Shakshuquiche

Shakshuka is a dish which Sunny and Meeta taught us: They had learnt it from an Israeli friend. Essentially, you poach eggs on a mush of cooked tomatoes, onion, garlic and herbs and green chillies.

Shakshuquiche is our variation which was tried out yesterday for tiffin.

Recipe:
For the pastry: 2/3 cup til oil, 2/3 cup water, salt, 2 cups whole wheat flour.
Briskly mix oil, water and salt. Add the flour and quickly mix with your fingertips into a dough. Keep aside for a couple of minutes. Then line your pastry dish (bottom and wall) with the dough, pressing and spreading with your fingertips.

For the filling: 4 or 5 tomatoes, 1 large onion, 5 cloves of garlic, coriander leaves, 4 tablespoons of milk, salt and pepper, 4 eggs. (We left out the green chillies because of the kids, and added milk instead)
Chop all the vegetables. Add salt and pepper and put it on the pastry. Add the milk. Make four wells in the mixture, and break an egg into each well. Bake for 50 minutes at 180 C. (In the solar cooker, it will take three hours).

Cheers!

Self-Reliance

Chinnathambi, Arunachalam and Thenan just called us to share some honey which they had extracted from a hive under some rocks, whilst clearing part of our land. Talking to them, looking at how they function, I wonder about their lives and the lives of the next generation of villagers which seem to be headed in a "townu" direction.

They are responsible for every facet of their lives: We seem to have passed on the responsibility for many (important) things to institutions.
They build their own houses: We delegate that to architects, contractors, masons and "coolie aal".
Their babies grow up in their grandparents' laps: Ours, increasingly, go to creches
They educate their kids: We pass that work on to schools.
They grow their own food, and have various remedies for many common ailments: We buy food (and, increasingly nowadays precooked or semi-cooked food), and pass the responsibility of our health onto hospitals.
They are born at home and die at home. Increasingly many people in towns are born and die in hospitals.

But, now, many of the next generation, are passing on the responsibilities:
From their panchayats to the police station and the courts
From their medicine men to the hospitals
From their families to the hired mason and carpenter
From themselves to the government schools.

Increasingly youngsters are getting alienated from their culture. They are moving from a culture of self-reliance to a culture based on money.

If, like us, they "sublet" the important work of Roti Kapda aur Makaan, what will occupy them? What occupies us?

One thing that I need to learn is to extract honey from a hive, for the next lot of workers I hire may not be able to do that!

Linux

Our house has become a "Linux household" in the last couple of months, and the boys have been furiously drawing stuff, apart from working on the computer. Sketches of Linus Torvalds and Linux-related themes are all over the house. Varun Baba even has Tux (the penguin) with the features of Linus on one of his drawings (the second picture)

We have had a phone for two years now, a computer for a year and a half, and an internet connection for just under a year. For the last two months we have been using a Linux OS : Ubuntu. So we are newbies and what I write will be naive in parts. I would urge all those who read this post to comment on what I have written and what I haven't, on your usage or non-usage of Linux/Ubuntu/FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software).

To connect to the Internet using Ubuntu was an issue and Badri Baba and I ("with a little bit of help from our friends") managed to do it after a week or so of frustration. Once online, we mucked around and over time completely stopped using Windows. With the evangelism of the new convert, I would urge all of you to try Ubuntu in a separate partition if you do not want to get rid of Windows. The whole feel is great from the Desktop backgrounds and Screen savers to the fact that there are no virus issues.

Q1: Why does Linux not have virus issues?
Q2: Relatedly, why are there viruses at all? Is it criminals who are trying to steal credit card details or your phone number or what-have-you; or is it "hackers" doing it for a lark?

The philosophy behind the Open Source movement seems sound to me. Sharing means that everyone who uses Linux is a potential contributor to it, whereas Proprietary Software means that the people who work on it are a small fraction of the people who use it.

But how is a company like Canonical (which "makes" Ubuntu) financially viable? You can download Ubuntu for free, you can even ask for an installation CD, and they will mail you one for free. Obviously I am missing something, but I have to ask, with Badri Baba, " I know how Microsoft makes money, but how does Canonical make money?"

A Requiem for Ramasamy

I went into Thekambattu, one morning, last week, to "check my mail" (at the Post Office) and was passing the time of the day with Vellian, when the "Oppari" wailing started on the loudspeaker.

Vellian told me that Ramasamy, who had broken stones to build our house, was dead. He had committed suicide by drinking insecticide in his field the previous afternoon, and was found dead later that evening.

There was no kaatu prachanai (Land trouble: i.e. boundary disputes with his brothers or cousins) or veetu prachanai (House trouble: i.e. problems between husband and wife), so everyone's thoughts turned to kaasu prachanai (Money trouble). He seemed well-off, with regular work in Karumandurai, his son having passed his Class 10 exam and working as a watchman at the Sun Hatcheries, and of course, all his fields well looked after.

But.... Some debt somewhere? Some moneylender squeezing him? He didn't know which way to turn... A pleasant, rather shy man, driven to the last desperate "solution"... Now, he is one more in the endless statistic of farmer suicides. Actually he is saved that last ignominy, since in these parts, they do not automatically involve the police in their affairs.

I saw "him" that morning, waiting for all the clan to come and pay their last respects. The entire village, like me, was in a state of shock at his untimely and unexpected death. That night there was a terrific thunderstorm, and his ashes would have mingled with his fields.

I'll end this with some lines from Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay;
Princes and Lords may flourish, or may fade :
A breath can make them, as a breath has made.
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

Health Food

At the shandy, on Saturday, I was treated to a cup of tea by an old man who rode pillion behind me to Karumandurai. Then, I got into a conversation with Shiva, my kaaikaran (vegetable vendor).

He very sweetly warned me about the danger to children of consuming "Gold Winner" (the most common packeted refined oil we get hereabouts) . His doctor had told him that all this refined oil was made for adults who need to worry about cholesterol and high blood pressure and so forth. Children need all the stuff that is "refined out" of the oil.

This is something we intuitively were aware of, but it was heartening that "knowledge" like this reaches people like Shiva and the tea-kadais of Karumandurai. His response was to start buying unrefined groundnut oil for his granddaughter and to add crushed peanuts to her diet.

Moreover, harking back to the good old days, he was also organising to get from Aandi , "mettukaatu nellu" (highland paddy) which is grown organically, and rainfed; not in pumped-up standing water with tons of chemical inputs.

We have grown this rice on our land for a few years, until unavailability of labour at the crucial planting time, and the rat menace forced us to give it up. We (and perhaps some of you reading this!) can attest to the awesome taste. We got our paddy mill-ground, alas, but hand-pounded mettukaatu rice would be impossible to beat for taste and nutritive value!

Related to this, I see the Organic certification industry as another "middleman/broker" business which does not help small farmers
After all, Shiva can buy mettukaatu nellu from Aandi because he knows Aandi, Aandi's fields and mettukaatu nellu. Aandi and millions of small farmers like him can not afford certification which is, as far as I can see, an urban-consumer-based affair (dare I say racket?)