Drunken Noodles

After weeks of plotting and planning we finally made it to Shiok for lunch. My partners-in-crime this time were Supreeth (SR) (who I was meeting for the first time) and Aarti (AC) (who’s probably a little tired of seeing me so often :-)

We settled into the comfy seats and attacked the food and drinks with great relish. We must have made quite an interesting sight - two hungry women wolfing down food like there's no tomorrow! SR was a little more polite. But the food was good. Or we were hungry. Or it might have been both. All I remember is stuffing me self to the gills.

We had Thai Drunken Noodles (aka Pad Kee Mow), a lovely shrimp dish, a really nice tasting rice. As you can see, I am not so good with names. To top it all, I had a green concoction called Madhu’s Illusion, which turned out to be more potent than I first thought.

Madhu's restaurant also has a compact lounge area next to the dining area where you can relax and have a drink but we decided not to venture there. I don’t think I would have made it out of the door for a long time, if I had.

We started at noon (we were the first eager ones in) and they finally had to shoo us out at 4 p.m. after we had stretched their hospitality to the limits.

BTW, Shiok (pronounced 'she-oak') is a Malaysian-Singaporean slang word roughly meaning damn good, heavenly or yummy. Yes, Shiok was shiokly!!

Another reason to be grateful

Jim Cooke lives in New York State. He has normal eyesight, but he cannot recognize his own face in the mirror. He has to shave by feeling his way around his features. In 1995, then aged forty-eight, Jim went in for a brain operation. When he came round, he realized something was wrong. It took him several days to figure out that he could not see faces properly any more. Jim was now suffering from prosopagnosia. This term is derived from prosopon (‘face’) and agnosia (‘lack of knowledge’), and refers to a disorder in which people can see most things normally, but when they look at a face they see only a canvas of features that do not form a meaningful image. They cannot recognize the face as someone familiar.

You can be born with this rare illness, but more commonly it occurs as the result of adult brain damage. While the brain as a whole is involved with most perceptual functions, there is a tiny, specialized section of the brain that is intimately involved with the recognizing of faces. It is called the fusiform. In a scanner it lights up with electrical activity whenever a person looks at a face. If the fusiform gets damaged we cannot recognize the face as a face – and Jim’s fusiform area was damaged during the operation.

Jim explains that when he sees faces: ‘It’s almost as if everyone’s wearing stocking- masks.’ It is disturbing for Jim if people recognize and approach him in the street, since he has no way of placing them or guessing who they are. Most of us forget the odd name or face, but Jim can’t see faces at all. Most distressing for Jim is the fact that he cannot respond to the faces of his own children. When he goes to meet his twenty-year-old son Tommy, or his eighteen-year-old daughter Cindy, he cannot recognize them. Tom and Cindy have learnt to cope with their father’s illness. They make sure that they say ‘Hi Dad’ or identify themselves every time they approach him.

Prosopagnosics evolve complex strategies to deal with their illness. They become expert in differentiating voices and clothing, so as not to give away their problems. But for anyone, this is an enormously debilitating illness.

Jim Cooke says that: ‘When I look in a mirror, I’m not there. I’ll see items on the wall behind me, but a blank in the middle…’ - From The Human Face, Brian Bates with John Cleese

Chillin’ With M

I met up with a college friend of mine - Mugs (this isn’t short for muggles, mugs is very far from being human), yesterday. We used to hang-out together A LOT till she got married and moved to the US. She was this really cool person. Not the spaghetti-strapped-top-in-a-little-black-thingy! Cool though and a very nice person. I mean, she had a retriever called Whisky. That in my eyes made her totally adorable. Now, she is a successful businesswoman.

I invited M over for lunch. It’s great to have her as she always relishes my cooking and it thrills me to bits when my culinary skills are appreciated cause I never in my life imagined I would cook. My cousins or friends would always be the ones in the kitchen, helping Ma out and I’d be keeping them company chattering away or reading in my room. I used to be a nerd once upon a time!! Anyways, I made a delicious pasta and baked cauliflower, which M loved and between the two of us polished off everything on the dishes. Later, loaded with coke and popcorn, we settled in to watch Mona Lisa Smile on DVD.

We were quite disappointed with the movie. The plot was banal, the characters weren’t defined well and no standing-out performances. They had a good idea to begin with, but they couldn’t carry it through. Julia Roberts is a free-spirited, sexually liberated, unmarried-by-choice art history professor who wants to challenge and change the ways of the uptight, traditionalist “finishing” school that Wellesley was in the 50s. But the way the movie went she ends up looking rather pushy and silly, and hardly makes any difference. So after 2 hours of the movie you’re wondering what the point of it all was!

What was interesting about the movie though was to see how the role of women was defined in the US in the 50s; How women were groomed to be trophy wives and how hitching a guy was the sole objective of a girl’s education.

Mugs and I wondered if things were any different in India even today from what America was 50 years back. Look at our “convent educated” classmates!! Being convent educated raised their chances of finding a “suitable hubby” or for that matter even ND who did her BE, just so that she could find an “engineer” husband. What a waste of that engineering seat!

Fighting the system

Today a colleague at work called me a Bohemian... just because I wanted to change the "traditional" way of making a report. They have been making this stupid payroll report in the same format for some 10 years now... and it does not even give a complete picture of the monthly pay-outs.

To conform is societies greatest desire. Anyone who doesn’t, is branded different, difficult, loony or maverick like me! But nature never conforms, she always chooses her own path, just like no two snowflakes are alike!

Then why do so many humans want to be alike?? To be part of the ’IN’ crowd.

I am currently reading "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kensey, which examines the very same concept. What coincidence!

The book is a grim satire set in the Oregon state mental institution with an inmate narrating the story of an energetic con man who seeks institutionalization as a means of escaping the rigors of a prison work farm. Before long, in order to reduce the sexual and emotional impotence of the men at the institution, he began to challenge the dictatorial "Big Nurse" Ratched and her system, and eventually "waking up" the patients on the ward.

The book inspires you to make your own choices and not be bullied by the Establishment. Walking against the system is hard, especially if you are the only one. But if the step is never taken, for fear of the beyond, then you will never move from the starting line....

I did a bit of research and found that Kesey wrote this book after having participated as a guinea pig in Veterans Administration studies of psychedelic [chemical substances]. He also worked in a mental hospital and even underwent electric shock treatment, just to see what it was like. WOW!!

This book is a tribute to the original thinkers of our age, who dared to dream and fought to achieve their dreams....

Read it and open your eyes!