The Simplest Recipe

I was channel surfing this evening and stopped at scene showing a group of 4 women curled up around a coffee table drinking vodka and eating chocolate. It was obvious that they'd had a crappy day and were trying to make themselves feel better - and succeeding from the looks of it.

Greatly inspired, I decided to google a chocolate fudge cake recipe. I found plenty, for cake as well as for chocolate, but the strangest one by far is this one for sugarfree dark chocolate:
Ingredients: 500 g - melted & tempered sugar free dark chocolate
Method: Melt and temper Sugar free Dark Chocolate and put in a mould. Cool in refrigerator for 25 to 30 minutes. Tap each chocolate out from the mould. Arrange nicely on a serving tray and serve.

How can the ingredients for a food be the food itself? This is like saying I make great biryani. I get it from Hyderabad House!

Cinema सिनेमा

I watched a movie on TV called The Transporter. It's about an ex-special forces operator, Frank, who now lives in France and works as a transporter making not quite legal deliveries of people/cargo. I'm not going to provide the whole plot here; suffice it to say that Frank gets involved with one of his packages, a young, attractive Chinese girl named Lai, and all hell breaks loose when they attempt to rescue 400 Chinese people smuggled into the country to be used as slave labour.

I must confess I kind of enjoyed it. It was fast-paced and reasonably gripping. No great acting - the characters were true to type. The strong, silent, I-work-better-alone hero; the young, vulnerable-but-gutsy heroine; the handsome villain known only as Wall Street; the I'm-tough-but-I-have-a-heart middle-aged cop. It was good watching if you had something on the stove and had to get up periodically to stir without missing much.

But all through the movie I kept thinking that this was actually a Hindi movie made in English by mistake. I could almost see the writer explaining "Is mein sub kuch hai. Action, romance, comedy, family drama. Fight sequence mein hero ka body dikhaenge, highway mein car aur truck ka chase dikhaenge. Superhit fillum banega!" And seriously that's what it was - an out and out Dhoom 2. I am happy to say that Hrithik and Aishwarya are way better looking and had better chemistry than the lead pair in this movie, but the fact that Lai didn't have that silly giggle was a huge factor in her favour.

So my rating, 2/5. For Dhoom 2, not The Transporter.

The Fine Art of Letter Writing

When I was in primary school, we were taught how to write our first letter to a friend. Here's how they said it should be...

My dearest friend {name of friend},

How are you? I am fine. I am so happy to hear that you are coming to visit this summer. It has been a long time since we last met. Let me know the details of your arrival so I can receive you.

Looking forward to seeing you.

Yours affectionately,

{your name}

I don't know why I thought of this after so many years. I think I miss the definiteness of relationships. Earlier there were best friends, schoolfriends, tuition friends, neighbour friends, friends of relatives friends, ex-friends (friendship broken cos someone shared lunch with the sworn enemy). I could immediately tell you how I knew someone, and how close or not I was to them.

But now, I can converse freely with anyone I meet, and make you think I've known them for ages. I can have a party for a dozen people where everyone meets everyone for the first time, and I would introduce them all as "my friends". But in all this soical frenzy, I keep myself essentially isolated. There's no real sharing. Noone who's met me for the first time in the past two years would know that I write poetry, or sketch in charcoal. They wouldn't know I've run an alternative healing center. They'd never believe I pick up the cell phone a second before it rings. Ok the last one, practically no one believes. But it's true. 90% of the time.

Anyway, coming back to the point. I think I've become commerically savvy but emotionally impoverished. Except when my REAL friends are around or in touch. I know myself through my relationships. So I'm happy that the lasting ones are so great.

By the way, if I had to write that letter now, here's how it would go:

Duuuude! you're finally coming to {name of city}. The last time we met I wore plastic jewellery and you had big hair. When you getting here? I'll take a couple of hours off from work and come home to let you in. Let me know. Yayyyyy!!

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