Posted on by Zarine Mohideen · 2 Comments

Movie Night

I almost forgot to write a post today. I made pepper chicken today. It didn’t turn out like my mothers chicken but it was close enough. We watched Karan Johar’s Student of the Year movie while having dinner. My thoughts :

1) The two main guys in the movie looked exactly alike.

2) Alia Bhatt can’t act or emote. But she can always look like she just came from chopping a sack of onions.

3) Alia Bhatt always forgets to wear her pants.

4) Tomboy girl has serious hair issues.

5) Hi-fi English speaking school has only like fifty students.

6) None of the kids in the aforementioned high school look like they study.

7) All the male high school students look like they’re on steroids.

8) I should have known better than to watch this movie.

Posted on by Zarine Mohideen · 2 Comments

Two for one.

Every time before I make breakfast I turn up the stove and then decide what to make. I will have egg today, I decided. So I broke the egg in a bowl and what I saw in it scared me. I broke ONE egg. There was ONE portion of white and TWO portions of yolk joined together in the center. It looked like a Venn Diagram! I’m not particularly fond of ingesting a genetically modified egg with two yolks, so I dumped the egg down the garbage disposal. My friend told me that it was a pair of twins. Mommy hen must be pretty pissed.

 

Proof :

photo (3)

Posted on by Zarine Mohideen

Rasam.

I’ve been sick the past couple of days. The flu has been doing the rounds and I didn’t want to catch it, so I went to the two most public germ filled areas I could think of : the mall and the movies. Yup, I was dying to get all coughed up. Now I have some coughing, sneezing and a runny nose. Ever since then I’ve been craving some nice home cooking. I Googled ‘How to make rasam’ and stumbled up on a fabulous Tam Bram pepper rasam recipe. Having sneezed four and a half times in a row, I just had to have it. So I made mashed rice and the most peppery pepper rasam for lunch. Ah, so yummy! I can feel my throat getting better already. Rasam is just the best.

Posted on by Zarine Mohideen

Me and my kuchi ice.

This blogging every day in January gig is proving to be harder every day. I have to wake up each morning and search inside my head to come up with something that’s even passable. It doesn’t help that its cold and dreary outside. No, something has to rain on my usual sunshine-y demeanor  I’ve been informed that the cold weather will end only at the end of February, maybe even March. I am so ready for summer already.

I loved summer holidays as a kid. Endless hours watching tv, playing with the apartment kids and scrumptious food provided my mommy dearest. You could say it was the perfect summer. But the one entity that had to dampen my spirits was the saravana Bhavan ice cream man. He would ring his little bell on his little vandi all the way to my street. I could hear the bell even at the far end of the house and would run as fast as my pudgy legs could carry me. There were times when I’ve even chased him down the street. We have all done things we are not proud of, so let’s not dwell on this?

All this hullabaloo was just to get my hands on the best kuchi ice ever – the grape flavored kuchi ice from Saravana Bhavan. So delicious, so slurpy, I’ve been know to inhale it three at a time. Good for me that my mother had the same interest in kuchi ice that I did.

But after a few years the losers at Saravana Bhavan decided to discontinue grape ice. And that’s where my story had to end. But it’s okay, I found the second best kuchi ice – Sravana Bhavan orange kuchi ice.

photo (2)Orange kuchi ice, outside Saravana Bhavan, with mother as the back drop.

Posted on by Zarine Mohideen

Naan auto kaaaran.

Auto men in Chennai are very famous thanks to the antics they come up with. I have quite a few auto man stories and I was reminded of one that stripped me of my maanam . So during college days my college bus would drop me off at the main road near my house. Walking from bus stop to my house that was inside the streets would take at least ten, fifteen minutes. Some days I would just walk the distance but on lazy days I would take an auto. If I took an auto it would hardly take a couple of minutes to drop me off so I would want to pay ten rupees but some days,  persistent auto guys would ask for fifteen rupees.

So on one of my lazy days I took an auto. When I got down I handed the guy a ten rupee not. He looked at me like I was crazy and said no ten rupees, it’s twenty, lady. I was already on a short fuse that day and I blasted at him, “It hardly took two minutes to get here, indhe route nan daily varuven, twenty rupees too much, blah blah blah”. He listened to me patiently and said, “Ille ma twenty rupees dhan. Government has put new rule that minimum fare is twenty rupees. Nennege inniki paper padiklaya?”. He said that in such a condescending way! Me being the newspaper disciple that I am, that hurt my ego and I was like whoa, is he saying the truth? So I paid him the twenty rupees and ran home to grab The Hindu. I scanned every page for this piece of news. It wasn’t there.

And I was twenty rupees poorer.

Posted on by Zarine Mohideen

I’m doing okay.

People in this country are so friendly, it took me a while to get used to it. I come from Chennai where people are not particularly that friendly. I mean, I never had the experience of walking to my local grocery store (Ayyanar Stores) and have the boy who works there ask me how I’m doing today. I would just go and be like one Maggi packet please . I then pay him the money and leave. But here it’s hard. I have to always think of response to the question “Hey how you guys doing?”. Initially I would just smile and walk away but later I realized the pressure of having something to say in response to that question which seems to be the first thing every store clerk wants to ask. Do I tell them the truth that I’m not doing that great or do I just say oh I’m doing good, how are you and have a conversation that both of us really don’t want to be in? After a while I seemed to have found a response that can’t be deemed as curt or lengthy. I just say fine, thanks and give them a dazzling smile. I thought I worked that out just fine and was out of the danger zone. But then the cashiers at the department store started saying “Have a good night, guys!” when we left. I was stumped. What do I do now? Smile, nod or say “You too”? I settled for smile and nod. I didn’t want to hold up the line.

In Chennai the only person with whom I had to actually converse with outside my immediate circle was the auto man with his permanent request of “meter ku malle anju roova“. Of course I had to say no I cannot part with my anju roova you thief and then we would engage in a little not so friendly banter that would end with me just giving him the anju roova to make him shut up.

I miss the good old days when I could just leave the house without having someone ask me how I’m doing and me having to evaluate my feelings of the day. Some days I don’t want to know how I’m doing, perky Starbucks girl, so please just give me my hazelnut hot chocolate and let me get on with my day.

And no whipped cream, thank you very much.

Posted on by Zarine Mohideen

Thank you.

Dear Neighbor,Did you know that you make my mornings better? You play the piano every morning for hours. It makes my morning, and my day so much better. Your music provides an interesting background score to my thoughts when I’m on the potty. Your music makes me want to dance when I’m cooking. You don’t know the difference you make in my life but I’m happy to have you as my neighbor (I hope you’re not the one with the dog). So thank you for that. Thank you for making me happy when I feel down. You make me feel a little less lonely in the mornings. And that’s more than what this girl could ask for.

Posted on by Zarine Mohideen · 5 Comments

Good morning breakfast!

As a child I could never eat breakfast on a school day. I lived an hour away from my school. I would wake up at 6 am to catch my school bus that would come on the dot at 7 am. Breakfast was never on my agenda. After tenth grade I switched schools to one that was fifteen minutes away so there was always time for breakfast. I’d wake up to steaming idlies soaked in hot sambar, crispy dosas or vadas speckled with pepper corns. Those two years were amazing, breakfast-wise.In college breakfast was always with my friend S in the college canteen. Pongal soaked in ghee or pooris gleaming with oil, those were our only two options. College pongal was probably one of the best pongals I’ve had. S and I would get off from the bus, walk straight to the canteen and sit ourselves there, stuffing faces for a good half hour. That was one of the reasons why I added on to my puppy weight, I guess.

Today, breakfast was scrumptious, thanks to Trader Joe’s Super Nutty Toffee Clusters that absolutely made my day. Corn flakes with a bunch of nuts, what more could you want? How about Toffee Clusters that taste exactly like caramel popcorn! Whaat?! Ya ha!! This caramel popcorn cereal makes my mornings a hundred times better. This is also another thing I like about this country, the variety of cereal. Caramel popcorn cereal, who woulda thought!

Posted on by Zarine Mohideen · 1 Comment
This is my first winter in this country and although it doesn’t snow where I live, the climate is very, very cold. And that’s okay. You turn up the heat, layer up and grab a mug of hot chocolate and you will feel warm enough. But that doesn’t prepare you for the depression. When I look out the window I don’t see warm sunshine and the birds chirping. I only see dark, depressing gloom and an obese squirrel struggling to run on my balcony. I can’t wait for summer, and for sunshine. I can’t wait to go out without layering up. Summer, come soon.