The Existential Pleasure of 'Dal Dhokli'

A Monsoon Lunch in Benaulim

So I land in Goa on a wet Monday afternoon. The landscape is lush with the soothing green of paddy fields, the mysterious green of bushes and undergrowth and the dark, foreboding green canopies formed by trees. I make a beeline to the home of Aasif and Gita in Benaulim, a 30-minute drive south of Dabholim airport. Both have been our friends as far back as we can remember. The warmth is a given but Gita knows about my fondness for this Gujarati specialty called ‘dal dhokli.’ We eat Gujarati food every now and then in Delhi but never, for some reason, this wonderful concoction.

In Goa, as we wolf down fish and all manner of creepy crawlies, Gita’s house is like a port in a storm. She serves the tastiest meat and fish dishes including fresh Bombay Duck, flaky and hugely satisfying. Whenever I’m there though, she adds to her table the above-mentioned dish, much to my delight.

‘Dal dhokli’ is pasta served in a lentil sauce. You put a dollop of ghee on it and the world is at your feet. It is one of the few bland dishes in the repertoire of Gujarati cuisine. As a child, I can remember eating it in my grandmother’s house in a steel thali that was raised on one side by a burning coal. This was ostensibly to keep the contents hot. Some spice it up with ‘methi masala’ that is used to make the famous Gujarati ‘methia keri’ (spicy mango) pickle. I never find the need to do that because the bland dal and pasta are good enough for me.

When my friend Vir Sanghvi wrote about Gujarati food in his excellent “Rude Food” feature in Brunch, the Sunday magazine of The Hindustan Times, he either had never eaten ‘dal dhokli’ before (knowing Vir, I doubt that) or ignored it; most likely, he just forgot about this unique dish. It is unique because Gujarati cuisine makes a fetish about sugar and spice. To be sure, there is a sprinkle of sugar in the dal; never mind that, ‘dal dhokli’ does not even have the traditional garnish of cilantro, called ‘kothmir,’ a green sprig that is superior to parsley or mint. This dish is the closest Gujarati food comes to Western cuisine.

I can see eyes rolling at that sentence. “Aha! You poor sod with a colonized mind! You like everything Western, even their food,” a critic might say. Well, actually Western food is great. But I liked ‘dal dhokli’ even as a child, long before I ate my first morsel of Western food. Growing up in a Gujarati household, I drew sustenance from the legions of sweet and spicy dishes that are paraded on every menu. 'Dal dhokli' was the only bland legionnaire in the march past on my table every day. Like the pauses of silence in a great drum solo, the dish is a subtle counterpoint to the Gujarati taste for spicy food, with a little sugar or jaggery added for good measure. Aimed at your heart, kidney, stomach…we have all the shock and awe ingredients in our recipes to, well, shock and awe you. ‘Dal dhokli’ is the respite, a pause from the recurring assault of hot, sweet and sour.

Oh, so now people from the hinterland are shaking their heads. “Our menu too features spices and we reserve sugar for our desserts," a friend might say. Well, of course it does. But you poor dears, your use of spices is just too recent to compare with those of us who hail from coastal India. We facilitated the global trade in spices when you were still eating roots, berries and dairy products with a side order of grilled chicken and mutton. We were global spice traders and the foreigners we dealt with brought with them a cornucopia of foods from the New World such as potatoes, tomatoes and chili peppers. The foreigners you dealt with came bearing swords of conquest and spears of subjugation.

What can I say? Your garam masala and your sauces are like McDonald’s fast food: just throw stuff together. It’s like a store-bought mango pickle compared to my grandmother’s offering: a labor of love and expertise undertaken annually in the summer, the making of ‘methia keri.’ The right amount of methi mixed with the powder of red chili peppers dried in the sun and ground, sometimes to accompaniment of tuneless singing; with intuitive amounts of haldi (turmeric) and hing (asafetida). The composite powder is stuffed into specially picked green mangoes, cut on the quarters and then steeped in oil. To eat the first flush of the pickle, when the mango is still a bit green is to taste nature after it has been to culinary finishing school.

Coming back to ‘dal dhokli,’ its very blandness adds variety to Gujarati cuisine. It is a distant relative of Rajasthani ‘dal baati’ except that ‘baati,’ the flour component, ain’t exactly ‘dhokli.’ It is a dumpling where ‘dhokli’ is pasta. They too add ghee, lots more of it. It is very tasty but the quality we seek is being ethereal. Forced to choose between the two, I would unhesitatingly plump for the Gujarati dish. And no, that’s not a provincial statement…it is an honest choice.

So here I am back in Goa, the land of spices and New World produce. Between the various curries and the chili fries, meat, fowl and fish, I get my fill. The crispy bite of batter fried calamari, the sensuous swallow of hot and sour shrimp curry mixed into coarse red rice and the sumptuous crunch of rava fried fish are enough to make humble table wines taste good. I am suffused with the exciting taste of Goan food and sated by excellent desserts that include jaggery and coconut stuffed pancakes, seductive coconut cakes and honest and upright custard. I can't get enough of the feast. Nevertheless, a couple of bowls of ‘dal dhokli’ in Benaulim add to the enjoyment of fish curry, chicken caffreal, beef chili fry, fried shrimp, calamari, mussels and teesriyos. To my mind, Gita's ‘dal dhokli’ is an added and growing attraction of this lush green enclave on the west coast that serves for us as an escape from the uncivil catastrophe that the rest of India has become.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

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Scaling Heights, Plumbing Depths

A Disturbed Weekend in Kasauli

Our friends Yuri and Rupa have a place just outside Kasauli, a civilized mountain oasis on the way to Simla. I call their retreat “Misty Heights.” We got there late on Thursday evening with Gautam and Rita, our other friends with whom we share the experience of living in America. When we arrived late in the evening, I thought of the Eric Clapton song, and said to myself that the place, shrouded in mist, looked wonderful that night.

If ever there was generational bonding, this was it. Yuri, now a growing Bollywood star, is a former IAF fighter pilot, who was chosen to be a part of India’s space program. Rupa is a whiz kid; she is a partner in a global business that deals with American and European buyers of quality apparel.

Gautam is India’s senior-most editor, who is the genius behind the success of the Bombay-based DNA newspaper and who now serves as editorial adviser to The Times of India. He is the most sensible and erudite person in Indian journalism today. Rita is a teacher in Washington DC area; she is the fount of wisdom on education. What we discovered over the weekend is that she is also the greatest authority on films, Hollywood and Bollywood.

When you put this accomplished lot together in the hills, walking in the clouds and wearing sweaters and shawls in July, you have the makings of an enjoyable weekend, dripped in nostalgia. Especially because Gautam and Yuri are also rock stars, who, like the cult band of the 1960s, Traffic, can “sing a song, play guitar, make it snappy.” So we sat in the bar of “Misty Heights” and laughed away the hours, talking about the great things that we could do that weekend.

Even as we enjoyed conversations and music, we learned over the weekend about the bomb blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad. Many of us had family and friends in the two cities. We tried to reach them but all phone lines were jammed. So we sat on edge, worrying about them, hoping for the best, fearing the worst. We did eventually reach them and were gratified to learn they were okay.

Nevertheless, it cast a pall over the gathering. We wondered what could possibly motivate people to rain death and mayhem on innocent people? I can understand driven psychos like Prabhakaran’s LTTE in Sri Lanka, who sent a suicide bomber to kill Rajiv Gandhi. Given the levels of corruption and police state governance in the island country, there is modicum of logic in the LTTE’s extremism.

What is clearly beyond reason is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in India. There are 150 million Moslems in India and they are within their rights to be concerned about the BJP and its Nazi views. On the other hand, they are a pampered lot, with every political party vying for their support. The classic example of this mollycoddling is that the avowedly secular government of India pays for Moslems to make their pilgrimage to Mecca.

Politics apart, these terrorist blasts have outlined in stark relief the sheer incompetence of the government. It is not about the BJP or the Congress; the central and state government agencies are simply inept and stupid, what a good banker friend of mine calls IAS. These agencies, whether RAW or IB or CBI, have been unable to bring anyone to book, starting with the bombings in Bombay in 1993.

“The world has decided we should be a global player,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once told me. But the world simply has no idea that the Indian government is in held in thrall by corrupt politicians and wily bureaucrats.

So we have the unseemly spectacle of L K Advani, in the midst of this terrorist mayhem, asking the Speaker of Parliament to release a clandestine video that ostensibly shows a cash for votes transaction. No one, including the Speaker, bought the BJP’s wild allegation. In fact, the Speaker is reported to have read Advani the riot act, expressing grave displeasure at the flagrant violation of parliamentary norms.

Advani was referring to an alleged monetary offer made by the government’s supporters to induce legislators to vote for the UPA in the confidence vote in Parliament. What’s even worse, despite enjoying the exalted status of opposition leader, Advani allowed, nay encouraged, these dubious players to enact the cash drama in Parliament.

My personal view is that Advani is the most corrosive politician in India today. He stands criminally accused for his role in the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992 and for his recklessly provocative rath yatra two years before. He is so blinded by his ambition to become prime minister that he has lost all sense of balance.

How can Advani focus on the so-called sting operation that members of his party conducted during the vote of confidence? More than 50 people have died in the terrorist attack in Gujarat (which Advani represents in the Lok Sabha) and Karnataka, both states run by the BJP. Shouldn’t he be asking questions of the BJP chief ministers there as to how this happened? He clearly has come unhinged by the government's convincing win on the floor of the house.

Where he should stand shoulder to shoulder with the central government, urging his party chief ministers to move quickly to arrest the perpetrators, Advani has shown he has the mentality of a municipal councilman. As such, he will continue in his cynically graceless manner to yell and scream from the margins to which he has relegated his party. Under the burden of his ambition, the BJP, which could be a useful right of center alternative in the political mainstream, has been reduced to a rump of naysayers and whiners.

Meanwhile back in Kasauli, we agreed that politicians like Advani would naturally draw an extreme response from Islamist formations like the “Indian Mujaheedin,” who have claimed responsibility for the blasts. Advani bashes on relentlessly: sponsoring foolish resolutions to oppose the government's plans to speed up reforms; egging on the egregious Sushma Swaraj in her wild allegations about the blasts; forgetting his own dismal record as home minister. It's time for him to adopt a vow of silence and maintain it for the remainder of this government's term.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

The Defeat of Evil

The Advani Karat Pact

Paritranaya sadhunam vinashaya cha dushkritam
Dharma sansthapanarthaya sambahvami yuge yuge

(Gita 4:8)

(For the upliftment of the good and virtuous
For the destruction of evil
For the re-establishment of natural law
I will come in every age)

So the BJP and the Left and the casteist Mayawati have been defeated conclusively; time to take stock of why they did what they did. A bit of history will help understand what happened.

On August 23, 1939, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin entered into a secret agreement with Germany’s Adolf Hitler. It was the ultimate act of appeasement because Stalin felt that would focus Hitler's attention on Western Europe. On July 8 2008, Prakash Karat made a not-so-secret pact with L K Advani, whose naked ambition is to become India’s Prime Minister.

Karat is a diehard Stalinist, who is enjoying his place under India's democratic sun. Most people believe he gets his marching orders from the mandarins in Beijing. Because the Left is what it is, he remained unchallenged until the Speaker of the House, Somnath Chatterjee, called his bluff with support from the more flexible members of the CPM. He defied Karat and stayed on as Speaker and was quick to call "The Ayes have it" on the voice vote after the debate, rudely disrupted by BJP thugs, over the confidence vote called by the Prime Minister.

Then there’s Advani, who for all the years he’s been in politics, comes off as an amateur actor seeking a role in the major play of governance. For many years he served as the home minister and forced his way into being the deputy prime minister of the clueless Atal Vajpayee. For all the darts, deserved or not, hurled at the current home minister, Shivraj Patil, Advani was clearly the most incompetent incumbent.

On his watch as home minister and deputy prime minister, terrorists were freed and flown by external affairs minister Jaswant Singh in an abject surrender to the world’s worst thugs, the Taliban of Afghanistan. Under his watch also, Islamic terrorists attacked Parliament House with a view to taking Indian lawmakers hostage. And on and on the story goes. There were so many terrorist incidents, including the attack on the Akshardham temple in Gujarat, under his dispensation that when he gets up in Parliament to attack this government for being soft on terrorism, he comes off sounding like a hypocrite.

Remember, this man is so desperate that he has become discombobulated. He went to his native province of Sindh in Pakistan and was so "moved" that he lost all sense of bearing; he ended up calling Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, a secular leader. He forgot that Jinnah led the Muslim League and asked for a Pakistan as a home for the Muslims of British India. Jinnah's intractable stand caused the Partition and a loss of millions of lives and the largest transfer of populations the world has ever known to this day.

Sadly, Advani and his family were among the victims of Jinnah’s communal calculations. But then Jinnah was personally suave and secular and used the communal divide just to grab power. Advani understands that; he took out his rath yatra in the 1980s that left thousands dead in it‘s wake. Like Jinnah, Advani has cynically manipulated communal divisions in India in his no-holds-barred pursuit of power.

Between the ideologue Karat and the incompetent Advani, our country is being held hostage today. They have come together to try and topple India’s most liberal and reformist government. This is not the first time that India’s Hindu nationalists and communists have come together. They colluded in 1977 to support the Janata Party government of Morarji Desai and then in 1980 to support V P Singh, the feudal thakur who managed through sheer deviousness to become the prime minister for a few months.

Both experiments ended in disaster. Who can forget Madhu Dandavate, the finance minister in V P Singh’s ill-starred government? A man of great integrity, Dandavate was nevertheless an inexperienced person with no sense of the importance of his position. His first comment on assuming office in 1989, “The coffers are empty,” set the stage for the rapid decline of India into bankruptcy. The man who presided over the mortgage of India’s gold reserves to the Bank of England was Yashwant Sinha, an equally incompetent bureaucrat who served as finance minister after Dandavate. Sinha is today a leading light of the BJP, partly because he is among the few articulate people in the saffron combine.

The communists and the communalists joined forces in opposing the government over the nuclear deal. The communists’ objection is bigoted; they hate the US; the communalists’ opposition is purely opportunistic because they would rather have done the deal. Who can forget Jaswant Singh strutting around the place, dropping names: “My friend Strobe.” A senior British executive told me that he was struck by the number of times this obstreperous BJP minister dropped the name in a 15-minute conversation.

This is why, despite the desperate 11^th-hour drama of dubious BJP MPs smuggling currency into Parliament House, the Advani Karat pact was defeated convincingly on July 22. They are the forces of darkness and India has already awoken to that Tagorean heaven of freedom, “where the mind is without fear and the head held high.”

copyright rajiv desai 2008

Halfway Point for the UPA

The Way Things Are Going…

When the Congress Party came to power nearly three years ago, middle class hearts were gladdened. Having supported the Neanderthal Democratic Alliance led by the BJP, many were dismayed by the 1998 nuclear tests, following which India became a pariah of the international community. In 2004, the Congress-led UPA won a mandate. Tragically, the Congress think tank, which consisted largely of people who played the role of the palace guard for 10 Janpath, interpreted the result as a vote against the BJP’s “India Shining” campaign.

The Congress continues to believe that Indira Gandhi was their talisman with her garibi hatao and her 20-point program. They see in Sonia Gandhi glimpses of Indira, when really she represents a continuation of her husband Rajiv Gandhi’s vision of ushering India into the 21^st century. Many of us who worked closely with him remember when he met Jack Welch, the head of GE, who started the first BPO operation. The rest is history. Today, we are not just the world’s back office; we are solving complex business problems on the basis of our information technology expertise.

Yet the Congress rank-and-file believes that the socialist nostrum is the way forward. They now talk about “inclusive growth.” There can be no denying that the fruits of India’s screaming economic success, led by the BPO industry, should also include the poor and that the government must play an active role in ensuring that they are equally distributed. But that’s not why the BJP-led NDA coalition was defeated. The middle class that voted it into power in 1998 deserted them, frightened by the communal agenda and more so by their incompetence in governance.

The BJP sees things in black-and-white: they propagate that the Congress is an anti-Hindu party and seek votes by raising the basest communal passions that were tweaked by the Partition. The Congress also takes a similar zero-sum view and pits the rich against the poor, stoking the fires of class conflict. It is unable to shake the Soviet mindset of state control over all aspects of human endeavor.

Both parties tend to ignore the middle class. In the old days, the middle class was small and easily forgotten; today it is a substantial, creative force that chose to oust the communal die hards of the BJP. And this is the very group against which the Congress seems to have taken up cudgels, with its divisive agenda of class and caste differences. It has increased taxes, squeezed credit and supported irrational quotas based on caste.

Neither party has taken into account the aspirations of this fastest growing segment of the population. There is something abroad in the world; it’s called the India story. No political party seems to understand it. After Manmohan Singh, as finance minister, scrapped Soviet-style controls on private enterprise in 1991, the economy boomed. Unfortunately, the sacking of the Babri Mosque derailed the reforms the very next year. The economy began to drift and that saw the comprehensive defeat of the Congress in 1996 and the emergence of carpetbagger politicians, who slept in different political tents every night.

In 1996-1997, there were two weak Congress-backed governments under whose dispensation the bureaucracy was able to stall any further reforms. In 1997, when it was clear that the Gujral-Deve Gowda regime had run it course, the bureaucracy unleashed a series of demand management measures including a rise in interest rates that reined in the growing economy. The recession that followed lasted until 2003. In the interim, BJP-led coalitions came to power but proved unequal to task of reigning in the demand managers. It resorted to ad hoc measures such as the poorly designed national highway program. In the event, the BJP-led NDA crashed to defeat in the 2004 election.

For two years, the UPA government focused on setting things right. But the internal contradictions in the Congress and the nihilism of the Left saw its goodwill erode. The Congress is losing elections everywhere but its sycophantic leaders believe that Rahul Gandhi will deliver them from the morass of ignorance and intrigue that is sapping the party. Such complacency will cost them dearly.

from daily news and analysis april 18 2007

The Fall of India’s Berlin Wall

Comrades Sent Packing

"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last." (Martin Luther King).

Prakash Karat cuts a sorry figure today. His ideological posturing has cost the Left dearly. In 2004, his predecessor, Harkishan Singh Surjeet offered the UPA support and enabled the Congress-led coalition to form the government. In 2005, Karat replaced Surjeet and almost immediately the relationship between the Congress and the Left turned sour.

The dogmatic new general secretary unveiled a new era of hectoring the Congress and pushing an unreconstructed ideology that survives only in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Elsewhere in the world, the communists have been pushed to the fringes after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Between April 2005, when Karat replaced Surjeet, and Tuesday July 8, 2008, when he foolishly withdrew support to the UPA, the Indian Left enjoyed more influence over the Indian government than Israel has over various US governments. And they blew it.

Karat’s obduracy has painted the Left out of the reckoning. Beijing’s mandarins cannot be very pleased. This is abundantly clear from foreign secretary Menon’s statement that China will support the Indian application to the Nuclear Suppliers Group. His dour, immature brinkmanship cost the Left its invaluable influence over government policy. The current crisis is of Karat’s making; it has rocked the India story that the world believes is crucial both in geopolitics as well as in international economics.

What the commissars don’t understand is that the entire world in banking on India’s emergence from a regional to a global power. US President George W Bush was among the first to grasp the importance of the transformation. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says, the whole world is rooting for India to emerge from its poverty and its Third World victim mindset. Should India succeed, it will set an example for poor countries. It did that in the 1940s when the Indian National Congress won independence from Britain and presided over a relatively smooth transfer of power.

India’s economic transformation will send a more powerful signal to the world than China’s phenomenal growth. The only other large nation that succeeded in wiping out mass poverty is the United States more than two centuries ago. Sure, China has lifted more people out of poverty than India; at the same time, it has clamped down on political opposition. “An iron fist in a velvet glove,” a Chinese-American scholar once called it.

What China lacks is soft power. That’s what the Olympics exercise is all about. The fact is that without the fuzzier aspects of power, it will always be an outsider wanting in to the world milieu. On the other hand, between cricket, Bollywood, the increasingly competitive and aggressive business community and the English-speaking, highly accomplished emigrant community in the West, India has more global influence than China.

The charge that India’s communists are a Chinese fifth column is not lightly made. Many in the highest levels of government believe it to be true. Any rational explanation of Karat’s latest move must factor it in. If, we give Karat and his commissars the benefit of the doubt, the only conclusion left to draw is that they are irresponsible and dogmatic. Any which way, they do not deserve to have a veto on government policy. Either as Quislings or as juvenile ideologues, they should be banished to the fringes from whence they sprang.

So Karat has now wrought his masterpiece of absurd theatre. It reminds me of a scene from the acclaimed film, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” With the forces of the law closing in on them, the duo found themselves at the edge of a cliff with a river flowing furiously below. They had no option but to jump. Sundance was hesitant because he couldn’t swim. Butch told him not to worry “because the fall will kill you anyway.”

That’s the fate of the Left today. They have pulled the plug and find they are the ones who will be flushed down the drain. The Congress is a mighty political player with over a century’s experience. It ran circles around the juvenile commissars and emerged triumphant.

from the times of india july 14 2008