate is becoming confusing to follow. Here is a lowdown on what is the whole matter all about. There was allocation of mines between 2006 and 2009 by the UPA government after discussing the matter with various state governments. So what? One may ask. Well the devil, as they always say, is in the fineprint of the whole allocation process. There was briefly talk of allotting mining leases based on auction prices. Eventually the government abandoned in the 'face of stiff resistance of the states'. It is an excuse of convenience, because as quite a few former CAGs have pointed out (and which I also pointed out thanks to their observation) that Seventh Schedule under Article 246 of the Indian Constitution defines the subjects on which Centre and State governments can legislate, and it clearly sp...

Much sewage has flown in the channels of the Yamuna, and several hours have been wasted trying to discredit Anna Hazare and his 'team' (though they do not have a lot to their credit except for their work). News has now said that these guys will enter politics. In my opinion they already were in politics, though their contest in the electoral foray is certainly welcome. It makes sense that they contest. In this age of live Lok Sabha telecasts, it would make sense for them to come into the Parliament and expose the corrupt deeds of the people who are disconnected from the ground reality. Till now, they had just an urban audience; they can now get even the rural audience's attention. Moreover, all they need to win elections is the anti-corruption agenda. The urban voters are angry and need the kind of alternative that this group can provide.In this day of coalition governments, even a handful of seats can make a huge impact. My personal assessment is that IAC can win about 20...

For some time now there has been talk about how indoor air pollution kills more people than anything else in the world, and how this is prevalent in rural India. A lot of it has been attributed to cookstoves, and while it is true that they are a major cause, the solutions that have been bandied about for some time now are all in the same direction. Let us improve the cookstoves is the unanimous voice that resonates across the world. But there seems to be more to it than this. A recent paper by Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna and Michael Greenstone has been doing rounds for a while now. For those who have seen the program upfront as well as others who are familiar with it, the paper seems to have confirmed the worst - the problem of women's health in rural areas has not been mitigated in any way. The paper goes on to highlight how the distribution of cookstoves has been an abysmal failure because people stop using them within a year. Why is it so? The question does not have a difficult...

Seeing the amount of hot air over the various issues of chalta hai attitude that afflict this country, I wonder why people think this is appalling. Anyone who has travelled across the country would tell you horror stories of the terrible infrastructure (or mostly lack of it) in this country across a range of public services that would otherwise be considered a public right in developed nations (I do not count the United States in this). Lack of beds in hospitals, horrifying mental asylums. incessantly long queues at hospitals, strips of roads in potholes (and not the other way round), open manholes and deep flowing drains. no remediation of the annual breakouts of dengue, malaria and chikungunya across the country during monsoons - you name the problem, you find its evidence in abundance across the country. Nobody however seems to be trying to diagnose the disease. This country has a law that can declare strikes of people working in 'essential services' illegal. There are al...