Table Talk with Kurush Dalal

Our guest for the fourth edition of Table Talk is Dr Kurush Dalal.

Kurush is an archaeologist and anthropologist, an educator, and an inheritor of a culinary legacy (his mother was a legendary caterer (and an archaeologist)). We’ll talk about all these facets of him, and hopefully remember — he’s an entertaining storyteller, so it’s easy to get distracted — our main topic: what the people of the subcontinent ate based on the evidence he and others have literally dug up.

We’ll chat for at least an hour, and have questions and discussion for 15 to 30 minutes, though I suspect we’ll go on longer.

Please join us?

May 30, 2021 21:00 IST.

Register here with an email address linked to a Zoom account (signing up for Zoom is free). This is a security precaution. Registration is open up to the time of the event. After you register, you'll get a confirmation email with your meeting link and password.

Table Talk with Saba Mahjoor

Our guest for the third edition of Table Talk is Saba Mahjoor.

Saba's stories of her phuphee have captivated the Simple recipes for complicated times group. In this Table Talk, we'll listen to a few of these tales live. We'll also chat: about recipes and learning to cook, about growing up in Kashmir and about feminism.

We'll chat for 45 minutes to an hour, and have questions and discussion for 15 to 30 minutes.

When: May 2, 2021 21:00 IST. Register here.

Things not to say to someone grieving

(A very personal list from my own experience of receiving condolences. YMMV.)

- “Everything happens for the best” / “It was meant to be” / similar.

How TF do you know? You have a crystal ball which sees all possible futures and found this was the best outcome? Fuck right off. Now.

- “[The loved one] is in a better place now.”

May work for religious folk who believe in an after-life. It’s not something you want to say to an atheist / agnostic.

No, it doesn’t matter what you believe, however sincerely; this is not about you.

- “Grieving is a process.”

You’re right. But it works differently with different people. I’ve seen grief that lasts a lifetime. (All grief does; it’s just that for some the ache stays an open wound.) If the bereavement is recent, it’s hard to rise above it and see the long term. Don’t try to ‘fix’ things.

- You don’t know what to say, so you say nothing.

Reach out anyway. The bereaved person isn’t expecting magic words from you. Chances are, they won’t really hear you if you do happen to have the eloquence. But they will remember you reached out.

That last one? Saying nothing because you can’t think of what to say? I’ve been guilty of it so often.

Things you can say and do.

- "I love you. I’m here for you."

(And mean it. Be there. Be present, in whatever way the circumstances allow.)

- Cook a meal and take it over or send it.

- Help with things like paperwork, giving away the departed one’s possessions.

- The bereaved often have a lot of people around the first few days after a loss. The company helps. Then people must return to the other things that life demands. This is a good time to check in, not necessarily to ask whether they need help, but just to listen to whatever they want to say. The silence they're unaccustomed to, the big hole in their life, the daily reminders of the loss, they’re hard. This is even more true if the dwelling unit was a small one, and one person is now alone.

Nothing you can do will bring the departed one back. No one expects you to.

But you can be a friend, an ear, a shoulder, a hug.

Table Talk with Antoine Lewis

This Sunday, our guest will be pal Antoine Lewis, food writer, culinary experimenter, and, he insists, not an influencer. 

We will talk about this whole authenticity thing, how cuisines influence each other, travel, morph, have descendants, change. Antoine has also been a literary curator, so we will perhaps also talk about food and books.

 We'll chat for 45 minutes to an hour, and have questions for 15 to 30 minutes. So, like an hour to a maximum of ninety minutes. 

You will need to go to this link on Zoom and register with a valid email address, after which you will get the link to join the event.

Please join us?

Field notes for disaster relief (suggestions for those wanting to help on social media)

You want to help, you’re limited to being able to offer only your time online or on the phone, but you don’t know how to get started. Here are some tips from Dina, Bala, Neha, and me, based on our own experience long ago running tsunamihelp.blogspot.com and allied and subsequent efforts.

YMMV and all that.

Collaborate.

We believe in the power of one. But we would also strongly recommend collaboration. (Which, if you come to think of it, does require that one person to make the first move.

Many like-minded folks working together make for a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Even if members each have modest followings in the social medium you choose, you can reinforce each other’s posts and increase reach by each one amplifying to their own audiences.

A collaborative effort can also be the foundation of life-long friendships. Trust us at least on this.

Most of the rest of this is about such collaborative work.

So, what next?

Step 0.

Look around for people who have already formed groups to do things like collect and sort information. Volunteer to join them. There are many already out there. Follow their methods and ignore the rest of this post. (Folks who are running groups like this, please leave a comment so others can find you.)

If that doesn’t work out, for whatever reason, perhaps you could start a group of your own. In which case you might want to read these tips.

What do you want to do? Will you list fundraisers? (What kind? Help for individuals? Organisations raising money?) Help people find home medical help? (Source oxygen tanks + ventilators etc? Medicines?) Source medicines? Hospital help? Help people who are quarantined?

It makes sense to look around and see what is needed.

There are three broad types of info needs we see right now: emergency, persistent, and clarity.
• ‘Emergency’ would be all the cries for help we see where people require oxygen or hospital beds NOW or they will die.
• ‘Persistent’ or longer-term needs would be reliable (and current) sources for O2, medicines, lists of beds available, medical help at home, meal services, and similar.
• ‘Clarity’ is needed because there are many, many questionable and troubling rumours and superstitions being passed around as facts, which need debunking, and many good sources of sound info and can-apply-right-now tips that need amplification.
Each requires slightly different skill-sets.

Decide: Which type will your group handle?

(It may make sense to focus on one and do it well rather than flounder as you try to do it all. Of course, if you have a large group, you may be able to pull off many things at once. We did, that time, with TsunamiHelp, because we had several hundred people in the effort.)

A collaborative blog would probably work better for the ‘Persistent’ type of need. Your effort could be a constantly updated repository or aggregator.

‘Emergency’ needs could prob be done with a blog, but may be more efficiently done by working as individuals but coordinating.

‘Clarity’ needs could be met by individuals supporting the efforts of fact-checking sites and healthcare professionals; donate to the, re-share their posts.

So, step 1.

Decide exactly what you want to do.

Then put it into words.

A clear ‘mission statement’ helps everyone focus. (Mission statements are for internal use, meant to inspire your team and give it direction. It isn’t necessarily the name of your effort or your hashtag.)

Step 2.

Think through the various tasks that will need to be done, and then divide you team accordingly.

For instance (with titles, some of which we used):
• Collect information: ‘Seekers’
• Sort info: ‘Sifters’
• Verify info: ‘Checkers’
• Clean up and format info: ‘editors’
• Make it accessible in multiple ways (including to people with disabilities) and on different platforms: ‘Translators’; ‘Specialists’
• Delete info that is outdated or sensitive: ‘Cleaner-uppers’ (This is important. Someone required a hospital bed and shared a phone number; the bed is got (or worse, is not needed any more), but the person who asked is still getting calls at a time when they have other needs. Or a supplier is out of stock, but still getting besieged by requests. And we’ve seen women who posted numbers getting dickpicks and lewd calls. Never post private numbers in public if you can help it.)
• Answer requests: ‘Call Centre’; ‘Helpline’
• Onboard new volunteers: ‘HR’; ‘Trainers’
• Solve tech issues: ‘IT’; “Fixers’
• Coordinate all this (no mean task): ‘Managers’
• Your effort is very popular and the media wants to chat? Have ‘spokespersons’ with agreed talking points.

Step 3.

Put people in charge of each of these functions; we suggest working in shifts with handover protocols.

Bring new volunteers in quickly (a shared document with goals, methods etc would be great) but ensure that they're on board with your central goals AND methods. If you can hear out people who disagree with your goals/methods, fine, but it's cool to shrug, thank them for their time and wish them godspeed elsewhere.

How do you run this?

Some thoughts.
• You’ll need an HQ, a ‘war room’ or ‘conference room’ which could be something like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, or a Google Group.
• Keep a private page updated with what one finds / verifies etc for the group’s internal use. You could use Google Groups, which lets you have stuff in threads, or a private Facebook group with posts under which new info is added as comments. A platform that doesn’t let you easily go just to the threads that matter will became a morass in no time.
• And of course maintain a public page / site / social media handle updated for your target audience. This could be a blog, a Google Drive (or similar) page, Google Sites, a Twitter or Instagram or whatever is most comfortable and hospitable for your team and your audience.
• Use whatever social media you’re comfortable with, and see how you can use (or repurpose) the new tools you have, like Zoom, Google Meet, and similar, Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, and similar.
Repurpose?
For example, we used a blog as a collaborative publishing platform, supplemented that with things like using Yahoo Chat (R.I.P.) as a war-room, Skype (you remember, Zoom people?) as a call centre, Flickr (THE photo-sharing site of that time) as a missing persons album, and so on. None of these were designed with those uses in mind, but they worked for us.
• Whatever you use, it’s important that not everyone should post to the public page — could lead to duplication — so systematic process and defined roles are important.

A word on self-care.

The work you’re doing is important, but you won’t be able to continue to do it if your body or mind get too tired, too stressed. You won’t be doing anyone any good if your mind of body break down.

DON’T TRY AND DO THIS ALL YOUR WAKING HOURS. Take breaks. Cut out completely for some time. Chat with the folks you live with, or loved ones further away. Cuddle you pets or talk to your plants. Eat properly. Listen to music. Watch a movie. Go down internet rabbit holes as you pursue your other interests. SLEEP.

A word on conflict.

Resolve conflict early. Any group of people will have conflicts. In a world in which so much is going to hell in a jet-propelled hand-basket, people will be tense. It’s important to solve disagreements quickly, without rancour. Maybe someone in the team is good at calming people down? Put that person in charge of conflict resolution.

 

p.s. For other ways you can help, this post might give you some ideas. This kind of action can have huge value, as Anshumani Ruddra has shown with this tweet, and the very many folks emulating him (see the quote tweets).

Update: Some of us are doing Dhan Daan again. More here.

Table Talk with Kirtana Kumar

Our guest for the first episode is Kirtana Kumar, theatre practitioner.

During lockdown, Kirtana and her family moved base to their farm. We'll talk about how that has worked out, the unromanticised view of what farm life actually is from an urban person's point of view, its effect on her theatre practice, food and politics and what she's learned about it in these months (including a project she is working on), and other things that take our fancy.

We'll also make time for questions from the audience.

Table Talk

If you’re on Facebook, chances are I have invited you to join Simple recipes for complicated times, a group I run. If you’re in the group, skip the next two paragraphs.

It was a sort of reaction to lockdown, a way for people like me, unaccustomed to cooking or managing their kitchens to get some simple recipe ideas, tips on how to work with whatever was available, and so on, from more experienced folks. It took off rather rapidly, thanks to folks like you who saw usefulness in it and invited friends in and helped spread the word. Membership grew rapidly, until we began moderating join requests as a way of cutting clutter. It’s now at around 6,800. (The group even got a bit of kind press coverage, finding mentions in these pieces by Paromitra Vohra, Priya Ramani, Ranjini Rao, and Manjula Padmanabhan.)

On March 19th, we completed a year. As a way or marking the date, (‘celebration’ seems like the wrong word to use for something born of a crisis), I hosted a couple of video chats on the group, which were fun.

Going ahead, I plan to host a fortnightly chat, each time with a different guest (or guests, max three people). It’s called Table Talk and will be live once a fortnight, on Sundays, 9 p.m. IST. I'll also archive these to YouTube or similar for those who couldn’t be there for the live webcast.

The idea is to have my guests tell stories — which could be in many kinds of media — or do a lecture or a tutorial or a demonstration, or have a debate or chat with two or three people, maybe even things like quizzes. All connected to recipes, cooking and food, of course. This would be for around an hour, maybe more (who am I kidding; definitely more). And then we’d throw it open to the audience to join in, with questions, discussion, debate, because the purpose is to involve the community, for another half-hour or more.

Topics for the first few sessions include: what it takes to actually give up the city and live the farm life, with asides on what kitchen ingredients you may want to carry with you if you’re spending a short stint in another country; summer foods and beverages and also food and literature; tales from one of the group’s most popular story-tellers; what a food reviewer looks for and also why not to be constrained by recipes; writing food for kids, with a reading; a peek into an artist’s travel diaries and a bit about food and art; culinary anthropology and what we know about what ancient Indians ate; creole foods and exploring creole cultures. And more to come.

That lovely logo? Hand-lettered by my talented friend the designer, artist, calligrapher and storyteller Kriti Monga, who was a founding member of the group and frequent contributor.

Gratitude to my friend Shubha Sharma who brainstormed the idea with me and came up with many of the possible subjects we'll be exploring, and Nilanjana S Roy, Manjula Padmanabhan, Rimi N, Venkat Krishnan N, Sameera Khan, Prem Panicker, Kurush F Dalal, Rashmi Dhanwani, Richa Dubey, Anita Vasudeva, Anita Roy, who all took time to critique the idea and offer me their thoughts and suggestions.

If you’d like advance notice of shows, and links to recordings, please subscribe to the Google Group and/or the Telegram Channel. Both are one-way: only admins, i.e., me, can post, so you won’t get any clutter on your inbox. There will be, at most, three messages a week: advance notice of the next live show, and links to recordings of shows just gone by.

Who has been on the show so far? These folks.

Want to be on the show? Get in touch.

p.s. You’ll notice, if you’ve been nice and subscribed to the Google Group and/or the Telegram Channel, that they also reference ‘For Pete's Sake.’ That’s another project I’m developing, about which more soon.

Annus mirabilis

The day just past marked a year since my last day at The Hindu.

This day last year marked the beginning of a week spent on the first actual holiday I’d had in eleven years, just sleeping a lot, reading, being self-indulgent. A week later, I began working on a proposal for some linked non-profit projects I’d been putting aside for years, and a plan for a book project I could do alongside. This was going to be the start of a year of self-discovery, of indulging myself by doing work I wanted to, and to hell with the money, doing just a bit of pay-the-bills work on the way.

But life, as it often does, had other plans. Like death. Dad, the last member of my immediate family got ill, two months were spent between hospital and home and then a sickbed, then he died.

Suddenly I was living completely alone. Suddenly, my life decisions would affect no one but me.

And I was paralysed by freedom.

Weeks went by when I could do nothing except walk every day, a couple of kilometres every day at first, slowly ramping up to 15. And then a health scare that made me pause. And made me pay closer attention to stories I’d been reading about a city called Wuhan and an epidemic of serious disease that then seemed to leap to an area called Lombardy. It seemed inevitable then that the contagion would reach us sooner rather than later. I stocked my kitchen and locked down before the thaalis and taalis.

And so nine months have passed, baby.

I had to put the projects and the book plan aside (they all needed me to travel). The kind of jobs I wanted were getting scarcer; many I know lost employment that seemed secure, and there was no freelance on offer. My health has been up and down.

But, you know what? It’s not been a wasted year.

For one, low phases aside, I’m healthy, net net. (And three Coronavirus tests came out negative.)

Thanks to once having been too broke to pay hospital bills, I had saved madly for medical emergencies I thought would come. Instead, I wound up prepared for the truly unforeseen, with savings to pay rent in the quiet neighbourhood I live in (and a landlord, bless his usually miserly heart, who hasn’t raised it, though he was contractually entitled to). I was in a godawful mental slump a few months, and I pulled myself together with this thought.

I learnt, thanks to the generosity of many of you, and a group I started, how to feed myself better, more nutritiously, with more variety, with stuff I had never encountered before. And with less waste. (Peels and scraps and bones and such are frozen, then made into stock; all remnants are composted; the only waste I generate is packaging from food, and that is one dustbinful a month.) In the time to come when we can visit each other, I won’t be famous for my dinner parties, but I’ll invite you to stay for a meal without embarrassment.

And I helped start and run two other projects that were not even on my horizon nine months ago.

Thanks to being able to afford that quiet neighbourhood (and male privilege) I was able to walk every night. I haven’t been able to do any art or poetry, strangely, but I’m not too worried about that; those things come when they come; when they do, I’ll be there.

My closest friends are still my closest friends, we talk more than we did before (though I’d also like to hug them, and that will have to wait). Friends who’d been too busy to keep in touch — more likely, truth be told, I’d been too busy or worked hours too weird to keep in touch with them — were chatting again. Some folks I knew only slightly have now become close too. Together, we talked each other through this weird reality we find ourselves in, across the world, sharing stories, sharing memories, sharing hopes.

No, not a wonderful year, but yes, a wonderful year.

❤️

The ❤️. When did it become a symbol of love? For that matter, why is it called a heart symbol, when it doesn't look like a human heart?

Illustration from a drop-letter in 'Roman de la poire,' which dates back to around 1250 CE. The first known depiction of a heart as a symbol of romantic love.

We know that we associate the heart with emotions. And that became a symbol of romance in medieval Europe, particularly the Renaissance, when it figured art showing Christ and his 'sacred heart.' It also was used as one of the four suits in European playing cards. By the 1700s, it began featuring in Valentine’s Day cards.

I read also that a symbol much like it has been seen on cave paintings dating back to 8000 BCE or more, like before the last Ice Age, but what meaning those painters may have ascribed to it is unknown. And in the Voodoo religion, the heart icon is the symbol of Erzulie, the loa of love, beauty, and purity. In Ghana, the Asante used the symbol in Adinkra, hand-embroidered cloths that represented social thought and belief, to represent love.

But I digress. Why was this shape the symbol for a heart, which to our eyes, looks rather different?

One theory associates it with saunf, fennel. Or rather, silphium a species of giant fennel now extinct. Silphium grew on the North African coastline. Greeks and Romans used it as a spice, a medicine for coughs, but also as a contraceptive. Poets praised this latter quality. It was cultivated into extinction by the first century CE. In images from the era (the city-state of Cyrene, which prospered with the silphium trade, put the shape on its money, for one) the silphium seed looks like the ❤️.

Some theories say it is based on ivy or water-lily leaves. (Ancient Greeks associated ivy with Dionysus, god of sensual things, which may have lead to its association with sex and then romantic love.) Others say that that it was based on the shape of breasts or buttocks or the pubic mound or vulva or testicles.

The Catholic church's story is that a saint Margaret Mary Alacoque a vision in which the sacred heart of Jesus appeared to her in this shape, with thorns around it. This vision was in the 1600s, much after the symbol (sans thorns) was already well known, so doesn't explain the origins, but since the church had no small influence in Europe, it accounts for its further spread. (Before this, in heraldry, the heart signified sincerity, eventually became synonymous with the holy grail. Some playing cards use the holy grail instead of the heart symbol.)

Some scholars argue for a more simple evolution. They say it originates in the writings of Aristotle, who said the human heart had three chambers with a dent in the middle, and when artists in the Middle Ages drew representations of ancient texts, this is what they came up with. Some say says that the symbol does resemble the chambers of the heart cut open. Bird or reptile hearts are closer in shape to the symbol, and since early anatomical study was based on the dissection of animals, this sounds viable.

At any rate, most early graphic depictions in Europe were sort of pine-cone shaped, and upside-down, at least from our perspective. In the 1400s, a dent began to appear on the base, first small, then getting bigger. By the mid-1500s, it depiction on playing cards was the one we know today.

We no longer think of the heart as the seat of emotions, or of love, though it persists in language. And emoji. An example of iconographic inertia, to use a phrase coined by Nicholson Baker.

(All this is the product of one of those trips down rabbit holes when one goes to look up something. Maybe you'll find it interesting too.)

It isn’t done

You’ve stayed the course.
Since March, you’ve stayed home as much as you can, perhaps 100%, perhaps close. If you’ve ventured out, you’ve done so masked, maybe double-masked, maybe with a visor, perhaps gloves, to pick up essential supplies. Whatever you brought home, you immediately sanitised. If you’ve had home delivery, you’ve answered the door masked, and immediately sanitised everything, after, of course, tipping the delivery person, because you know they are indispensable now. You’ve cooked what ingredients you have.
You’ve had only the people at home for company — sometimes that’s good, but you could still use a break, sometimes that’s awful, and my heart goes out to you — or perhaps you live alone. You haven’t spoken to friends in person for months. You’re sick of video meetings and working from home though you’re grateful to have a job, let alone one that lets you work from home. Or you’re out of a job and wondering how long the savings will stretch. You know that you’re better off than so many others, and you’ve tried to do your bit to help those less fortunate. You’ve stayed TF home.
But you’ve had enough. You’re *so* done with the virus.
You want to scream. You want to walk without a mask. You want to walk without fear. You want to just go out and have a normal day. And you think, why not?
After all, restrictions are being eased; lockdown is officially over in some places. And all around you, you see people returning to work, going out to shops, hanging out in each other’s homes. Going to restaurants. Celebrating festivals in crowds.
But it isn’t over.
Yes, numbers are down. But they’re not anywhere near zero yet. And if you look around, around the world, you’ll see that wherever restrictions have been lifted before numbers were down to trivial, opening up has resulted in infections rising again. Yesterday, the USA, which has been opening up, recorded its highest single day of new cases.
In India, many people who have no option are returning to work, to commuting. Restaurants are now open, and are filling up. With festival season starting, and social distancing being sacrificed at the altar of bonhomie and enjoyment, not to speak of the start of cooler weather, which results in more pollution and a rise in respiratory ailments, it seems inevitable that we will see a rise too.
Also, complacency has set in. I’m seeing people walking around without masks, or lowering their masks to sneeze or cough (!) or to talk on the phone. That last one puzzles me most; I use an old-style candybar phone, and folks I talk to can hear me through the mask; people with fancy touchscreen phones shouldn't be having issues.
So, friends, if your circumstances permit it, continue working from home. When you do go out, remember social distancing and wearing masks, carrying sanitiser and washing hands obsessively.
You’ve stayed the course, so don’t let all the sacrifices you’ve made so far, all the inconveniences you’ve faced, all the behaviours you’ve modified, be in vain.
You’re so done with the virus. But the virus ain’t done with us.