Truth. Coffee Cult, Cape Town

Truth. Coffee Cult
They roast coffee. Properly.

“Do you want sugar with that?” asked Thomas the barista. “Would I need sugar with that?” I should remember not to reply to questions with questions. Oh well. Who takes sugar with a well-made cappuccino anyway?

Truth takes its coffee very seriously. It’s religion to them. They have irrevently named blends like Resurrection, Vengeance and Donde’s Chaos. What caught my attention is how they describe each blend with a snippet of a conversation. Their decaf is dubbed Antithesis, because you know:

“Do you have a pacemaker?” We ask. “Yes.” You reply. “Then this is perfect for you,” we say only with the slightest hint of ag-shame, “It’s coffee without palpitations, or caffeine.”

When I was there, there was a old man flitting about the place barking orders and muttering things about “customer service” while being quite dodgy himself. Spiteful managers and good coffee served by all smiles and gentle baristas, such a bittersweet way to start the day. 

I bought their House Blend quite aptly named Resurrection:

“How strong?“

“Well, strong enough to resurrect even those that stupidly chose to drink Kool-Aid.”

Exactly what I needed after encountering that slight old man so early in the day.

Grandma Food

Gabriele Galimberti pays homage to all the grandmothers in the world and to their love for good cooking, starting from his own grandma Marisa who, before the departure for his tour around the world by couchsurfing, took care to prepare her renowned ravioli. She was not so concerned about the possible risks or mishaps her grandson might face in his adventurous travelling worldwide, but her major worry was, “what will he eat?”. That is because only at home you can eat well and healthily. And above all, only your grandma (and sometimes mum) knows what is best for you.  

Aside: Why isn't Grandma Food a cuisine in itself?

With the taste of his grandma’s ravioli in his mouth, Gabriele travelled around the world and, next to thousands of other adventures, turned into a curious and hungry grandson for the grannies of all the countries he visited.  Appealing to their natural cooking care and their inevitable pride in their best recipe, common factors to all grandmothers in the world, Gabriele persuaded them to do their best in the kitchen. This means moose stake in Alaska and caterpillars in Malawi, delicious, but ferociously hot, ten-spice-curry in India and sharks soup in the Philippines. 

The Art of Lepak

On the Malaysian Art of Lepak-ing:

“Sometimes, driving around the city on my way home after dinner, I am struck by its small-town ambiance – the inherent slowness of life, the dedication to a certain way of life that revolves around languid, simple meals with friends, often in modest, open-air eating places, or going from one mamak stall to another, nowadays perhaps interspersed with a drink in a fancy bar somewhere in central KL. We call this kind of social interaction to lepak, even when we are speaking English.

‘What do you want to do tomorrow?’

‘I don’t know, maybe just lepak’.

It can be most closely translated as hanging out, or relaxing, or kicking about, but it is more than that – it involves a greater sense of intimacy, an acute appreciation of the absence of responsibility, a feeling that there is, in fact, nothing more to do in life than to lepak – as if to lepak is inevitable. To understand the Malaysian’s commitment to the art of lepak (or lepak-ing; the verb can be used with great freedom) is to understand why KL is a strange place – a capital city with the soul of a village, a metropolis that doesn’t quite know how to be a metropolis.”

- Look East, Look to the Future

The Twain Shall Meet

Where two seas of different densities collide, taken off the Alaskan coast.

Crème Brûlée @ Intelligentsia, Venice

At the Coffee Shop, Dan knows I’ll order a Cappuccino and then look longingly at the Crème Brûlée with my nose pressed against the glass-case.

Let’s get this straight: I don’t know how to pronounce Crème Brûlée. I always say it softly and slowly “Crem-Bruley”. In the glass case at the counter, it’s just Custard waiting to be christened Crème Brûlée with a blow-torch. Sometimes I point at it, lower my head, mumble Crem a little loudly and then eat up the Bruley. Dan the Barista will then repeat my order and I’ll repeat it a little more confidently, ‘Crème Brûlée’. “One of those?” “Yes, Yes” and I shake my head like a puppy who’s just seen her Mama after a long day.

Till my next visit to the Coffee Shop, I say “Crème Brûlée” over and over in my head. Damnit, I have to get this right.

Maybe if I say it everyday for 21 days.

Chikmagalur, Belur and Halebidu, A Roadtrip

Belur & Halebeedu

Put on my blue suede shoes and I jumped into the car…Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues, In the middle of the pouring rain. Ok, this was Chikamagalur but it will do for now.

Sunday was the birthday and all I wanted to do was drive down to the temple towns of Belur & Halebeedu. K obliged and off we went: Belur is 30 km away from Chikmagalur and Halebeedu another 15 kms ahead of Belur.

Belur & Halebeedu are known for the temple complexes dating back to the Hoysala Empire. Wikipedia tells me, It was built by king Vishnuvardhana in commemoration of his victory over the Cholas at Talakad in 1117 CE. Legend has it that it took 103 years to complete and Vishnuvardhana’s grandson Veera Ballala II completed the task.

At Belur, I was overwhelmed by the magnificence of the temple, the attention to detail and the history of the area. A perfect way to spend my birthday.

Halebeedu, on the other hand, is a study in disappointment. The craftsmanship itself has improved - the elephants look more elephant-like, the horses have more detailing on their faces, the humans are more proportionate. Interestingly, there are no expressions on the faces in both the temples - all staid, bored Indian gods. Then you also see cornerstones that have been left out, there’s less attention to detail and you come back saddened.

For example, this unfinished panel we came across (it’s also the last picture above): The one on the extreme left has a ton of intricate detailing - curves and dots; the fringe in the middle has the bare minimum - just curves with very little detailing, the third one is a smooth stone.  

The Halebeedu startup had run out of funding.

Belur was glorious, Halebeedu was all about ruination. 

Coffee, IG and Other Spoils

Chikmagalur- Chikka+Magala+Ooru literally means ‘Younger Daughter’s Town’. It is said to have been given as a dowry to the younger daughter of Rukmangada, a legendary chief of Sakharayapatna. I also saw a gopuram styled structure that welcomed visitors to Hiremagalur. 

Quaint Chikmagalur city now is all of 2 roads - Indira Gandhi Road and MG Road. It also has a stunning piece of modern architecture: a multi-coloured mosque located just behind the BP on their high street, IG Road. 

Even more distasteful are the hoardings plastered all over the town about Congress and their resounding success in the region. Ugh. Because it is after all the constituency that elected Indira Gandhi in a by-election in 1978 after she lost the 1977 election in Rae Bareli, paving the way for her eventual return to power in 1980. 

Since I don’t scrunch my nose at the thought of chicory in my filter coffee, we picked up Panduranga coffee from a store of the same name on IG Road. 

Legend has it that Hazrath Shah Jamaal Allah Magatabi, later known as Baba Budan went to Mecca on a pilgrimage around 1600 AD where, intoxicated by the fragrance of the coffee flowers, he smuggled seven coffee seeds in the fold of his robes, out of Yemen. On his return to India, he planted these seeds around his mountain abode on the Chandradhrona Parvatha, near Chikmagalur. The plant took root and thus was born the Coffee Industry in India. This place is now known as Bababudangiri.

Chikmagalur, Belur and Halebidu, A Roadtrip Part 1

K & I have been working almost every weekend and every weekday for a year now. It was time to take stock of our stress levels and leave behind the maddening city for a break in the hills. 

The birthday weekend combined with a holiday for Gandhi Jayanti was the perfect excuse for a longish-short break to Chikmagalur.

Where to Stay in Chikmagalur

I didn’t want to rough it out in a homestay - I didn’t have enough time to research, I didn’t want to stay at a resort that was filled with families and had kids running all over the place and, I didn’t want to stay at an overpriced “honeymoon” resort. 

My long list of what I didn’t want and drawing a blank at what I want, notwithstanding, there were two clear choices: Taj Gateway and Flameback Lodges. A quick check of the bank balance, credit card bills and the long wishlists on a hundred and one e-commerce sites later, we settled on the Taj Gateway.

Chikmagalur is a 260 km drive away from Bangalore. We set off not so early in the morning on Saturday at 9 am, stopped at a Kamat that had lady servers (I haven’t seen this in Bangalore), drove through potholed Hassan, wondered aloud why an “international boarding school” was located just on the outskirts of dirty grimy Hassan (City?) and finally made it to Chikmagalur just in time for lunch.

Lunch was perfectly circular mini akki rotis and mamsa curry, home style. I don’t have a single food picture from this trip - that should be testimony enough to how delicious the food was.

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When we drive through these sleepy touristy towns, I always wonder about their equally sleepy seasonal economies. It’s disconcerting to drive on highways that meander through sleepy little villages and see the local people waiting for hours together for a bus to come by. There are almost always no rickshaws in sight beyond a 2km radius of the city centres. Whether it’s Coorg or Chikmagalur or hamlets on the way to Calicut, there are always these people just trudging along - to work, from work - on potholed roads with no streetlights as we zip down in our fast city cars. What do they make of all these contradictions abounding in their backyards? I’ll never know.

I was chuffed to learn that Kamat now hires local women as servers in their highway restaurants. I asked around at the Taj about the other worldly mamsa curry and found out that the hotels now have homemakers on their payrolls. So much win!

Taj Gateway

Powder blue skies, cups of coffee and mouthfuls of sky are my idea of a perfect vacation and Chikmagalur didn’t disappoint. Or maybe there wasn’t much of an expectation to begin with: I wake up all sneezes and sniffles in Bangalore and spend an hour every morning re-orienting myself to the pollution. 

The added bonus was the morning entertainment via a monkey family that came by to raid our coffee leftovers aka sugar packets.

Post their regular sugar binge, there was some sugar spilled on the table and this li’l monkey had come back to lick it off.

So disgusting.

It then went swinging on the trees and fell off a branch.

So cute.

I liked that the hotel is located just off the major highways that pass through Chikmagalur. The buildings that house the rooms are reminiscent of the colonial architecture one sees in these parts. The trail around the property lead to miniature coffee plantations interspersed with pepper vines and chikoo trees.

When I walk around these lush properties and serendipitously find fruit trees, veggie patches and spices I’m instantly reminded of summer holidays at my Grandma’s house in Mangalore. 

 We used to even have coffee plants as hedges at my grandma’s. Now I act like a city bumpkin every time I see these plants - “ZOMG! Look, Coffee! Such much coffee!”       

(Then my grandparents became greedy capitalists and sold away my childhood memories for lumps of money.) 

Taj also had these hibiscus plants at the entrance. Each flower was as big as my face - I should have posed next to it to give you a better idea. Next time.

Then there was this pool that we didn’t swim in. Because we forgot to pack swim wear, of course. It overlooks the misty hills of Bababudangiri and I think its only purpose was to distract us from the seemingly treacherous trek.

What we did instead was sit by the pool and dig into the sumptuous breakfast buffet spread. The breakfast was a good mix of Continental and South Indian with a dismal pastry + bakery selection. I don’t know if there is any breakfast item that’s intrinsically Chikamagalurian but there wasn’t any in the spread.

Sunday was the birthday and all I wanted to do was drive down to the temple towns of Belur & Halebeedu. K obliged and off we went: Belur is 30 km away from Chikmagalur and Halebeedu another 15 kms ahead of Belur.

Don't Touch - Borders & Walls To Keep Us In

msgopal:

Don t touch. Goa. When they were buiding the konkan railway the goans made a big hue and cry about the track going through population centres. They were afraid tha people from all over india will come and settle down in goa. Or I guess its because some people didn’t want to partt with land. Thats the reason you have to get off a tivim for north goa. Luckily the tracks pass through madgoan where I found this map. At the station

This reminds me of Los Angeles where the subway tracks don’t go through predominantly white neighborhoods. 

Sweetmeats

I was at MTR on St Marks Road for breakfast earlier today. While I was walking out of the outlet, the glass counter filled with sweets of all shapes, sizes and colors caught my eye.

Sweetmeats.

Remember those CBSE - NCERT textbooks that spoke of kids going to the sweetmeat shop? Moral Science textbooks, particularly. There was always a Mohan or some such fellow with a nondescript name trying to steal from Ram Kaka’s sweetmeat shop or if his moral compass was aligned right, salivating in from of the sweetmeat shop, then saving up to indulge. When I was in school, I associated the rosgulla alone with the word ‘sweetmeat’ - it was sweet and the spongy texture made it meaty.

Nostalgia, much giggling as I repeated “sweetmeats” over and over again to K and some ruminations on Twitter followed.

Aside: This is what @Subfusced had to say when I tweeted the picture from the MTR store. (I’m yet to look up how true this is and figure out how slimy intestines are converted into shiny lighter than paper silvery foil.)

@joylita Those silver foils contain intestines of animals. So “sweetmeat” might be somewhat accurate! :)

— Subfusced (@subfusced) December 2, 2012

As expected, someone from Tamil Nadu (in this case, it was a  D. Vrinda from Coimbatore) had already written to The Hindu asking about the word’s origin:

Why do some people refer to sweets as ‘sweetmeat’?

The word ‘sweetmeat’ is considered to be old fashioned; some dictionaries label it as being ‘archaic’. In the past, any sweet delicacy — candy, a piece of fruit coated with sugar, etc. — was called sweetmeat. The word ‘meat’ in ‘sweetmeat’ has nothing to do with animal flesh. In Old English, the word ‘mete’, from which we get the modern ‘meat’, meant ‘food’. All items of food, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian, were called ‘meat’. The original meaning of ‘sweetmeat’ was ‘sweet food’.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first print reference to sweetmeats to the 16th century

1. collect. pl. (and †sing.) †Sweet food, as sugared cakes or pastry, confectionery (obs.); preserved or candied fruits, sugared nuts, etc.; also, globules, lozenges, ‘drops,’ or ‘sticks’ made of sugar with fruit or other flavouring or filling;
sing. one of these.

The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink by John F. Mariani published in 1999 has this to say:

The ancient Egyptians preserved nuts and fruits with honey, and by the Middle Ages physicians had learned how to mask the bad taste of their medicines with sweetness, a practice still widespread. Boiled “sugar plums were known in the seventeenth-century England and soon were to appear in the American colonies where maple-syrup candy was popular in the North and benne-seed [sesame seed] confections were just as tempting in the South.

In New Amersterdam one could enjoy "marchpane,” or “marzipan,” which is very old decorative candy made from almonds ground into a sweet paste. While the British called such confections, “sweetmeats,” Americans came to call “candy,” from the Arabic qandi, “made of sugar,” although one finds “candy” in English as early as the fifteenth century.

Explains NCERT’s sweetmeats hangover. The textbooks were probably written in the British era and never reviewed!

Many Lives, Many Languages

Aravind Adiga in one sentences captures the beauty of learning many languages in the Daily Beast.

Language becomes for me what German must be for those who have learnt it well enough: a new way of understanding the world.

As Adiga points out, most of us Indians grow up ‘in an archipelago of tongues.’ (What a beautiful phrase!) It’s only after I moved away from India that I understood the beauty in the mangle and deluge of languages that hit you from every corner here. It was also a time when I yearned to hear languages that sounded like home to my ears. A few words here and a snatch of a conversation and I’d be back in a happier place again.

In Mangalore, I wake up to Konkani caught in the tangle of a busy weekday morning. Someone’s rushing for work and someone’s late for school, someone else has forgotten lunch and someone has forgotten a morning kiss from Mommy(me!).

The dust settles, it’s quiet till the domestic helps start trickling in. Then it’s the mad clangor of Bagalkot Kannada(I think! I should find out from Iramma) and the local Kannada. Dishes are washed, clothes hung out to dry, gossip exchanged and soon the chaos of an alien Kannada and a familiar tongue vanish. It’s time for Leelamma the fisherwoman to do her round, you see.

'Daada, Leelamma? Yenchina und meen?’ Nothing sounds more cut-throat business like than Tulu. It’s brusque, even. Even if Babyakka the grandmotherly lady down the road is asking me 'Kodeh idjiya?’ I straighten up and pay attention.

Kannada and Tulu didn’t come easily to me. Tulu’s the language I learned by way of explaining to Muthakka the milk-lady that my shorts weren’t half as scandalous as her hitched up sari; it was also the only way I could convince Ajja, Grandpa’s friend, to part with the little stem from his betel leaf. 

Kannada was all my Grandma’s doing. A little outraged that I knew not a word she made it her mission to go the whole hog with Kannada - writing, reading and speaking. Udayavani, Udaya TV, god knows how many four-lined notebooks and many stifled snickers from strangers later I could finally confidently give directions to the rickshaw driver and buy groceries at the local shopkeeper’s. 

The Ephemeral Man in the Reflection on the Coast Starlight

I met a peculiar Tattoo artist on the Coast Starlight, covered from the top of his head to his toes in tattoos. The first thing he said to me as he passed me by while walking to his seat, “When is your arranged marriage?” I stared at him in disbelief, “What century is this again?” We struck up a conversation.

He doesn’t pose for pictures, has no cellphone or email address and apparently has “never sent a text message or used a cellphone.” His entire right leg is covered with tattoos from all the places he has been to (Borneo, Egypt, Prison), or has tattoos made by friends, friends’ kids, etc. His “Yearbook of sorts”.

When I was about to get off, he looked at me and exclaimed, “Y'know, you look like a mouse! You have big eyes, cute ears, small mouth, tiny nose and a mischievous look.” I looked up at this human totem pole of sorts and glared. “Aww, that’s Mousey!” he laughed.

I managed to catch a reflection of him in the glass panes. I don’t know his name. I just know he lives on 5th and Spring in Downtown LA, has an assistant who answers the phone for him and helps him run his tattoo shop (“I only do works that cost 5000$ minimum”), rides a Harley, loves surfing and is a tattoo artist. Atheist, doesn’t believe in marriage or monogamy and thinks I’d enjoy riding a Harley and “being one with nature, as the wind beats the face and there’s rain above and only the road to keep you going.”

The mythology of a city’s not-so-distant golden past →

Madiha Sattar, a writer based in Karachi, in her recent comment on the Karachi violence complained about ‘the mythology of the city’s not-so-distant golden past’ that is evoked whenever the times are dark and roads bloody.

Those of us not old enough to have worn hipster saris to nightclubs here in the 60s and 70s, are frequently subjected to misty-eyed reminiscing about a city that was once apparently safe, cosmopolitan and liberal, a magical place where one could drive around late without racing home to avoid a hold-up and people were far too polite and open-minded to be too fussed about each other’s religions, sects and ethnicities.

“We desperately need narratives of Karachi that do justice to its complex past and help us grapple with its bewildering present.”