Your best charitable contribution will replenish itself.

Last week I spotted a tweet Looking for donors of any blood group to provide replenishment blood to the TATA Memorial Hospital blood bank for a Cancer patient currently undergoing treatment there.
The tweet mentioned a phone number which I called. The lady Asked me to come to the hospital the next day where she would meet me so that the blood bank could be provided details of the patient concerned.
At the appointed time, I reached the blood bank and contacted the lady. Instead of waiting for her to arrive, I went through the short and painless process, to which I am no stranger, having been a regular donor for the last 10 years.
She had arrived while I was going through the donation and walked up to me soon as e needle came off.
The young lady, just 24, was the patient herself. She is undergoing her second round of chemotherapy. She came down just to thank the stranger who had walked in to Donate on her behalf.
Then as I was walking out of the hospital I saw dozens of patients, their heads having lost hairs under the ravaging effects of chemotherapy, some just toddlers of 2 or 3.
Blood can only be manufactured by one factory, the human body. Thankfully, there are at least 4 billion such factories that are old and fit enough to share some of their production, and days after they've shared it, it will replenish itself, with no residual I'll effect.
Go on, become a blood donor. There are thousands out there who need you to.

Macaroni with Fennel, Pancetta and Mushrooms

Over the last ten years, a few vegetable stalls in different fresh produce markets across Mumbai (and every other major metropolis in our India that is Bharat) have begun sourcing and stocking ‘foreign’ ingredients. Ranging from herbs- if you sing parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, they will offer you all four; to fruit- kiwi, dragon fruit, rambutan

Rambutan

, Granny Smith apples, Thai sweet tamarind; through vegetables specific to cuisines- Thai brinjal, galangal, basil, kaffir lime, kaffir lime leaves; Pakchoy and Inoki Mushrooms for those keen on the Orient; or cherry tomatoes, new potatoes, assorted mushrooms, wide range of lettuce, arugula (rocket) if you are planning on cooking European style.
A conspicuous absentee in this delightful and distinguished line-up, at least for me, was the fragrant white bulb of the herb Foeniculum Vulgare, the fennel

Fennel bulb

. It is

scarcely foreign. No Indian home will be complete without fennel seed: saunf, to be used by turns as post-meal mouth freshener, cooking ingredient (for instance as one of Bengal’s Paanch Foran) or home remedy, particularly for disorderly stomachs. And yet. Having enjoyed its sweet, aromatic character in soups, sauces and salads while travelling in foreign parts, and more recently even in Swadesh, I’d long hoped for a chance to experiment with it at home. Which finally happened yesterday at a wonderful new food shop in Parel’s Palladium Mall.

The protagonist having been identified, a quick casting call around the refrigerator and the provisions cupboard brought together the supporting cast and we were ready to roll. Without further ado, here’s the recipe that emerged:
Preparation time: 20 minutes (but I’m slow and you might get it done quicker)
Cooking time: 20 minutes (I try to slow cook everything)
Ingredients:
Fennel: 1 large bulb (trim and retain a fourth of the shoots too)
Pancetta (or other spicy Italian sausage, I just had this at home): 100 g

(Shakaharis will evidently leave this out and could consider adding a ½ tsp each of ground nutmeg, cinnamon and clove to add back some spice and body)
Mushrooms: 200 g (I had a fresh mushroom packet but you can reconstitute and equivalent quantity of mixed wild mushrooms and will be rewarded with more taste+ the water you reconstitute them in works very well as stock)
Spinach- good old Palak is perfect: 1 bunch
Onions: 2-3 medium sized
Garlic: I used half a medium sized bulb but this is a matter of taste
Chicken or veg stock: 2 cups (but feel free just to use hot water, the ingredients are flavourful enough even without this)
Oil: I keep looking for interesting olive oils and this recipe used a Portuguese Extra-Virgin but I would as happily use a refined sunflower or kardi or rice bran oil too
Chop onion. Crush garlic. I do not chop garlic. Somehow, a bit of pounding in the mortar and pestle gets the essential oils of this bulb flowing like chopping never can. When I’m lazy, which is most times, I don’t even bother to peel it. The bulb goes in, chhilka and all. Trust me, no one will know in the end. Finely chop fennel bulb and about 6 inches of the lovely green shoots attached. Slice mushrooms vertically. This is really a matter of the visual aesthetics. I just like mushrooms look mushroom shaped in the finished prep but if you want to cube them, be my guest. Never, EVER julienne a mushroom. You want it show up as a taste bomb in every other morsel, not become a part of the cosmic background radiation. Finely chop pancetta. I sliced it and then cut it up with kitchen scissors. Tear the palak leaves by hand just removing the hard, whitish stalks at the bottom.
Put big pot of salted water to boil for the pasta. Time to start on the sauce on the other burner. Use a heavy bottomed, lidded deep pan. Pour in a generous splash of oil and immediately add the crushed garlic. Stir until the garlic just begins to sputter. Toss in the chopped pancetta and, about a minute later, the onion. Cover and let rest for a 2-3 minutes. Good quality non-stick heavy bottomed pans will ensure the ingredients don’t stick and burn, just start cooking nicely. When the onion turns kind of translucent, add the fennel and about a half of its chopped shoots. The rest will be required later. Give the whole lot a vigorous stirring and cover. When you uncover the next time, your kitchen should be filled with a blast of richly aromatic steam that will announce your plans to the gharbaar and get their salivary glands firing. By now your cook-pot water should be boiling and you need to drop the pasta in- you know the drill. Now add the ‘shrooms, which will cook in another 3-4 minutes. Now pour in stock, or plain old hot water. Another couple minutes and toss in the spinach. The idea is for it just to wilt into the sauce and this will take no more than 2 minutes, after all by this time, sauce is boiling and bubbling enough to please the most fussy witch from Macbeth or Hogwarts.
Drain pasta preserving half a cup of water to add to sauce if it has thickened too much. Place in serving dish, then pour over your fragrant sauce. Dress with sprinkling of fennel shoot and as much grated Parmesan as you dare. Buon appetito!

Courage? Or cowardice?

As an émigré into Bangalore, you are advised that the city works on the creed “Adjust Madi” : please adjust. You will, it suggests, face various inconveniences from time to time. It is best in all such situations to make allowances for them and move on. Resistance, as the Borg Queen famously put it in Star Trek, is futile. Of course, while Bangalore actually acknowledges it, is this not true for all of us all over India?

You are denied your space to cross at a designated zebra crossing. You adjust. A chap in the car in front of you opens the door only to explosively discharge a litre of glutinous red tobacco spittle. You adjust. A man, claiming that he is in a hurry, jumps into the queue ahead of you at a Railway Booking Counter. You adjust. The municipal authority digs up every square inch of motorable road and walkable footpath in your city. You adjust. Neighbours in the adjoining bungalow use a high power hose connected directly to the main water supply conduit to wash their car. And the driveway. You adjust.

We all adjust. And move on. After some time, even the bile stops to rise. After all, we are like that only. No?

It is India’s historic genius to be the ultimate assimilative civilization. For countless centuries invading hordes entered this country to plunder her riches and carry them back home. Most times, they never went back. Everybody adjusted and before long, disappeared into the rich broth called India. A new gene pool was added to the melting pot and everyone was the better off for it.

Are these two phenomena equivalent? Do they merely represent aspects of an underlying willingness, even eagerness, to accommodate?

Great civilisations share a common desire to define and codify rules of conduct. The finest go further and identify the ethical principles that underlie such rules. Whether Hammurabi of Babylon or Moses of Canaan, our ancient priest king Manu or Quetzalcoatl of the Aztec pantheon, they all became known as lawgivers, arbiters of right and wrong for their societies. Without exception, all of them demanded that their followers be steadfast in upholding the right, even at cost to their own life and limb. Krishna’s revelation of the Gita to Arjun at the battlefield of Kurukshetra is, above all else, a stirring exhortation to uphold Dharma, the righteous way. Indeed, righteousness held a lofty place among the virtues.

When India assimilated, the new incumbents accepted the norms and mores of their host society. Often, they enhanced it. Remember the story of the Zoroastrians who landed at Sanjan in Gujarat, about a thousand years back, telling the King Jadav Rana that they would be as sugar to the milk that was the kingdom? Or the Sufic spiritual legacy India received from Persian and Arab mystics who made this country their ‘Karmabhoomi’? Assimilation, unlike ‘adjustment’ is certainly not passivity.

Right then, let us return briefly to examples of ‘adjust madi’ that we reviewed a few paras back. Could you have told the drivers of the vehicles sitting astride the pedestrian crossing that they had violated the stop line and were committing a brazen traffic offence? Could you have written to the Municipal Commissioner seeking explanation of the craters that we pass for roads and footpaths? Could you have rung your neighbour’s bell and asked him to stop such criminal waste of water?
You could have, but you didn’t. You adjusted, walked on and soon enough, forgot all about it.

There was nothing virtuous about this indifference. You were scarcely beyond the occasional misdemeanour yourself. You tossed empty brown paper bags out of your own car window. You regularly drove the wrong way up a one way; after all it was an extra 1 km if you followed all the no entry signs. Your DDA flat now had an extra room after you covered over the balcony and settled the issue amicably with the local building inspector. When you were at the receiving end of the indignities that these everyday adjustments engendered, you almost saw yourself as virtuous, for having the stoicism to deal with them without demur.

Don’t kid yourself. That wasn’t stoicism, or any virtue of any sort. It was an acknowledgement of your own complicity. And assuming that you were one of the vanishing few whose escutcheon remains untarnished, your apathy was merely a sign of cowardice, not courage under fire. Most times of course it was the devastating combination of both; you were a complicit coward.

Civilisational transformation is, in Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology, a tipping point phenomenon. A lot of small and individually ineffectual changes need to accumulate across millions of people and situations for the change to take effect and transform a civilisation. This change cannot be legislated. When you walk about in the great cities of the East or West, the litter free pavements, well maintained public utilities and encroachment free parks and gardens don’t speak only of strict policing and efficient municipal administration. They speak, in at least equal measure, of a community conscious of, and actively practicing, its civic responsibilities.

Several studies show that this pays real economic dividends. When people believe that other people in their community will act within a prescribed set of norms, they create a trust engine that becomes a huge force multiplier for the entire society. Canada is a great beneficiary of this, as are the Scandinavian countries.

Isn’t it possible for us to see that the ‘adjust’ we do now is unjust?

If you must adjust, do it in a manner that will lead to more, not less civic behaviour.