Pongalo Pongal

It was a sudden decision to try making Sakkara Pongal to celebrate the festival of Pongal. A quick chat with mom and an online recipe made me understand that I did not have the key ingredients (cashew nut, raisins etc) with me. But I had decided to go ahead and make whatever I could. The initial part of keeping rice with water and milk was too simple. Then came the tough part - powdering jaggery. With the rule in this country that not much of sound should come from the apartments, breaking jaggery with a mallet was not the best of options. Still I started doing it till I felt like I was hearing shrieks from the below apartment. Then sprung the ideas of cutting the jaggery with knife, using a can opener to crush the smaller pieces, using the fruit juicer etc. Ideas came and ideas went, and so did 1.5 hours. Tired of the effort I chucked the process and used whatever small amount of jaggery powder I could make till then. According to the recipe I was supposed to put 3 cups of jaggery for 1 cup of rice. Well, I had put half a cup of jaggery for 2 cups of rice. Hmmm, too much sweet is bad for health I added rice to the jaggery paste and then added some ghee and cloves. Voila, sweet pongal was ready. Just that it was too solid to be called pongal and had too less jaggery to be called sweet. Anyways, I did not indulge in finding a new name for my latest invention.

My apartment mate liked it and so did I. The sweetness was less but I preferred it that way. The thing that took 2 hours to prepare was over in 15 minutes. Yep, satisfaction!

Bhasky reminded me of the Pongal that we celebrated 3 years back in Indore. Nostalgia -> http://sbhaskar.blogspot.com/2005/01/happy-pongal.html

Multicultural Adaptability

Most IT folks from India travelling abroad for the first time would have had the experience of attending some kind of course to make them aware of the cultural diversity between countries and help them adapt to the new culture. It is quite interesting to note that even people in US get trained to appreciate the culture of the Desi folks they would be working with. A colleague of mine once explained how the course helped him in understanding certain things about India and Indians. It was pretty nice except for few things that he said that were not applicable to India. Seems his instructor told him that whenever he had to eat in an Indian's home then he had to leave some food unconsumed in the plate to indicate that he was full and satisfied. I have always known the Indian etiquette to make a person complete his food in entirety. In my first company there was a manager who used to tell me, "In a country where there is a pocket of people not having enough food to keep them active, wasting food should be made a criminal offense". Not that I waste anything, but then I was managing the social welfare committee of the organization and this dialogue came while discussing about the possibility of transporting the unused food in our cafeteria.

Coming back to the multicultural training given to the US people, some of my colleagues recently attended one of those trainings. I was very curious on what they learnt about India and enquired about it. I shocked to hear, "If we had not heard about India from you, then we would have believed all of what the trainer said". Seems the trainer was neither a person from India who would know the country, nor an American who would better appreciate the cultural difference. The trainer had showed some clips of India, all from the places exhibiting poverty. Just few weeks back I had shown my colleagues my presentation on India that we presented in a local school. After watching the natural splendour in my presentation, they were bewildered at the pictures shown to them in the training. I was heartened to hear from them that they understand that every country in the world has places with poverty. I was even more heartened to hear them appreciate the respect given to elders in India. A colleague said, "I give respect to elders, but am still instantaneous in my replies to them. May be if I had followed your culture, I would be more organized and thoughtful over my words". Definitely a different way of looking at things.

Most of my colleagues understood that they cannot generalize any set of people. A simple example quoted by them was the difference between the people in the east coast and west coast of US. Everyone's different, and my colleagues have a better understanding probably because my team has had people from the east, west and south of India. They recognize each of us to be a different kind of person, and I recognize them the same way.