La Fondue

“Pieces of bread dipped in a warm combination of cheese mixed with garlic; Cajun sause and spices for dinner and three heaps of pieces of cake; chocolates; strawberries; marsh-mellows etc. dipped in melted chocolate for dessert.”

Today, we took mom and dad to La Fondue. Although, a well heard name and vegetarian, Fondue pretty much remains arcane and totally an unvisited territory by Indian Parents on their visits to USA. We had promised mom and dad an interesting and rich experience and so we took them to all the places- irrespective of whether they found the food good or not. I am glad (and so are they) that we could introduce them to as many cultures as can be possible.

We have tried Persian, Tex-Mex, Ethiopian and today…swiss food i.e., fondue.

When we said Fondue, my mom was thinking “fudge” so she thought everything would be sweet. She lost 20% of her excitement when we told her that the only thing that would be sweet is the dessert. Dad was worried that it would have beef or something similar and we cleared it for him that it’s pure vegetarian. I winced a bit when he poured wine and beer in our fondue pots because my dad cannot tolerate to be in the same vicinity as liquor but I guess they just wanted to go with the flow so that went all fine.

After the dinner I thought that I’d even pee cheese. Gosh!! I think one can afford it like once every 6 months or something- health wise. Extremely rich experience though.

Today’s Hurdle: Family matter! Mom dragged me to her shopping spree. Spent the entire day looking for clothes and other stuff.

What did I do: Ate Fondue…1000 calories in every morsel.

Let ‘Newton’ be…

You know what made me fall in love with Physics? The three equations of motion. If one wants to understand the beauty that lies in a mathematical equation the easiest way is to look at these three.

I am more than half way through the book “A Journey through Genius: The great mathematical theorems” by William Dunham. He has just finished talking about a man who gave these three equations- the man poked needles through his eyes for experiments; refrained from publishing his most cherished work in the mathematical history, Calculus, to shun criticism; secretly solved the problem of finding the path between the two points that took the shortest time and went through neurosis because of the chemistry experiments that he did in his house…

When do you stop talking about a man like this- how do you bring yourself to a conclusion of a life that did the work of several lives…

I love his famous epitaph by Alexander Pope:

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said ‘Let Newton be’ and all was light.”

Yesterday’s Hurdle: Couldn’t sleep well. Had some problem with my code that I needed to fix asap.

What did I do: Just threw away pen and paper and decided that it’s pointless to just keep thinking on the problem from one perspective. The best way to crack it is to stop thinking about it for a while. Picked up my swimming gear and just went for a swim.

It’s amazing- did 40 lapse- 20 rounds overall. But that was not the achievement. The achievement was that I could swim continuously 10 lapse at a time. You know… you see some people who take up the corner lane and whenever you see them they are always in the middle of turning a round- I am becoming one of those. hehe..

The Call of the Arteries

Today we introduced the “people who belong to a country with healthiest food habits” to the food “eaten by the people with worst health habits” – we took mom and dad to Carrows. For those of you who don’t know what Carrows is then let me tell you that it’s one of the chains of American Diners.

Our food was some or the other combination of potatoes, eggs, cheese and meat(can you feel my heart losing its enthusiasm towards life already?). There was a sautead (or probably boiled), extremely tasteless & insignificant heap of vegetables on the side in every dish for people above 55 (Senior Citizen menu). For mom and dad it was a new thing and for us it was something to be done ocassionally- but for an average American- THIS IS FOOD!!

It’s weird that being an Indian I realized that there’s no variety in American cuisine (if you’d like to call it a cuisine…because there’s no art in making everything taste like boiled paper or maybe there is) and it’s absolutely pathetic when it comes to nutrition.

When you go to an average Indian restaurant- in a normal thali you get- Dal(class A protien); a cooked vegetable(iron; roughage; vitamins etc. depending on the veggie); roti (roughage; b-complex; carbs); some green veggie (iron; chlorophyll) and in the end- rice(carbohydrtaes; and niacin).

If you compare the two kinds of food- you will realize that Indian food has almost every nutrition that we, as humans, need.

Considering this, even an average or a below middle class Indian eats better food than an American of any financial status. No wonder obesity is becoming an endemic in America. Somehow, the most developed nation in the world could not develop its food so that its people eat healthy or get into a habit of a normal & complete diet.

Maybe India, being the spice queen of the world, did develop better tastes- because if you want to eat healthy in America- then it’s soups and salads which after a thousand variations just remain and taste like….arrr….boring soups and salads.

Today’s Hurdle: Very bad day health wise- ended up eating mega skillet at Carrows and couldn’t work out either. Will have to make up tomorrow.

What did I do: Made a resolution to drink enormous amounts of water and get up a bit earlier like 9ish. Wanna get back to the routine of running in the day and swimming in the evening.

Athena’s Notebook

Ceaseless depth of ice

and blue corners of the sky.

A saucer full of death,

and a life to live by.

Hey guys!! This is my new blog. I am still in the sketching mode…so…until you don’t start finding something interesting here you can blast my old blog:

www.ashtan.blogspot.com