Monkey Menace

I loved this Kanchipuram hotel's straightforward warning about the all-too-common Monkey Menace. (The text reads, "Dear guest, we request you to keep all doors and windows shut to prevent monkeys from entering your room.")

At first glance, it might sound fun to have a monkey guest show up, but when they began to grab things, turn the TV to that show about the chimp and the bulldog that run errands, and look for the costly silks you bought in this town that's famous for them, that feeling may quickly change.

I didn't see any monkeys when I looked out the window, but the manager showing me the place said that they're all over around 5 to 7 pm. That's when the monkeys come home to roost, I guess. I will say that I saw amble evidence that they had recently been on the ledge outside the window, though -- I'll just leave it at that.

Monster Gecko

Well, I liked our lizard, but the one above was hard not to like better. All eight or so inches or him came with the 350 rs. ($8) a night place I stayed at this weekend. When I checked out the room at first, I thought he was some kind of weird ornament, he was staying so still. It was only when I came back that I realized I had my own gecko for the night.

As you'd expect from the hotel's rate, it was not fancy -- a bring your own soap and toilet paper kind of place -- but the bug-eating lizard came free, and it evidently did it's job well. And a free lizard friend is not something that the Taj or Oberoi would think to include.

Madurai

We're heading to Madurai for the weekend, and then I'll be off to a couple more places after that. Back on Tuesday or possibly Wednesday . . . . I promise to take lots of pictures of amazing South Indian temples.

The Lizard

We have a lizard that lives in the bedroom. I realize that sounds like the start of a 3rd-grader's story, but it's also true. We first saw him a week or two ago, but only for a little bit, running up the wall. But now he seems to have taken up a permanent house in the closet, by Don's fancy office shirts.

Although it's endlessly entertaining to watch him scurry around the ceiling and hide behind the mirror on the wall, the gecko's best trick is the chirping call he makes, usually early in the morning or late at night. At first it was a little creepy -- it sounds more like a bird than a lizard -- but now it's really great.

Of course, we also hope the gecko is eating any stray mosquitoes that find their way inside, but we're not sure about that. More about house geckos here.

Pondicherry Elephant

Everyone loves the French-provincial-town qualities of Pondicherry (lots of fresh paint; buttery seafood; wide, nearly empty, well-marked, rectilinear streets), but it's also in India -- and that means temples. Here's the Sri Manakula Vinayagar temple's elephant. You can give it a rupee and then it will give you a blessing by stepping on your foot. Just kidding, it blesses you by putting its truck on your head.

There was a sign that you couldn't give it any bananas or other food -- maybe it was reducing or the pilgrims' bananas had had a too vigorous laxative effect in the past. Either way, Don didn't like the looks of its stamping and thought it might go on a rampage at any moment. But it didn't, and we kept walking.

Incidentally, the three horizontal lines on the elephant's forehead, his tilak, marks him as a devotee of Shiva.

On the Bus

This weekend we headed to Pondicherry, about 3-1/2 hours south of
Chennai, via bus. It pays to go for the nicer ("ultra-deluxe") buses"
instead of the middle or lower rungs. The one we took down, the 55
rupee model, had not only a driver who constantly honked (pretty
normal), but also a TV blaring musicals nonstop and not much leg room.
It was a lot to take in at 10 am.

The one on the way back cost 110 rs. -- twice the price. But there
were nice curtains on the windows, a think to hold your bottle of
water, lots more leg room, and fans by the windows. And the theme or
the bus seemed to be "naptime" -- everyone was sleeping rather than
having to stare at the TV. It was great. Well, very good.

More on Pondicherry tomorrow.

Balaji Truck

Balaji Truck, originally uploaded by jrambow.

Here's one great truck grill. I photographed it in the Georgetown section of Chennai. The god is Balqji, also known as Lord Venkateswara. His major temple is in Tirupati, not too far north of Chennai. Tamil Nadu and most of the south are strongholds of his worship, but people from all over the world come there -- it might be the most-visited (and richest) religious site in the world -- most travel guides say it's neck and neck with the Vatican.

Chennai Wedding

Today around 5:30 a wedding party went down the road in front of the guest house we're staying in. Everyone was dressed up in a Rajastani style, with turbans. There was also a Rajastani Marching Band as well as recorded music. And stilt-walkers! Finally, near the end, came the groom on a white horse. It was super. I didn't get any good photos, but I hope I have more chances in the future -- there are two huge wedding halls round the corner. (And I hope to not mistake any Jain monk processions for wedding groups this time.)

And in completely unrelated news, our evil cell phone service provider, Airtel, sent Don a hilarious text message yesterday. Not only did he have the opportunity to talk with an astrologer for 6 rupees (or so) a minute, but he could also win a prize by doing so. How? By being the person who had talked on the phone for the longest time! I wonder how much the prize-winner spent in winning.

Mamallapuram

Here's a slide show of some of our pictures from Mamallapuram, a town with some amazing Hindu bas reliefs and stone carvings from the 7th to 9th centuries (or so). Carved in granite, the sculptures are in remarkable condition and very lifelike. The town is about an hour drive south of Chennai, along the coast.

Astrology & Education, Close-Up

Astrology & Education, originally uploaded by jrambow.

I love the books for sale at this bookstore. It was closed when I walked by, so I have no idea if they have any books that don't predict the future.

Astrology & Education

Astrology & Education, originally uploaded by jrambow.

Terrifying Reptiles That We Love

I've been working on updating a travel guide's coverage of Tamil Nadu, so part of our time in Mamallapuram was spent touring hotels, asking about AC, and demanding to look at dinner menus in the middle of the afternoon, long before dinner was available.

One of the tourist sites we visited on the way out of town turned out to be so much cooler than I thought it would be. The Center for Herpetology is basically two scary spots in one. First, you have small ponds with lots and lots of crocodiles (and even a few alligators, in case you're from the Americas and feeling a little homesick).






The crocodiles are in sunken areas with pools, and there's just a small gap and a couple walls between you and them. At an exhibit of muggers (Indian-native crocodiles), you can get a guy to come out with a kilogram or so of chopped up mutton. He'll throw it all them -- a highly entertaining sight. It's a good trick to get guests to pay for feeding the animals, but it was also fun.




There's also an area in which snakes are milked for their venom, to be used in anti-venom. In addition to cobras, there were also kraits, a small, somewhat boring-looking snake whose venom is a lot deadlier than a cobra's. It was terrifying and awesome. In the picture below, all those pots in the background contain snakes. And the plastic bucket contains MASSIVE quantities of snakes as well!



There were turtles too, in well maintained tanks (a rarity in India). They were loveable, but come on, they're going to have to take second seat to deadly serpents and alligators and crocodiles.

Here are a bunch of families looking at a crocodile swimming around in its strangely graceful way. It was almost more fun watching the kids get all excited about it, though.

Panicker's Travel

Panicker's Travel, originally uploaded by jrambow.

This is my new favorite travel agency, even though I just walked by and didn't "avail their services," as they say in India.

Best of all, you can see in the small print their main branch in is Delhi, my choice for the best place to do the most panicking while traveling.

Speaking of traveling, we'll be leaving Chennai for the weekend to head to the beach town of Mamallapuram. It's about a 90 miinute drive -- back on Monday.

Flying the Good Times

We're now more or less all set up in Chennai. We flew here -- it's
about an hour's flight from Bangalore. It was great to finally be able
to take Kingfisher, United Breweries' airline and one of the better
ones. Just as the breweries' Kingfisher beer is "for the good times,"
the airline allows you to "fly the good times."

It was a good flight. Since most of my flights in India have been with
the bargain basement airline Air Deccan, it was thrilling to get
breakfast on the plane this time. (But even if we'd flown later in the
day, there wouldn't have been any Kingfisher beer available. Indian law
prevents any alcohol being offered on domestic flights.)

Best of all, the flight wasn't cancelled or delayed, an all-too-common
problem with Air Deccan. (Basically Air Deccan is for when you kinda
want to fly the good times, but would be just as happy staying put if
your flight is cancelled. For those "let's not and say we did" times.)

We're staying in a guesthouse -- an apartment that's been converted
into a hotel. There are 4 bedrooms with their own bathrooms, and then a
dining room and living room that's common to them. The place comes with
two servants, who clean the rooms each day and cook. Although it's a
little weird having guys hanging out in the place all the time, it's
been surprisingly easy to get used to having someone else make supper
and get the laundry done.

Chennai is hot, but not as horrible as we feared. Of course, it is
early in the year still, and most offices and stores have air
conditioning.

But Chennai is definitely as full of mosquitoes as we thought. I've
discovered that guide books, in addition to whatever other charms and
utility they may have, are great at crushing the little buggers.
Something about the large numbers of thin pages make them easy to close
quickly. Consider that my handy tip of the day.

Chickens Roosting

Chickens Roosting, originally uploaded by jrambow.

Here are some chickens we saw roosting alongside the road near Hampi last month. They all seemed pretty happy there -- I think there were a good amount of chicks on the ground below.

Eating in India

We had a reader email us with a few questions in preparation for an upcoming trip to Bangalore. One issue was the neverending debate of what a visitor can and can't eat. There is one school of thought that says that getting sick in India is inevitable, but I don't think this matches the reality. We've never gotten anything more than minor problems from eating here for most of a year.

Of course, I can't say if that's because we've just been lucky or not. If you're just in India for a few days, you might want to be a little more cautious -- don't blame us if our advice gives you jippy tummy. In any case, don't be lame and not eat anything except crackers and Coca-Cola! You might not get sick, but you'll definitely be bored, and that's sad too.

Things we don't eat:

• Cut-up fruit sold on the street: even though it always looks really, really good.
  
• Salads and lettuce: we pick the lettuce out of sandwiches if it's in there. Admittedly, this is pretty much the same as just eating it, but you have to have clear-cut policies about this stuff.
  
• Tap water: Unless it's heated up, as in tea. Also, we think that a few drops in a just-washed glass is OK.

Things we think are safe:

• Street food: As long as it's hot and there's lots of turnover at the stand. Sometimes I pick out the coriander (cilantro) leaves on top, but usually I don't.
  
• Tender coconut water: It's inside the coconut! What could be safer? Too bad it doesn't taste that good. (Don says, "It really is good once you get used to it.")
  
• Lassis: There might be some water in the glass and possibly water used to thin the curd down, but it's a risk I think worth taking.
  
• Fresh lime sodas: As much as possible.

I am happy

Here's a quick test to tell if you're an optimist. If you head to a
bookstore's reference section and see a row of thin language books with
titles like "Learn Tamil in a Month," "Learn Tamil Through English,"
"Urdu for Dummies," and "Read Hindi Script Just Like That," do you
think to yourself, "well, four weeks is a pretty long time, I'm sure
I'll learn how to say lots of stuff by then"? (We already have the
classic "Learn Kannada Through English," and it hasn't taught me a
thing just sitting there on the shelf. All the same, I had to get a
couple more of these language guides.)

The reason for the current bookstore expedition was our upcoming
departure from Bangalore. Next Monday, we leave for two whole months.
For three weeks, we'll be in Chennai (the former Madras, where Tamil is
the main language), then we're going on vacation, and then we're going
to Delhi for month. And then back to Bangalore.

My (I hope realistic) goals are to learn a few basic Tamil phrases, and
also be able to read and say a few things in Hindi. My success with
Kannada has been poor, but I'll do my best with these two other
languages.

Summer's Coming

Most stores in Bangalore are in the middle of sales right now. That's
because it's almost the end of winter, when it's been in the 60s to 80s
(15-32 C), but mostly in the 80s. Soon it will be "summer", in the 90s
(32-37 C) or more, and you'll be able to get short sleeves in the
stores again. (Although short sleeves ("half sleeves") have been very
comfortable here since I arrived in November, they have not been on
store shelves. It's because it's long-sleeve weather, that's why.)

In the dead of winter, many people wear sweaters or blazers in the
morning, and knit caps ("chilly hats"), and old men wrap thin wool
shawls around themselves. And little kids wear "monkey caps", hats that
cover their whole head except their face. The coldest it's ever been in
Bangalore in the morning is probably around 60 (16 C) or so. (Delhi,
however, does get genuinely cold, right around freezing.)

But summer's right around the corner. Any smiles I may have had at what
seemed like over-reaction to the cold will be more than paid back when
I start sweating within moments of walking out the door. The sun's
power is amazing here.

Tablecloth Treatment

Koshys!!!, originally uploaded by dakini.

For lunch today I headed to MG Road to eat at Koshy's, a favorite old-skool Bangalore coffee shop/diner kind of place. I ate in the smoky old-man side, as always, rather than the prettified section. Can't say my fried chicken was very good, but the fresh lime soda was wonderful as always. One nice touch is that the waiter comes out with a plaid tablecloth and throws it over your table if you're ordering food. At first I got paranoid and wondered why I was getting this special treatment, but then I realized that of course all the men around me were just talking and smoking with coffee -- it was early. No tablecloths for them!

Drying in the Sun

It's always laundry day at this centrally located gully on Richmond Road, not far from several malls and lots of major office buildings. If you send your laundry out and you live nearby, I suppose you might be able to find your pants in this picture. We have a washing machine, so our clothes aren't on display in town unless you visit our the constantly used drying rack in the apartment. Seriously, I'm glad that dryers are more or less nonexistent in India -- with so much sun (almost) all the time, they'd be a serious waste of energy.

Not too far away is Don's favorite goat in all of Bangalore (well, at least I think it is). The goat has what we suspect is an optimal life. He lives to one side of a plot of land on which people spend their days making marigold garlands and other decorations out of flowers. I'm sure the goat gets his fair share of all that vegetable matter.

Making Fun of Gandhi: An Object Lesson

So recently there's been a bit of a media ruckus over a comedian named Gautham Prasad. An NRI (Non-Resident Indian) living in New York, he posted some of his shows on Youtube a while back. One of them has him dressed up like Ghandi, performing a (PG-13) striptease, with a pole and everything. A couple Indian TV stations found out about this, and broadcast clips of the skit to the general dismay of many, many people.

The clip, which can be easily found on YouTube, is a whole lot of not funny. However, calls by politicians to punish the guy in some unspecified way or to make the TV stations that aired the clip apologize are hardly the right approach. The video is now banned from being aired on TV in India, so I guess most people will just have to imagine how bad it could be.

I bet Prasad is glad there are several oceans between him and the folks angry with him, and here's hoping it blows over soon.

Still More Books

Just like last time, I sent two boxes of books from New York. They took about $60 and almost exactly two months to get here. This time, I mailed them to Don's office address rather than here, in hopes they would arrive with less hassle. Well.

The books didn't go to Don's office, but instead, Don got a handwritten letter saying that he needed to pay 30 rupees a box as a "bulk mailing fee." This was fine, although I don't really understand why my New York City post office didn't know the right amount of postage to put on. Was this a fee a unilateral decision by the Museum Road branch of the post office? I don't know.

Off I headed to the post office. I managed to pay the 60 rupee fee and to locate the books without too much trouble -- they were in the PO's basement, in an office next to a couple other random packages. The next problem was convincing the clerk to give me the books even though they were addressed to Don. Since I was the mailer (but not the mailee), it ended up being OK. And then I discovered that one of the boxes inside the heavy plastic M bags had burst in transit. So I had a bunch of books sloshing around in a bag.

It would have been easy if I could have kept the boxes in the bags, but I needed to give both bags to the post office, and the clerk (and the postmaster, who she called) wouldn't trust me to bring them back tomorrow. (Why did they need the bags? According to the clerk, to get the USPS to reimburse them for postage). After standing around for a while packing all the books I could into my gym bag and making a pile of the rest, I wore down the nice clerk, and she gave me a spare box to get them home.

Now I only have to find the time to read them . . .

So Long, 70mm

We recently called it quits on our membership with Seventymm, the Netflix-like service we joined back in November. It got to be a pain calling the company to have someone come pick up the movies and making sure someone would be around to give it to them. It's a lot easier to just drop DVDs in the mail.

The selection of English movies was not huge -- and most of the ones they had were either action flicks or old movies. Often we'd fall into the trap of feeling like we HAD to see the movies we'd gotten, just to get them out of the house.

The small selection reflects the English movies you find in stores, but we didn't get the feeling that 70mm was buying bunches of new stuff every chance they could get. Of course, the company does have the challenge of having a good selection of Bollywood and also movies in Telagu, Kannada, Tamil, and other languages as well as English, and we're not their average customers. But for us, it's probably easier and cheaper to just buy a VCD or DVD when you think you'll have the time to watch it.

I'm Always Breaking Things

India is a land of hard surfaces. There's lots and lots of stone
available, so counters and floors tend to be granite or something
equally unyielding. If you drop something glass, it's gonna break --
you don't have the fighting chance you'd have with a wooden floor or a
plastic counter. In my time in India, I've broken a large Kingfisher
beer bottle by tipping it over onto the counter, a jam jar (it fell out
of the fridge), a watch crystal, and countless glasses (I also dented a
cell phone, but since I lost it soon after, that doesn't count).
Undoubtedly I'd have broken lots more stuff if most things weren't
metal or plastic.

And all that stone on the ground can be a little scary to walk on. Big
fancy malls and office buildings feature highly polished, slick,
head-busting granite stairs and entrances, and they also often have
someone energetically mopping away and making sure the stone's a little
wet. I'm always expecting to see lots of wipeouts, but I guess people
are nimble and on the lookout for potential spills.

My favorite recent breakage was when I was shopping for a dinner party
last month. I had a bunch of stuff, including two bottles of wine. I
set them both down in the small parking lot of the schmanzy Home Stop
store, and immediately one bottle tipped over and broke at the neck.
Oh, the stares from the rickshaw drivers and passers-by I attracted as
the red, red wine stained the pavement and rolled down toward the
street. The store guard very kindly got me a new bag to put my as-yet
unbroken bottle in, and took the busted one off my hands. I thought
he'd throw it in the garbage, but instead he hurled the bag into the
drainage ditch/open sewer that flows right by Home Stop. Handy! And off
I went.

A Bit Too Much of an Adventure

"The fascinating rock-hewn Barabar Caves, dating from 200 BC, are 36km north of Gaya and contain detailed Ashokan inscriptions. These are the 'Marabar Caves' of EM Forster's A Passage to India. From Gaya take the train to Bela (Rs. 7). Then ride a tonga (horse cart; Rs. 70) for 10km of potholes to the start of the arduous 5km hike that leads to the caves. Although well worth visiting, they're in Naxalite territory, so it's best to organize armed guards at the police station."
--Lonely Planet India, page 511.

I love the passage's can-do spirit, what with the potholes and the 10km horsecart ride and the commie gang threat, but I still don't think a trip to the caves in Bihar is for me. Here's a bit more about the caves. (It's also where I grabbed the photo above.)

Christmas Star

It's almost Epiphany, so here's a picture of one of the many stars we bought in Kerala (we also saw some sold later in Bangalore). As you can probably see, they're made out of folded paper. Although a few were more plain, most of them were bright like this one. I thought they were all beautiful.

Hampi Rest Stop

Here's a nice picture of Don at the Narasimha Temple in Hampi. I think he looks like a rock star. We were a little tired by the time we got here . . . .

Hampi Road Trip!

So we made it to Hampi after all, but only some travel mix-ups. Ho Ho ho!

To back up, we had made our train reservations late, so that meant neither of us had a seat, just two versions of "wait and see." My status was RAC (reservation against cancellation), while Don's was just a waitlist. When we asked the conductor if we could board, he implied that we could, but it didn't seem likely that we'd both actually get a seat. Since it's a 10-hour trip starting around 10pm, a seat to sleep on is important.

Earlier that day, I'd bought us a bus ticket on a semi-nice bus as a backup. We decided to ditch the train station and go for the bus. We were running late, so we took a rickshaw to the bus station. The bus station is across the street from the train station, but they're both enormous, and we were panicky. Anyway, the jerky rickshaw driver let us off in a completely stupid part of the station, but only after trying to get us to go to Mysore instead. By running we got to the right platform with plenty of time.

Except we were never able to find the right bus. We went to the platform on the ticket, we asked people around us, we asked bus drivers, we asked and asked, but that bus either never showed up or took off from a platform different from the one we thought. (The destinations are only written in Kannada, so it's not simply a matter of reading what it says on the front of the bus.)

There was a Japanese guy who had missed the same bus we did, and he found out that there was another bus leaving at 2:30 am. We nearly went home, but when a bus headed in the right direction showed up at 1:00 am, we thought we were very lucky. A bus official nearby took our ticket, scribbled some stuff on it to make our slightly fancier ticket good for this one, and then we got on, ready to blast off for Hampi.

But the "1:00 bus" was the 2:30 bus. It stayed in place for 90 minutes while everyone sat on board, holding their unreserved seats with their body mass.

(It was around this point that Don and I started saying things like, "When we didn't board that train and we paid that rickshaw driver 50 rupees to abuse us and treat us like fools, that was when I discovered the TRUE meaning of Christmas!" or "When we ran to the bus platform and waited hours for the bus that was 'late' but which had evidently left from another platform anyway, that was when I REALLY discovered the true meaning of Christmas." It's funnier if you say it with crazy-eyes, which is what we both had at this point.)

Providing additional distraction was the somewhat wizened lady who sat down next to us with her five-year old child. First, the lady got up, leaving her child on the seat. Then the girl got up and walked away. I thought they'd got up to leave, so I let a man take the seat. There were lots of worries when the mom and child came back and wanted their seat. Lots of "sorries" from me.

Finally the bus took off.

This was a terrible bus. It had no shocks, and there was lots of bumping even though the road was by and large very good. There was legroom, but that's about the best I can say.

After a couple hours into the drive, I noticed that that child was sleeping on the floor of the bus, under her mother's seat. I guess it was kind of practical, but I did make a point of telling Don so that he wouldn't get up and accidentally step on the kid. (By the way, there was really nowhere for Don to go -- there are no bathrooms on Indian buses.)

A little later, the lady disappeared. Where had she gone? Had she found a new seat? No, she was SLEEPING IN THE AISLE. This was kind of cool, I thought, but it caused a problem. There was now an empty seat, albeit one with a sleeping girl where your feet would go. And a full bus hates an empty seat. When the lights turned on for a moment, a small man or teenager carefully stepped around the mom and slipped into the aisle seat. Soon he was fast asleep, with his head on my shoulder. It was a heavy head, but I didn't have the heart to push him away. What else did I have to do with my shoulder?

But what was the proper etiquette? Should I have let this guy take the seat? He seemed to be taking care to not step on the kid. Luckily, this problem solved itself, since after about 45 minutes (or half an hour? Or 75 minutes? or 3 million minutes?), my bag fell from the storage rack above onto my chest, and from there hitting the guy and then onto Aisle Lady. Everyone woke up, the guy said "bye" and went back to his seat, and the lady got back into her seat.

Only four or five or so more hours to go! I wish I could say it flew by, but I can't remember. It was just too long to remember. I do remember we stopped for a bathroom break at some point, and Don bought early-morning potato chips. They were crunchy.

I wonder if that lady is thinking of me while I'm thinking of her. I suppose I did enough to make her remember me.

After all, I 1) allowed a man to take her seat and 2) allowed another man to take her seat, this time with her daughter on the floor, and then 3) allowed my bag to crash into her while she was sleeping. Perhaps she ALSO discovered the true meaning of Christmas . . .

All Hail the Plum Cake

Plum Cake!




America has their fruit cake, sure, but let's face it -- a lot of them are just wretched and they're more a figure of fun than something that everyone actually eats.

I've been lucky enough to have some very good fruitcakes back in the states , so I was excited by Indian Christians' own version of this heavy, heavy treat, the Plum Cake. The cakes started appearing in stores around the 2nd week of December. Selflessly putting our diets on the line, we went through two of the cakes in the days up to Christmas.

The first was small, unfrosted, and rather expensive at 125 rs. Made by the famous Nilgiri's store, it was very dark, fairly moist, and full of little cut-up fruits. It took a little getting used to, but after that I was hooked. Surprisingly, it had the red circle code on it, the Indian symbol for something that's non-vegetarian. Were they using beef suet in this, as in Merrie Olde England? I doubt it, but it's possible I suppose. Or maybe the fact that it probably has a little rum in it make it "non-veg"? This seems more likely.

Our second plum cake, bought at All Saint's for 120 rs., was about the same size but much fancier , with extremely thick almond-flavored fondant frosting on the outside. Don didn't like the frosting at all, but I thought it was kind of fun (there was also a rockhard frosting flower to chomp on). The interior was similar to Nilgiri's, maybe a little lighter tasting.

In both cases, eating the plum cake right before bed caused us to fall asleep so heavily that we could hardly wake up in the morning. It was the Ambien of desserts. Wonderful!

Here's a picture of the plum cake extravaganza at All Saints. Do you think they have enough garlands and cakes? I would like to have a big one right now. (More pix are here.)




For more extensive (and careful) plum cake tasting, check out Bangalore Belly's investigation. And to make your own, here's a recipe that looks as if it would make something very similar to what we kept eating, day after day.

Off to Hampi, We Hope

So we're off to Hampi in a few hours, either by train or bus. I can't
figure out our train ticket -- one of us is on a waitlist, but it seems
as if there should have been enough cancelations already to move us up
into the next category, which means we get to board but don't yet have
a seat assignment. It's all a little confusing, so I spent a couple
hours in line this morning at the bus train buying back-up tix in case
we don't get on the train. You can normally buy bus tickets at lots of
places besides the station itself, but the one near our house had a
sign saying all systems were down -- it might have been because so many
people are taking off for the weekend. Anyway, we'll be reporting back
on Wednesday.

Indian Math

This week's podcast of the BBC's radio show In Our Time is about Indian Math. Although it's very once-over-lightly, covering thousands of years and a lot of area in just 45 or so minutes, it covers a great deal the early developments in Indian, which included the use of zero, the concept of infinity, and the Pythagorean theorem (before Pythagoras), and the Arabic numerals. One weird fact: those numerals weren't allowed to be used in book-keeping in England until the 18th century. I guess they were still totaling them up with Roman numerals. Must have been annoying.

Counterpoint: Coconuts Are Great!

In the interests of fairness, I fell compelled to respond to the previous post with a reasoned assessment of the properties of coconuts, both positive and negative.
The coconut tree is arguably among the most valuable plants in agricultural use today. The tree provides an energy-rich food in the form of its tasty white meat. Its oil is useful not only as a flavoring and a cooking medium, but also as a hair dressing (in India, at least). When it’s hot outside, the tender coconut (the green, immature coconut) affords anyone with a machete and a straw a liter or more of a refreshing, mildly astringent, and (perhaps most important) sterile beverage. Coconut milk (extracted from the white flesh) is an essential ingredient in Thai curries and various wonderful desserts from many nations. Cream of coconut, the goo extracted from the meat and combined with coconut oil, is the basis of pina coladas and the wonderful Puerto Rican holiday beverage coqui. Dried coconut flesh is used in countless American cakes and candy bars.
Did you know coconut water can be fermented into an alcoholic beverage? It can, and it’s called arrack in many South Indian communities. Did you know that the coconut fiber, known commercially as coir, can be used to make mats and rugs? Well, OK, probably you did, but did you also know that the world’s hardest, thinnest, and firmest mattresses are also stuffed with coir? No? Well, come to India, where these mattresses are the standard. After a while your hipbones get used to it.
Are coconuts difficult to open? Well, yes. Or rather, it takes some practice. The ladies at my office regularly cook with unprocessed coconuts, which they open themselves before scooping out the flesh. Once I received a coconut as a wedding favor and I asked a coworker what I should do with it. “Oh, you know, just grate it over some rice,” she said matter of factly. This was admittedly easier said than done; I managed to open it by smashing it against the counter, but the water was lost, and when I started to go at it with a knife, little bits of shell kept getting mixed in the sweet white flesh. So I have a long way to go. But that’s my fault, not that of the coconut, which has been so good to the tropical peoples of this world. The correct response should not be “I hate coconuts” but rather: “Where can I find someone to open and grate this g-d—m coconut for me?”

Not Cuckoo for Coconuts

God I hate coconuts. Well, they're fine from a distance, on trees, but I've never been able to open them and get at the flesh or the milk inside. The one time I did, the coconut milk seeped out on the floor. That was where the coconut was after I hurled it down in a messy but effective attempt to open it.

Today, the problem was getting dried ("desiccated") coconut. I was cooking a recipe in a British cookbook, so that was my first mistake -- too many convenience products were used, and it assumed I had a blender.

Dried coconut may exist in India, but at my stores you deal with a copra, the entire dried-out interior of a coconut. It's not ripped into tiny pieces or anything, and it still has a brown coating. It's like a little shrunken head, except it's a coconut.

To try to use it, I first hacked off the coating and then sliced off pieces of the leathery white coconut inside. Then I tried to cut it into smaller pieces, but it didn't work out well at all. I didn't cut myself with my dull knife, that's about the best I can say about it.

To do this job properly, I believe that Indians either use fancy mixer-grinders or maybe grate the whole thing with a stone. Or maybe they do something else. Please let me know what I did wrong if you know.

I just know I'm not going for any recipes calling for dried or whole coconut until I'm back in New York City. Coconuts, you've won this time.

Christmas In Karnataka

If our train reservations change from being waitlisted into actual reservations, then we'll be taking the night train to Hampi this Friday for a Christmas visit. Being full of Hindu ruins from the 1500s , it's not exactly the place to go looking for chestnuts, Jack Frost, yule logs, or figgy pudding. The more likely Christmas destinations include Goa (would have had to plan too far in advance), Calcutta (plane fare seemed too pricey), or somewhere in the southern state of Kerala (we just went there last week).

So I don't know what in the way of Christmas festivities await us, but I am looking forward to checking out Hampi again and seeing some of the slightly off-the-main-drag sights we missed when we went there in the spring.

Our Crumbling Infrastructure

Like Bangalore itself, our apartment's own infrastructure needs a little tuning up. First we have the drain in the kitchen, which got stopped up with rice and little bits of vegetables. I'd beat the dishwasher for the crime, but that would be me. I took the drain apart today, and I got it working, but it's still a little drippy underneath.

As I worked, fruit flies hovered on the kitchen cabinets. There are so many of them there now, I don't know why. Well, I know why they're there -- a couple dirty dishes before we left town -- but I don't know why they haven't died yet. Cunningly constructed traps haven't caught more than one or two.

Finally, I feel that we now have a reputation in the building as slobs. The two ladies who clean the hallways knocked on the door this morning to fill up their water pails. They're done this one or two times before, and I don't know why their own taps weren't working today. Anyway, they filled up their enormous pails in the tap under the shower, and as they did, they started folding the pile of clean clothes that were lying on the bed. (We have a big washing backlog at the moment.) I asked them to stop, but they wouldn't so I had to start doing my own tidying up to not feel weird.

The ladies also wondered if I wanted a servant. And I really did, especially at that moment.

Sandalwood Stamps

It's too late for many of my Christmas cards, but I'm still very excited about the scratch-n-sniff sandalwood stamp that India just came out with.

Cow Attack!

We spent a long weekend in Varkala, Kerala, eating lots of seafood,
swimming for hours, bargaining for a daily beach umbrella rental, and
just looking out at the amazing views of the Indian Ocean. We did have
one very slight misfortune. We were walking along a twisty road and had
to pass by a cow that was tied up in front of someone's house. Like
most Indian cows, she still had her horns, and this one chose to give
me a little butt with them. It hurt, and I still have a little bruise.

I was very surprised, since the cows I've known in the US were mostly
skittish (and all were hornless), and the cows I've seen in India have
all been apathetic to or bored by people. But this one was a cranky
cow. Maybe it had a calf somewhere. An Indian friend claimed that
because the Indians in Kerala tend to be darker, maybe the cow was
scared or freaked out by white people. This is funny for several
reasons, one of which is that Varkala is full of Europeans and
Americans soaking up the sun and getting a little darker (or redder)
with every day.

Christmas tree

Here's our Christmas tree, bought for 60 rupees at always-fun Nilgiri's supermarket. I'm so glad I found one.

I'm also glad at how much it resembles Charlie Brown's:

Poo Face!

Rickshaw drivers have a very expressive way of refusing a fare. If they
don't want to head in the direction you need to go, they make a big
show of disgust, as if they just smelled something really raw that you
hadn't quite noticed yet. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason
as to which places are stinky, but it might be that they just aren't
far enough for that particular driver. Anyway, we were first sad
about all the poo faces we generated, but now I think it's kind of fun. If
it didn't think it was exploitive to take a photo at that moment, then
a gallery of poo faces would be wonderful to see.

The State of Christmas Cards

Today I went on a bit of Christmas card bender, trying to find some cool-looking cards that also had a bit of Indian flavor. You see, right after Thanksgiving, I had panicked -- what if you couldn't find any Christmas cards here, or if they didn't appear until just a week or two before Christmas? Luckily, December 1 or so seems to be the date that the Christmas season begins, because right around then cards started becoming available here and there.

A lot of the cards I saw first just weren't that exciting -- generic pine trees, badly drawn stockings, and very fat Santas, and most of them seemed imported from the Island of Misfit Toys or something. Don't get me wrong, they weren't terrible, but it just seemed a little weird to send cards like that all the way from India.

The best cards I found were at the stationery floor of Gangarams, on MG Road, and also at the Pauline Books and Media Center, on Museum Road. At Gangarams, I liked the cards that had Christmas trees and bouquets made of of pressed leaves and flowers. But the best was still ahead. The Pauline Center was a hotbed of Christmasism. There were two full tables of cards, and the sisters were even playing Silver Bells (by Nat King Cole?) on the speakers. The cards I liked best here ones on handmade-looking paper with a nativity scene and a leaf pasted on the front, and some brightly colored ones showing an Indian Holy Family being greeted by a peacock. These last were made at a convent here in Bangalore.

Related: How to Celebrate an Indian Christmas -- I'm guessing that the audiences is primarily non-Indians (if an Indian celebrates Christmas, isn't it by definition an Indian Christmas?). Either way, I'm certain that step 5 ("Dress in festive, traditional Indian clothing to perform Christmas music played on a stringed sitar, drums and cymbals") will not be accomplished in our house. I can, however, guarantee that Step 1 ("Light and place 'diya,' small candles, throughout your house") will, though -- we're sure to have another power cut sometime soon.

Somewhat less related: Unfortunate Christmas Cards, many of which are actually super-cool.

Future Jain Monk?

Speaking of parades, a fellow blogger named Deepa Krishnan wrote in to say that my theory about the two women who went past the house a couple weeks ago was all wet -- it was "unlikely" that the carriage held a Hindu lady on the way to her wedding. In fact it might be that the women were Jains, and that the older one was about "to begin life as a lady monk." If so, "they are going on a last journey in finery, there will be an elaborate ceremony later where the monk will renounce worldly goods, shave her head, and adopt an austere white." And it is true that the older woman is holding what could be a monk's robe . . .

Here's a bit more on Jainism and its monks and nuns.

World Aids Day Parade

Around 10 am, there was a long parade of school kids, police, and other groups marching down our street on behalf of World Aids Day. (The Times of India has a slideshow of other events today about India.)

Today I did notice a lot more commemoration of the day than I did back in New York. The anchors on the news were either wearing pins, or there was a small logo mentioning it in the corner of the screen. Even the dreaded Airtel phone company got into the act, sending me a little note about the day after I'd sent a text message.

I'm sure the message isn't getting to everyone it needs to get to, and in any case the problem can't be solved in one day. But you have to hope that the message is getting out a little more each day in a country with the most HIV+ people (in absolute numbers) in the world.

Christmas Is Coming

Commercial Christmas
Originally uploaded by GreyArea.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas -- well, not really. It's in the mid-70s every day (24 degrees C). And without the "trigger" of Thanksgiving and the Black Friday that comes after, when does India decide to put out Christmas stuff? From what I've heard, it's somewhere in early December, logically enough, so whatever merchandise will appear is still unknown.

Our next-door neighbor, a very old Scottish lady who is rumored to have starred in some silent (!) Bollywood movies, put a wreath on her door a few days ago, so that's one sign. And today, on the rickshaw to the gym, I saw a couple girls selling (and wearing) Santa hats. They were in the middle of MG Road (a main shopping drag), going from one stopped car and rickshaw to another.

Turkey Day in India

Happy Happy Thanksgiving to Americans, one and all.

For our Thanksgiving, we headed out to The Only Place, for its annual Thanksgiving dinner.

Unfortunately, we hadn't made reservations, and they were full up. I wish they could have fit us in, since it was early, the place was still basically empty, and I had been looking forward to a little schmoozing. But they wouldn't seat us, so we had to made do with takeout. As it was, this was for the best, since Don was feeling a little under the weather, and turkey always tastes better when you're home, right?

The turkey was really good -- not up to that of our relatives, of course, but definitely impressive and much appreciated this far from home. (Please excuse the lack of a gravy boat in the following picture.)

On the Treadmill

When we first went to India, I thought that somehow I'd magically lose weight. Maybe I thought I'd get sick for a while (nice, huh?). Maybe I thought that because most Indians, at least the younger ones, are skinny, this would somehow rub off on me. But it definitely didn't happen. So for about 6 weeks before we left Bangalore and again now that I've been back, I've been going to the gym.

I suppose like most Westerners, I first toyed with doing yoga or something here. But then I had to be honest: I'd rather have some abs and a lot less weight rather than still more serenity and inner beauty (I have too much already!). So off I go to the gym each day, sweating and lifting and running and drinking endless glasses of water, all the while listening to horrible dance music.

The below video has made the rounds, but I just have to post it since it so completely shows just what my gym routine is NOT like:

Mobile Paperwork

Because of their possible use by terrorists and other unsavory elements, cell phones take a bit of paperwork to get. The government wants each phone traceable to an actual person, basically.

For this second India stay, I had to buy a new one, because I had lost mine just before we left Bangalore in July. Don still had his, but the number had expired from lack of use. So after buying a new one I also bought two new Airtel SIM cards. And that's when the fun began, because I had to provide the following:

• 2 passport-size photos
  
• passport and visa, for photocopying [my store was excellent, in that were able to do the photocopying themselves]
  
• driver's license
  
• signatures on just about everything, including on the highly restrictive terms of service, both of the photos, and on the photocopies
  
• proof of address

It was that last bit that turned out to be a mess. I had an old letter from a foreign company that I thought would work, but I guess it wasn't good enough. Even less impressive was the delivery tag from the Netflix-for-India company 70mm. As a result, Airtel turned off our cell phones yesterday.

So today, Don and I went back to the Church Street store where I bought my phone, and he got to take a crack at filling out all the paperwork himself.

The best part of the "Prepaid Customer Enrolment Form" is a clause for farmers. In India, people who earn all their income through agriculture don't pay any income taxes, so they often don't have a tax number (I think this is true). Therefore there's a part of the form to sign if you're such a person. When I and then Don filled out our forms, the woman at the phone store tried to get us to sign that part. Luckily we both skipped it -- the last thing we need is the India government asking us where our coconut grove or rice paddys are.

Here's another account of a westerner getting a cell phone. It's interesting that he's also saying what several people told me today: it's a lot easier to get service through Hutch than through Airtel. But we still love you, Airtel, as long as you turn those phones back on!

Choley!

To continue our temporary impersonation of a full-fledged food blog, I made choley yesterday. This is a spicy stew made with chickpeas, tomatoes, onions, and something sour. The sour usually comes from tamarind, but the recipe I used called for lime juice instead.

This was yet another opportunity to come to terms with the pressure cooker, and I think I'm finally OK with it. Unlike those in the U.S., Indian pressure cookers don't let off a little steam at a time -- most of it builds up and up until it can't stand it anymore. A small steam cloud and a huge racket results -- it's like a steampipe breaking or something. Everyone, including cookbooks, call this small explosion a "whistle," but it's way scarier than any whistling I've ever heard. The "whistles" are so important that it's often how you might time how long to cook things -- "give those lentils three whistles, will you?"

Anyway, after 25 minutes and 6-7 whistles and only a little fear and loathing from the cook, the kabuli chana (brown chickpeas) were ready to have browned onions, cooked down tomatoes, and spices added to them. If I do this recipe again, I'm going to use one rather than two sliced chili peppers -- two was just a little too much for our delicate Western palate. But it was really good all the same -- amazing how a good recipe can transform 1-1/2 cups of chickpeas into something edible and interesting.

Fish Curry, Thumbs-Up

The fish curry turned out very good. First I cut the 0.6 kg (1.3 pound) fish fillet up into about 15 pieces and then tossed them with 1/2 t. each turmeric and salt. I let them sit for 15 minutes. Then I heated up about 4 tablespoons of oil and browned the pieces in batches.

I set the fish aside, poured off half the oil, and then came the excitement.

I turned up the heat to high, added four dried red chili peppers, and fried them until they were "plump and black," as the First-Time Cookbook says. This caused a lot of smoke, but it was all over quickly and noone was hurt.

Then it was time to add some mustard seeds and cumin seeds (1/2 t. total), let them crackle for a bit, and then fry a large, chopped-up onion (or five small ones in my case) until it was golder. And then I added spices-- garlic, ginger, chili powder, coriander, cumin, and more turmeric. I fried everything until the oil separated from everything else (the Indian term for this is to "bhuno"). I added 2 cups of water, returned the fish to the pot, brought everything to a boil and then simmered it all for 15 minutes.

It turned out great. I was worried it would be too spicy to eat, but the fried peppers seemed to make the broth peppery rather than hot, and the sauce was excellent when mixed with rice.

I'm thinking that if I make it again, I might throw in a few sliced potatoes along with the fish in the last step. And I'll know not to be too scared of those dried chiles.

Early Morning Wedding?

Well, if it's about 8 am on Wednesday, it's probably time for a parade with a band and a horse-drawn carriage! At least it was this morning, on our street.





I'm guessing this was a bride on the way to her wedding, along with an attendant. I wish I had a better idea what she was holding. And I wish I had a better shot of all the flags the band and marchers were all carrying. If anyone out there can help fill me in, I'll be in your dept.

Fish Time

Tonight we're making Bengali fish curry, (Maachher Jhol), using the always useful and encouraging First-Time Cookbook.

I'm very excited, since i haven't cooked any fish here in India yet.

I know very little about the fish I bought -- kingfish. It looks like a non-oily whitefish. It also cost a lot -- 600 inr a kilo ($6/pound). Of course, I only got about .6 kilos, but I feel the pressure if it turns out lousy.

Pictures coming tomorrow if I can manage to photograph it in a non-hideous manner.

So Many Books

The internet at the apartment, hasn't worked since we got back. Although this has cut down a great deal on frivolous browsing, having to buy Wi-Fi in hourly chunks has also made me disinclined to blog much at all. I've been busy with some freelance projects, and Don's been busy at work, so we haven't seen so very much of India (at least Bloggable India) in the past few days in any case.

Yesterday, I headed up to the Palace Grounds, which do hold a palace. However, it's also used for a lot of other things, including the wonderfully named Princess Academy horse-riding school. But I wasn't there for horses, I was there for the Bangalore Book Festival, during which publishers and bookstores rented stalls to sell books directly to the public.

There were publishers in Hindu and Kannada, Tamil, and other major local mother tongues. There were stalls by university publishers, such as Oxford and Cambridge, and scientific/technical publishers, including Elsevier and Macmillan. But my favorites were the stalls of the local bookstores, and I picked up a couple oddball books from them, including Three Men in a Boat and some short stories by J. F. Powers.

Just about all the stalls seemed to be doing a good business -- I got there around noon, about an hour after it opened, and crowds were already dispersed through the whole enormous building.

Oh yeah, and there was parasailing! Behind the building, not among the stalls. I didn't get too close, but I did see a man's torso floating up, about 30 feet in the air. I couldn't decide if it looked just scary, or scary and fun.

CHILLED CHILLI CHAI

The internet at the house remains busted, and so I find myself buying Wi-Fi down the street a lot. Because the two sellers are Infinitea and Cafe Coffee Day, I'm in a near-constant state of buzzness.

Today I decided to mix it up a bit, and ordered Infinitea's CHILLED CHILLI CHAI. I somehow elided over that middle word, and it was a big mistake. The drink looks like whisky, smells like diesel fuel, and that chilli makes it really really burn. Ow. Fresh lime soda here I come.

Dewar's Found

Sunday we went on a short walk through some of the older neighborhoods to the north and west of us. One highlight was walking by Dewar's bar, a landmark that's been around since 1933, when this area, the Cantonment, was one big barracks for the British.

It was way too early to stop by, at least for a drink, but I was glad to know where it was. The roads are fairly twisty by it, so it will take a bit of concentration to find it again.

Bug Fight

And I'm back too. I got in early Wednesday. So far I've managed to (mostly) unpack, go on several walks, make messes and then clean them up, and stay up a little later each day.

But what I'd like to talk about at the moment is our never-ending battle with the roaches and the bugs, who got very cocky during our absence. We've been moving stuff out of the kitchen's cupboards and spraying poison to reduce their numbers. One horrible surprise this morning was our canister of atta (wheat flour), which had fallen prey to web-weaving moths of some sorts. And their squirmy grub babies, a dozen or so which fell on the floor when I dropped the thing on the ground (and screamed like a little girl).

The canister had a tight-fitting lid, so the little buggers must have been growing from the inside out. But what were they doing for water? I'm a little too grossed out at the moment to clean the tin -- it's still sitting on the counter. If I knew any six- to eight- year schoolkids, I'd give then the whole thing and ask them to make it into some sort of science project -- it's a little like a terrarium, after all. Another option would be to pitch it into whatever yard it is that holds the rooster we hear each morning -- I'm sure he'd like the little grubs as well as the wheat, and it would be great revenge for us.

Back

Hurrah! I'm back.

Bangalore is the same. Well, there are a few changes. Some major roads now have designated autorickshaw lanes, and for the most part, the rickshaws are staying in them. Even more astonishing and wonderful is that a pedestrian crossing signal has been installed on Cunningham Road in front of the Sigma Mall, making my life a whole heck of a lot easier. Not so great is that the Food Bazaar has stopped carrying Coca-Cola products and has joined the evil Pepsi empire. So my grocery business is going to the scruffier but Coke-carrying Food World.

Oh, and the city's name is changing. As of November 1, Bangalore will be rechristened Bengaluru, which is the Kannada version of the name. This follows the trend started back in '95 when Bombay went local with Mumbai. Calcutta officially opted for Kolkata in 2001. Somewhere along the way Madras became Chennai. Now several cities in our state of Karnataka are jumping on the bandwagon next week, which will coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the state.

SeventyMM

So I think I saw a pamphlet or brochure for SeventyMM back when I was in Bangalore, but I didn't really follow-up on it. A recent post on the blog Hacking Netflix jogged my memory.

SeventyMM is a company modeled on Netflix. You subscribe for a monthly fee, and then create an online list of movies you'd like to see. The movies are delivered, two at a time, by hand. When you're done with those two, the DVD-wallah comes back for those and gives you the next two on your list that they have on hand. You can keep the movies as long as you want -- there's no late fee.

The biggest difference from Netflix, of course, is the hand delivery. In the States, all the movies come via post, one at a time. Delivery by hand means that the company is going to be limited only to urban areas -- the company is now up and running in Delhi and Bangalore.

Also, since a lot more people in India can watch VCDs than can watch DVDs, most of the movies come in the VCD format. [This might also have something to do with the problem of getting the right region code on the DVDs -- not sure about that.]

And finally, and very handily, you can SMS SeventyMM to arrange a pickup. You can't do any SMSing of Netflix and expect anything to happen.

There's a hokey registration fee of 499 inr, and a deposit (for what?) of 999 inr. After that, you pay 549 inr per month for as many groups of two movies that you can watch that month. Most VCDs in the store were at least 200 inr or so, I believe, so the pricing seems pretty reasonable to me, at least for people who are buying VCDs already. I didn't see any places to rent DVDs or VCDs in Bangalore, so there probably isn't much competition. There's also a scheme by which you can get other people to sign up and then have your monthly fee reduced.

Has anyone tried SeventyMM and had a good time with it? I think we'd like to sign up, so if anyone wants to "refer" us and get a little bit off their monthly fee, email us at bangaloremonkey @ gmail.com.

When Do I Get to Go?

It's been a weird couple weeks. Don's been finishing up at the office, and I've been cleaning up stuff around the house and running errands in between doing some freelance work. There have been several hiccups with getting our apartment sublet and ready for our absence. As a result, I'm not quite sure when I'll be heading off to India. Don flies out this Friday, and I hope I don't have wait too long to follow him.

Back to Bangalore

We've been holding out a bit on you, but the truth is we're heading back to India -- for six more months. Don will be working at the same publisher he worked at before, and we're mainly be in Bangalore again, with some stays in Delhi and Chennai and as much other travel as we can fit in.

Naturally, another trip back to India first meant another trip to the consulate. Don paid his call about a month ago, but I just went last Friday. Because the visa "clock" starts ticking the day you get the thing, and because it seemed likely that I'd get another six-month journalist one, I needed to wait until just about the last minute.

Figuring that I had nothing to lose, this time I applied for the 10-year tourist visa. And to my surprise I got it. When I applied back in January, I was working as a travel-book editor -- enough to tag me a "journalist" in the eyes of the consulate. This time, it was easier to be correctly seen a tourist instead. I'm very glad that I won't have to leave before six months, and I'm also glad that I won't have to apply for another visa for quite a while.

By the way, anyone who might have their own visa issues should first check out the India Mike roundup.

Magic Mango Splitting

It took an old Cook's Illustrated magazine to alert me to the fact that the world now has such a thing in it as a "mango splitter." Made by the Oxo company, which makes an excellent vegetable peeler, among many other things, the Splitter does what it claims, according to Cook's Illustrated. In a flash, your mango is sliced up into pieces, with the slippery seed all on its own.

All the same, I'm still not convinced enough to plunk down my $12. Isn't a big part of the fun of eating an Indian mango watching it slide halfway down your face and all over your arms? True, it can be hard on your clothes, what with the staining and all, but surely that's a small price to pay, although maybe a bit more than $12.

NPR thought enough of the thing to cover it last year (I can't make the audio or video play, but you might be luckier).

And here's a video of the splitter in action. As you might notice, the mango is pretty firm -- I think that ones in the Americas tend to be a lot less soft than those in Asia.

Breaking Bollywood News

This blog will be out of retirement soon, but in the meantime I just found out via Sonia Faleiro that the Bollywood star and illegal deer-poacher Saif Ali Khan has been filming a movie with Rani Mukherjee just a mile or two from Bangalore Monkey current headquarters (the couch). Sonia reprints the New York Post's Page 6 coverage:

Bollywood bad boy Saif Ali Khan has brought his troublemaking act to the Big Apple, squabbling with his co-star during the shooting of his new film on the Lower East Side and irritating the staff at the Madame X lounge. Khan, the son of a famed cricket king and Indian screen siren, is facing charges of poaching an endangered deer in his native India and has a reputation for doing as he pleases. He and the crew of his new film, "Tara Rum Pum Pum," have been shooting on Orchard Street by day and living it up by night. Khan and his fetching co-star, Rani Murkerjee, have reportedly asked their producer for rooms at separate hotels so they don't have to see each other off the set. The other night, the hunky millionaire and some pals stopped in at Madame X on Houston Street. A bartender there said Khan copped an attitude while throwing back shots of tequila and downing rum and Cokes. "He acted like he owns this joint," said the barkeep."

My knowledge of Bollywood is still sketchy, but I know enough to wish it was John Abraham in our fair city instead. (Photo of Khan and Mukherjee from Bollywood Blog.)