May—Or How I Learned to Stop Fearing and Love Rotis
Harebrained Hyperbole
“ देख देख देख तू यहाँ वहाँ ना फेंक …
देख देख देख तू यहाँ वहाँ ना फेंक …
देख फैले गी बीमारी होगा सबका बुरा हाल …
तो का करें भैया ?
गाड़ी वाला आया । घर से कचरा निकाल …”
All my life I have had a terse relationship with making rotis. My mother rarely made rotis and when she did, the rotis always tasted more healthy than necessary — so, for a long time even eating them was not a part of my life (this of course changed when Manjit da Dhaba became a recurring actor). Roti making seemed alien to me and it felt like too much effort. I remember for most of my youth claiming ‘rotis were created by the patriarchy to keep the women in the kitchen’ and therefore (consciously or unconsciously) “them-ing” this process that was integral to a large part of India.
Last year in Nagpur, I came to terms with my xenophobia. I was volunteering in the vipassana centre and got to be a part of an assembly line of automaton Daadis. They would take on different roles — one granny would make the dough into balls, 4 grannies would roll them out and then hand it to the next granny who would cook it and pass it on to the last gran who would expose it to an open flame so as to get a little puff in the roti, apply some ghee and set it aside, and so this tower of rotis would grow. They did this every day in the middle of the afternoon in the center of this large empty kitchen and they would make enough rotis to feed 200 people and they did this while sitting around and chatting. Half-way through the course, they asked me to help them with this and I was gripped with crazy fear of having to attempt this in front of these pros. When I finally got over this fear and helped them — with rolling out the dough — it turned out to be a really nice way to sit around with all the grannies, have a bit of a chat and learn this skill (I think they mostly wanted me around so they could have a laugh about my Hindi). And as with all xenophobia, being exposed to another story changed my own bias.
“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” — Chimamanda Ngozi
Anyhoo, since I came to Himachal, I have been psyching myself up about making these chapatis and putting them off, until this month, when I did. One very cold evening after the bells had finished their usual orchestra, I made my rotis in the tiny makeshift kitchen without proper equipment — I used chopsticks and a cutting board to roll out the dough. I was getting very hot and anxious in this tiny kitchen — and throughout the whole process. And they mostly came out ….pretty meh. They took on a whole array of identities: some turned out like Kaakra, other like Pooris and still others like Naan but amidst all of that, there were a few there which poofed up like real rotis. Since that first attempt, I have tried this again and I am getting better about it.
Other than the Roti debacle, I hiked up Triund and that was a lovely experience. After planning this for a long time and not actually leaving home early enough to do it, we managed to get to the top of Triund. It took us about five hours with all the stopping and chais. We saw about 200 goats on the way. I don’t think they are usually allowed to graze in these lands when it’s tourist season so they seemed pretty elated to be there, just like me.
It feels like bells are a large part of life in rural Himachal. At any given point, there is a chance you will hear bells. Most of the cows, goats, and dogs have little bells attached to them. Also every evening at 7 PM (and in the mornings at 7 am), this entire side of the hill goes into their puja areas and ring bells. It is like a relay race of bell ringing, starting from the house on top of the hill which hands the baton to the one below, all the way down to the bottom of the valley. Some of the bells are in rhythm, while others are far from it. Every evening, I wait hopefully as the ringing begins for that elusive bluemoon of a situation when the entire side of the mountains rings their bells sequentially and maybe it will sound like a little bell train leaving the station, slowly dopplering its way away from me and into oblivion.
There is quite a bit of work this month. I have been writing more grants to study governmental health expenditure. I helped write an article about Tripura’s health budget. I worked on creating a text prediction app with R and finished my data science course. I am trying to study COVID-related spending in different states. I am trying to keep up with my course on writing in the sciences and also trying to audit a course on epidemiology in public health.
I have documented here a few resources for studying epidemiology, bio-statistics and R (if anyone is particularly inclines).
- Data Wrangling With R
- Statistics In Plain English
- ‘Discovering Statistics Using R’
- ‘Introduction To Probability’
- Doing Bayesian Data Analysis
- Epidemiology: Beyond the basics
- Biostatistics for Biomedical research
I have almost completed 30 days of the #makefatcry challenge (I have 3 more days). I guess it was fun to do something every day for 15 minutes, but that young lady is a little too excitable for me. I might need to find someone calmer to work out with.
I have just finished reading this book by Robert Sapolsky called “Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst”. It is a very fun book and I really enjoy the way he delivers most facts in the book with considered arguments from different perspectives and loads of references. He also completes each chapter with a bulleted summary. The book has put together years of research on its central thesis on why we behave the way we do. It tracks the origin of a behavior all the way back to the origin of man. It also contains some really interesting insights on the different kinds of societies that existed early on and the cultures they shaped.
I have also bought 18 books on the kindle. I do not have an option of getting things delivered to himachal so these 18 books will be my life. There is a lot of VE Schwab and NK Jemisin on that list.
Spring is also finally here. It is presenting itself like some sort of Disney movie. It rained for a couple of weeks continuously and then suddenly wild strawberries, raspberries and prunes are fruiting all over on the sides of the road. All kinds of flowers are in bloom and insects are mostly hovering around our sticky bodies. Finally we are also getting better mangoes now..
With that the month ended and we started pondering about our life in this homestay. We conducted some basic cost-benefit analysis on some important factors (convenience, rent, ease of moving, inertia, other options, dangers of moving, salaries, and friends) after which we decided it was time to pack up and move to somewhere completely new….stay tuned.
(This is mostly written so I can go back and look at these photo journals and stories in a few years as I did recently about my notes from the Christmas before last. In line with that, the note starts with the lyrics from the very very catchy song that the garbage truck would play every morning.)
Books read this month
Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst — Robert Sapolsky
