Book Review: Marriages Not Made In Heaven, by Vathi Agrawal

A South Delhi mother of three daughters of marriageable age is a special creature and Nita Chopra runs true to the stereotype. Her three daughters are as different from each other as chalk and cheese and chai, with just one thing in common - all three, Payal, Simran and Nisha, are very keen to get married, just as keen as their parents are in getting them married. Anand Chopra, the father, works for the Mittal Group of companies and the Chopras are well-off, though not filthy rich and they have the money and wherewithal to spend on the desired weddings. Vathi Agrawal definitely believes in ‘getting on with it’ since the marriages happen in quick succession, atleast for two of the daughters, and the last one doesn’t take too long either, but that’s because the story moves fast. Agrawal’s characters are real-life ones and many run true to stereotypes, though a few don’t. Nita Chopra is ambitious, but also realistic. Nisha is the prettiest of the lot and ‘it was an unacknowledged aspiration of Nita, that her youngest daughter get married to the young scion of the Mittal family, Sidaarth Mittal. After all, aren’t rich business tycoons always marrying beneath them, so long as the bride is young and good looking.’ However, for the eldest Payal, an old maid who had crossed thirty and who took after her father in looks and brains, broad of shoulders, neck and waist, she did not harbour any extravagant ambitions and is even willing to shell out a substantial dowry to get a half-decent groom.

Marriages Not Made In Heaven is definitely not a politically correct novel, though it gets its characters and their settings correct. There is nastiness and jealousy, pettiness and greed, love and longing, sacrifice and benevolence. Each character is vividly drawn. Was it Mark Twain who said that human beings show their true colours when they are dating, getting married or getting ditched? Actually, I made that one up, but after reading Marriages Not Made In Heaven, one would find it difficult not to agree.

Agarwal’s debut effort is such a romantic (or rather unromantic) thriller that I read it in one go – I think I took around five hours to read the 198-page page-turner on a warm Saturday afternoon, not needing a single cup of coffee while doing so. Agrawal writes well in simple, everyday Indian English, the sort of English which the Chopras and their neighbours, the Grovers, would speak. Agrawal’s use of ‘will’ instead of the more common ‘would’ threw me initially, but I soon started to enjoy the usage. For example: “He knew Nisha had a steady boy friend, but was naive enough to believe that if he displayed his steadfast unshakeable devotion to her, she will fall in love with him sooner or later.”

I highly recommend Marriages Not Made In Heaven. Go on, do pick up a copy and read. Actually, its fine even if you don’t read it because it is very likely to be made into a TV serial soon and you can watch it on screen.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Thanks to Nita Chopra’s quest for sons-in-law from the get-go, despite the title of the book suggesting otherwise, I ended up looking (in vain) for Jane and Elizabeth and Lydia, Mr. Bingley, Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham in Marriages Not Made In Heaven.  In India, with its patriarchy and dowry, dyed-in-the-MCP-wool men and steeped-in-tradition women, many marriages, unlike the marriages that take place in Austen-land, don’t have a happy ending, even if both horoscopes had been matched before the M boat set sail. Payal, a marketing executive in a technology firm, does have a few things in common with Jane, but not in the looks department. Second daughter Simran, a doctor to boot, ‘attractive and unapproachable’, the official snob of the family who has a high opinion of herself, has nothing in common with Elizabeth Bennett. As for Nisha, the youngest and the prettiest, she is as head-strong as Lydia, but not as lucky.

Marriages Not Made In Heaven is as different from Pride and Prejudice as pride is different from prejudice, or are they really? Don’t pride and prejudice have a lot in common? If Jane Austen were to write Pride and Prejudice today, wouldn’t the Bennett sisters also be career-minded? Actually, unlike her two elder sisters, Nisha isn’t very career-minded, but she is pushed into working for an investment bank and she does pretty well, effortlessly stealing credit from her colleague Ananya and sleeping with a key client. Wouldn’t Lydia have done the same?

ONE MORE SPOILER

By the way, I did find Mr. Darcy in Marriages Not Made In Heaven. Actually, Nisha’s colleague Ananya found him for me. No, I’m not going to tell you more. Please read this potboiler to find out more for yourself.

Book Review: Once Upon A Plate – The Recipes and Memories of an Unhurried Cook, by Radhika Ramachandran

Do you know how Chicken 65 originated? Radhika Ramchandran’s cookbook Once Upon A Plate tells me that in 1965, when hostilities between India and Pakistan were on, Chennai’s famous chef A. M. Buhari came up with this delicious non-vegetarian dish that could be prepared instantly and served to soldiers. The resulting dish draws its name from the year in which it was invented. Or is it called Chicken 65 because it is made by cutting chicken into 65 pieces? Or did its name come about because a 65 day old chicken was used to prepare it? Once Upon A Plate is not conclusive on this point, but it doesn’t really matter. The eye-watering photo of a plate of chicken 65 and the accompanying recipe ensure that one is focused more on preparing a plate of Chicken 65 than resolve the mystery behind its name.

A cookbook they say, is made not just of paper, but carries with it the author’s sweat, grime from her kitchen, fragrant aromas wafting from her oven, the burnt smell of experiments that went wrong and sounds of grateful lips smacking in appreciation.

In the case of Radhika Ramachandran, Once Upon A Plate – The Recipes and Memories of an Unhurried Cook also has buried in it generations of inherited kitchen wisdom and culinary dust gathered from across the world. Ramachandran, a lawyer cum cook, has poured her heart and soul into this coffee table cookbook, which has been many years in the baking. Once Upon A Plate is more than just a collection of recipes. Rather, ‘it stands conveniently at the beautiful intersection of a cookbook and a food memoir’. It lovingly describes how Ramachandran inherited a passion for cooking, how the time spent with her grandmother laid the seeds for her motivation to write Once Upon A Plate for which she spent years accumulating recipes in meticulous detail. Ramachandran’s English is simple and unadorned and her instructions straightforward.

Ramachandran has her roots in Andhra, spent her childhood in various cantonments across India, went to law school in Bengaluru, married a Bengali man who too has a military background and much later moved to Nigeria where she lives even now. Once Upon A Plate draws on the culinary traditions of all these places.

There are recipes for chutneys, pickles, dips, sauces, salads, dozens of south Indian vegetarian dishes, many chicken, fish, mutton dishes from across the world, including Iran, Pakistan and Nigeria, breads and biriyanis and other rice dishes and more than enough desserts to satisfy any sweet tooth anywhere in the world.

One of the best bits about Once Upon A Plate is that it is almost autobiographical and Ramachandran’s background is truly fascinating. Ramachandran’s maternal grandfather BDP Rao was a military doctor in the British Indian army who was awarded an MBE for his exemplary service in World War II. Her maternal grandmother Anasuya Rao hailed from a Zamindari family. All four of their children became doctors.  Ramachandran received from her ammamma lessons in mythology, cookery, proper demeanour and Sai Bhajans. Ramachandran’s mother and her two sisters, all doctors at one time, formed a close-knit group of strong opinionated women and there is little doubt that Ramachandran is cut from the same cloth.

As the daughter of two army officers and granddaughter of an army general, Ramachandran who grew up in ‘magical cantonments’ where many evenings were spent at the Officer’s Mess and Army Clubs such as the Defence Services Officers’ Institute and various Rajendra Sinji Institutes.

 Isn’t the proof of the pudding in the eating? Well, I made Bhuna Gosht using the recipe from Once Upon A Plate and it’s lip smacking good, though I ended up deviating a bit from Ramachandran's toolkit - mainly in that the mutton I used was chopped into small pieces. Here’s a photo:

Once Upon A Plate is beautiful coffee table book which can adorn any drawing room. It runs to over 550 odd pages, has hundreds of photographs of the finished dishes and a painstakingly prepared index at the end which will be very useful to any reader.

I do encourage all my readers to acquire a copy of this beautiful book which will not only be useful in cooking tasty dishes, but can be passed on lovingly to future generations.

Once upon A Plate is available on Amazon and at Notion Press.

Maintaining My Streak On Duolingo

 

I have been using Duolingo since March 2019 and find that Duolingo is the best resource available to me to learn French, considering the various constrains I am under. However, I have learned to not use Duolingo mindlessly. Duolingo is designed like a gaming app and it makes one addicted to gaining various types of rewards or credits, which reduces its effectiveness. One of the most well-known features of Duolingo is the 'Streak'. There are folks who proudly claim to have a Streak of over a year, implying that they have used Duolingo regularly everyday to maintain that Streak. However, Duolingo makes it rather easy to maintain the Streak. There are refills and other gimmicks which keeps one's Streak going even if one has not been regular. I have become so annoyed with the Duolingo Streak that I don't use Duoling on weekends and once in a while on weekdays too, but my current Streak has stayed with me for over 58 days. This is the story of my current Streak on Duolingo.  

Duolingo offered refills to maintain my Streak, whenever I was on the verge of losing mine.

Look at my calendar. There have been many days when I did not use Duolingo.

I dropped down the league table many times!

 

I kept dropping

However, I manage to keep my streak

Streak is just one of the incentives offered. There are others too!

There are daily quests.

Once I was inducted into the Streak Society, not sure what that means though.

Look at how my calendar looked around 10 days ago

Book Review: Zainab The Precious Quest, by Shayan

When a butterfly flaps its wings in Delhi, it causes snowfall in Switzerland. When Indira Gandhi abolishes the privy purses of the former rulers of erstwhile Indian princely states, Magnus Montgomery, a Swiss banker focusing on South-East Asia at the Banque Wedderburn Privee, sees a huge uptick in his business.

We live in dystopian times and Zainab The Precious Quest reflects this with muddled precision. Vikas. Magnus, Zainab, Rishika, Varun, Sejal, they get on with lives, as they move across continents, meet new people and lose contact with old friends and then sometimes there is a reunion. Throughout the novel, Vikas, Zainab and Sejal manage to steal moments of happiness. We don’t know if Prakhar did the same. Most probably he did not, since he was always precise and methodical and his entire live was a managed project that did not require any external injection of joy. When the reader reaches the end, s/he is none the wiser (regarding the magic elixir that leads to human joy) than s/he was in the beginning.

Vikas Kumar ran a small travel agency in West Punjabi Bagh. When Magnus Montgomery landed at this doorstep after having lost his briefcase, which had his Swiss passport and expired Indian visa, Vikas was ever so helpful, even going to the extent of suggesting that the word "Banque" in "Banque Wedderburn Privee" was misspelt. Shouldn’t it be “bank”?, Vikas queried. Soon Vikas ended up working for Mangus, which took him to Moradabad, 'the armpit of India,' where he made his way to Rishika Pradhan’s father’s shop. Love blossomed between Vikas and Rishika, even as Vikas enabled, for Magnus, the collection and transfer of literally truckloads of cash from various parts of India through Tyagiji’s hawala parlour in West Punjabi Bagh. In parallel with Magnus using Vikas’s services, Banque Wedderburn Privee decideed to outsource back office operations to cut costs and retains New Horizon Infotech Limited in Noida for this purpose. Vikas managed to get Rishika to work for New Horizon. Fast forward and Vikas becomes a private banker in Zurich, working for Banque Wedderburn Privee. Rishika plays the role of the bored housewife amidst the mountains and snows of Switzerland. How does Vikas become a private banker in Zurich? Do please read this novel to find out for yourself.

Prakhar Solanki, a boring data analyst, and his clever wife Sejal, take-off from India for Zurich so that Prakhar can work on-site on an integration project for his MNC employer. In Zurich, Prakhar continues to be ever efficient and precise, while Sejal becomes a marketing assistant at the Uto Kulm Hotel, where she meet Vikas, who is a total contrast to Prakhar. On weekdays, Sejal swirls her prosecco and meets Vikas often. On weekends, the best she can hope for is an Antakshri with Prakhar’s office-mates and their families. Vikas wishes Rishika could be as much fun as Sejal, but he wishes in vain and so he continues to meet with Sejal whenever he can.

Zainab’s family hails from Hyderabad and her father Mr. Sidhiqui works for IDPL - Indian Drug and Pharmaceutical Limited where he is Senior Purchase Officer. When Mr. Sidhiqui is transferred to IDPL’s Vibhadra branch, he manages to get his wife a job as a Chemistry teacher at the IDPL Inter College. Zainab and her family are allotted a Type-III flat (though he is entitled to a Type-IV flat) and things would have been really dreary for Zainab if she hadn’t become very close friends with Varun Dixit whose father is entitled to a Type-V flat. Water Tank No. 5 of the Virbhadra township is where Varun and Zainab have their frequent rendezvous. Suddenly, Mr. Sidhiqui is transferred to a scientific laboratory in the US on behalf of IDPL and Varun and Zainab are torn asunder. Zainab chances upon some documents, addressed to Mr. Sidhiqui which contains another name. Further, at the US immigration counter, they are escorted by state agents via a special queue, sans the usual ESTA checks. Is it just a high profile posting, or something else? We are told that before the move to the US, Mr. Siddiqui had made several visits to the Office of the Technology Attache in the US Embassy on Shanti Path in Delhi. Do please read this excellent novel to find out more.

Vikas soon starts making frequent trips to Philadelphia where he runs into Zainab. They meet often in a seventh-floor luxury suite of the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Chestnut Street. Zainab has a boyfriend three doors down on the same street. Varun Dixit is a faint memory, though Zainab has been looking for Varun in every man she has had a relationship with until then. When her relationship with Vikas starts to threaten to become serious, Varun gets in touch with Zainab via Orkut and it turns out that Varun is actually in her vicinity. Are Varun and Zainab able to put the clock back and recreate the ambience of Vibhadra's Water Tank No. 5? Go on, please read and find out for yourself. 

Shayan (the author's pen name) writes well in precise prose that does not become a barrier to one’s enjoyment of the story. There is no unnecessarily lyrical prose that diverts your attention. The religious fundamentalists who pop in and out of the story occasionally add colour to the human kaleidoscope that rolls on at moderate speed. Shayan's main characters are all very much lovable - in fact, I didn't find a single character in this novel who is detestable, not even the boring Prakhar. I really enjoyed reading Zainab The Precious Quest and highly recommend it to Winnowed’s readers.

Zainab The Precious Quest is available on Pothi and Amazon.

How Effective Is Duolingo?

I’ve been using Duolingo to improve my French language skills. As I have mentioned in my previous posts on Duolingo, I started learning French sometime in 1999 and have been learning it on and off. As for Duolingo, I started using it in March 2019, used it for three or four months, found it very addictive, but had misgivings about how effective it actually is and gave it up until November 2020, when I went back to Duolingo, more because of the absence of any other feasible option that would help me learn French during my work commute.

I still have mixed feelings about Duolingo. On the plus side, the grammar exercises in Duolingo are very good, and though they don’t cover all tenses, help improve one’s grammar. On the flip side, Duolingo has not improved my ability to converse in French. If at all, I find myself hesitating more, compared to the past, when  I used to rattle off with my limited French vocabulary, unconcerned about my grammatical mistakes. 

These days, I constantly feel that I am not learning as much on Duolingo as I should be, considering I spend around 30 minutes on Duolingo every weekday and sometimes on weekends too. I feel that when I learnt French in a classroom, I learned a lot more. My vocabulary is composed almost entirely of words I learnt in 1999-2001 and later in 2002-2003 in a classroom where the teacher used a textbook (with pictures in it) to teach. I can easily remember a number of phrases from that learning. What I learn on Duolingo is more like water off a duck’s back. The new words I learn on Duolingo, I remember them for a few seconds afterwards and then I forget them. Vocabulary building is one of the places where Duolingo falters though Duo claims to teach so many new words every day. I feel that in a classroom, one creates associations between the newly learnt  words and the surrounding environment (such as the joke cracked by a fellow student or a  rebuke from the teacher), which makes it easy to remember the newly learnt words. 

Ultimately, online learning cannot hold up a candle to classroom learning, I feel and Duolingo is a case in point.