Day One, Part Three: A History Lesson

Last stretch of the day! This part was all about Punjab and Pakistan. And the military, of course.

This was on our way to an army checkpost overlooking Pakistan. If you ever get the chance to drive through Punjab, do it. Whiz past on the one-lane highways, listening to bad Punjabi rap, watching the fields go by. If you manage to do the whole thing without getting stuck behind a tractor, you're a star. If you manage to take a few pictures while you're at it, you're on your way to being my hero.

This is my sister looking out at the other side.

This is what she saw.

Reflections in...well...the reflection pool, Bhagat Singh Memorial.

After that, we went to the Bhagat Singh memorial, in a village called Hussainiwala. If you haven't read about this, you really should.

Bhagat Singh, Daddy and Rajguru, in that order.

Next, we went to see the lowering of flags ceremony at the India-Pakistan border, Hussainiwala. These are a few of the visitors on the Pakistani side.

This, below, IS the Pakistani side.

The ceremony itself was a lot of this. You can watch a movie on the whole thing, if you wish.

The sun had almost sunk by the time it wrapped up. So we did what cool people do; we went for a boat ride! It had been a long, long day. And we had been every bit enthralled, a whole lot more educated, and surprisingly, still full of energy. It had been a day well-spent.

Day One, Part Two: Museum, Guns and More Tanks!

After dusting down ourselves (post-tankride), we bathed, breakfasted and set off to explore what army life in Ferozepur is like. First, we went to the Special Ops Room, which is this cool, underground wartime planning space straight out of a movie. It's so secret that no one knows where it's located. So secret, that I wasn't allowed to take pictures. So secret, I forgot we went there!

Well, almost.

So you'll have to imagine the cold, steel offices, and the mess where food magically appears from the heavens, and the conference rooms with their maps and giant LCD screens. (I bet they watch movies there sometimes.)

Anyway, after all that excitement, we whisked off to the Army Museum, where we exchanged listened to war stories and I realised that the army is important outside of war. Delivering food to natural disaster zones, building bridges overnight, and all that. Good to know that someone's got it covered.

Then, we checked out artillery guns, which is basically what the army calls cannons. These are so heavy I couldn't even open the loading shaft so heavy they need nine-member teams to operate them. Here's the view looking out through the muzzle. Happy trees and leaves and things, right?

Here are the oily rags they use to clean the thing.

And here's looking through the viewfinder that shows you whatever is right behind you.

(Does anyone else think that it's easier to just turn around?)

After that, we got to my favourite part of our noontime adventures: the shooting range! I was so excited about shooting with an actual gun, that I didn't shoot with (my) Canon.

I wish I could show you my target-card, though.

Finally, we went to take one more tank ride, this time on smaller, bumpier tanks that the army uses to transport foot-soldiers over long distances. Above, you can see where they sit, hook up their guns, look out through the periscopes, and fire like crazy. You can also see the smokescreen-makers (the three cylindrical things), and the guy who explained it all to us.

And then we set off for lunch, which was this elaborate, buffet-style thing with lots of mayonnaise. And lemon souffle!

Next time: More historical/political stuff!

Day One, Part One: Tanks!

Can you guess what we did on our first day in Ferozepur?

Yes, we saw a tank.

And took a super dusty tank ride!

I found out that tanks have special smoke-screen makers, which cloud up everything in super-smoke, so that the enemy can't tell how many tanks have just passed. That's great for the people in tanks, or on them, like us. But all the doggies in the empty fields?

They sort of chill out and look around till it all dissipates.

There's so much dust that everything's covered in sun-flare.

Even the cool army guy who has to take us to our next stop.

Next up: Army museum!

Night One: The Indian Railways

A man checks the waitlist at New Delhi Railway Station

New Delhi Railway station is a photographer's paradise. Everything is perpetually in motion (unlike machines of the same name). Above the endless roar of trains, you can hear babies cooing in half-sleep, bags rattling down staircases, and voices that make up a nation all of their own. There are travelers, trains, coolies, suitcases, vagrants, and kiosks everywhere, all at once. The kiosks are by far my favourite, because they sell everything that you could possibly need, including what could only be travel staples in India: Hajmola, the Gita and paper soap.

All railway station kiosks have their quirks. In Karnataka (and most of southern India), almost every kiosk is a tea-shop, selling strong, spiced, thimble-sized cups of tea to langourous travellers. In Goa, they sell Bebinca, a rich, elaborate multi-layered specialty cake. And Delhi has fresh juice shops, shelves stocked with seasonal (and not-so seasonal) fruit. Here, have a picture.

Pineapples in the middle of autumn! Who would've thought.

This was the view from our train cubicle. Seven beds cleverly tucked into one, tiny niche. And so night one was spent in the top bunk, drifting in and out of the comfortable, dark, beyond-world of sleep. We woke up only eight hours later, at the very last station, a sleepy border town called Ferozepur.

(Best sleep I had in a week.)

More on Ferozepur tomorrow, though. 

Tomorrow: Ferozepur, a military welcome.

A state of mind

My family and I were in Ferozepur and Amritsar this weekend. We were there for two and a half days, but we did so much that I can't possibly choose just a few pictures out of ALL the ones I took. And I can't inflict a supersized blog entry on you readers, not all at once. So, in the coming days/weeks/month/as-long-as-I-can-stay-entertained, I'm going to put up pictures from my trip in more digestible chunks.

I'll go in chronological order as we go on, but here's an amuse-bouche, to get your buds tingling.

Sadhus at the Golden Temple, Amritsar

It's like what one wise mildly inebriated man once told us: "Punjab isn't a state in India. It's a state of mind."

In the Summer

Film grain: those tiny little spots of noise that make my heart smile.

Just one of the many reasons I would love to have a film camera.

PS: You must listen to this song. And check out this blog of the same name.

From the Archives: A Confession

I found this as I was going through my drafts today. I should have posted this a year ago. But the elusive right time never came, and eventually, I forgot. No worries, though. The word is out, and everybody knows what I did last summer. So here is a much-postponed letter to my dad.

Play along, try not to google the clues. Just pay attention and hopefully you'll figure it out. Have fun!


Dear Pa,

I feel you deserve to know a secret. I went exploring in a foreign land this summer, without you knowing. But you'll have to guess where. The day I ventured out here, I was in transit. In three places (in different corners of the world) but not wholly in any one of them.

Well before I ever came here, I dreamt about being here. In a long, long tram ride. In real life, this tiny city has 73 kilometres of tram tracks, and more than 110 trams! No wonder that's all I could dream about.

This incredibly cool city was one of nine European cities of culture in 2000, hosted the 2007 Eurovision contest, and held the 1952 Olympics. Blah blah blah.

It snows for more than one third of the year , and has an average of 51 days without sun in the winter. Imagine that! So when Carl Ludvig Engel designed this city, he very fittingly wanted it to be The Great White City of the North. His neo-classical architecture was so convincingly Russian that the Gorky Park film crew decided to shoot here instead of Moscow, where the park originally consecrated to Maxim Gorky is. Here, have a picture example of all the Rusky business.

Like me, people who live here love all kinds of fish, except, perhaps Tomato Baltic Herring, which isn't quite so much a fish preparation but a method of punishment in schools in this country.

Where there is fish, there must be water. And my, is there water. This city is built on over 300 islands. Three hundred! But it also has rocks. Big ones. The world's largest continuous rock tunnel is here.

You've probably guessed by now which city I'm talking about. Please, please tell me you peered at the picture above with a magnifying glass, at least?

I had such an awesome time there. It was the perfect last bit of holiday adventure before I went back to being in Delhi's belly again. More fun because it was on the sly, of course. And because while I was there, a giant rainstorm struck the city, and everything got soaked, and my plane washed away. That last part is not true. Unfortunately.

But almost! Because, when I got back to the airport (almost rain-soaked, but well in time!), they told me my flight was delayed. And so I had fun window-shopping in duty free and taking up kind strangers' offers for coffee and conversation for the rest of my time there. I can be such a happy, hippie hobo.

Please don't be mad, Dad.

All my love,

N

Eggs

If you have ever talked to me about food, you must have discovered how much I love eggs. What 42 is to some people, eggs are to me. Ask me for breakfast, and I will offer to make you eggs, any way you like. Ask me for lunch, and I will offer to make you eggs. Ask me for dinner, and I will offer to make you...well, you guessed it.

Truth be told, it's because they're just that versatile. You can use them in coatings, fillings, and main courses. You can cook them with vegetables, in fried rice (or noodles), or just by themselves. You can fry them, poach them, scramble them, boil them (eugh), foam them, age them, devil them, bake them, shir them, soup them, spiderweave them, and probably even dance with them.

The only thing you can't do if you want to successfully enjoy an egg, in fact, is to break it on the way home.

So it's only natural that I want to share with you some of the fun ways I've used eggs recently. And boy, I've used a lot of eggs. Perhaps a personal best? Thirteen in one day. And that's just to bake with.

Let's start simply with fried eggs. Here, have a look at my lunch and dinner from [some day] last week. For lunch, spaghetti with chunky tomato sauce and a fried egg on top. Yolk, just runny. Yummy. And another fried egg as part of dinner. This time with a yolk that wonderfully, sunshinily spread itself out in the pan. Topped with Italian pizza seasoning herbs (!), and eaten with toast. I can't even begin to tell you how good this was.

I'll just leave you to drool for a bit.

And then, I took the day off from classes to bake! It was my daddy's birthday on the ninth, you see. So I set about, with all the zest in the world (and tons of the lemon kind in my fridge), to bake. The trouble was, I didn't know what to make. AND, my sister had eaten all the eggs.

Okay, she'd eaten two of them. But two out of the six eggs I had carefully planned my undecided recipe around? Man.

But like every time things go wrong, things went super right afterwards! I went and bought a zillion eggs, and I didn't break them on the way home. I separated the whites from the yolks for seven whole eggs without mixing them up, or leaving bits of the shell in the mix. I measured and sifted the flours (which I usually don't have the patience for), and didn't even yield to the temptation of adding any whole wheat flour into it. I beat the whites till they were softly peaking, added some sugar, and beat till they were beautifully meringue-like shiny. I followed a recipe, for heaven's sake, for probably one of the few times in my life. And then, I poured the whole mix into baking trays without letting it collapse!

I felt like a superstar.

I won't bore you with the details of how much I enjoyed making the strawberry topping, which I smeared all over everything. Instead just look at how it turned out. Sponge cake with strawberry filling. All professional. All natural.

I made lots more cakes that day. One large-family-sized cake, and twenty-four gooey chocolate cupcakes. They smelt so good, I was afraid I'd finish them before everyone else could taste any. I didn't.

I had cake batter instead.

A note: I have a simple, delicious, new go-to recipe for chocolate cake. Ask me for details! (Or cake.)