When The Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...

Mor Kuzhambu

Whoa! What's this mysterious sounding word. This is nothing but a South Indian sambar made from curds. What a paradox! Sambar and curds getting combined. Yeps! That's the speciality of this item. It was Saturday evening at 6 o' clock. The baays in my room got ready to experiment on yet another item. Oh! I had a sound sleep for an hour and as I got up, I was smacking my lips seeing the dish. We laid down the matress on the carpet, the mor kuzhambu and aloo curry. One of my roommates got up to take the container of yoghurt from the refrigerator. On seeing the brand of yoghurt, I let out a scream. We can't have the curds. It has gelatin. So, I told them, we won't have the curds today. So, my roommate gave out an equally loud scream...In that case, we can't have the kuzhambu too! Then it struck us what had happened. There was curds in the kuzhambu. For a moment all of us were caught on the wrong foot. Here we have a mouth watering dish right in front of us but just not in the position to taste it. So, we decided to give away the dish to our non-vegetarian counterparts in the apartment below. They were delighted to have it.

So, we had to do with some of the podis that we had got and the mor kuzhambu transformed into nil-kuzhambu. But we also thanked our stars in just missing out on testing the sample of gelatin unknowingly.

The bottom line is being a vegetarian is fine but to practise it real hard is indeed real hard. I just hope we live upto the name of vegetarians knowingly (of course) as well as unknowingly.

PS : If anybody wants the recipe of this item, get in touch with me :-)

Comments

  1. He he.. That was amazing. Aama, do you know that Gelatin is present in icecreams? Dont tell me you'd give up on eating icecreams!!! Appadi partha, milk is an animal product. Veggies Thayir saadham saapida koodathu!!Come on maaaaaaaaaan :P

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  2. that comment is incorrect. gelatin is not an ingredient of icecreams that i am aware of. on the other hand, capsules contain gelatin (and that cannot be helped!).

    - s.b.

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  3. SB: Yeah, there are certain things that cannot be avoided. Nothing much that can be done about it!!!

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