Best served......Launched!

Flotation is a curious thing, somethings about it well just don't ...sink in.
Things that don't float for example; my G I JOE SIGMA 6 Mission Ocean Attack Figure, several brands of rubber slippers that fraudulently claim to be "floaters", and Jack from that movie with the ship and the lady's heart that insists on going on.
Things that do; my large orange swimming trunks (especially when liberated from my person a result of an attempted one-half somersault dive), and as luck would have it ELDEMER!
Yup, with one final collective heave and a toddy enriched grunt on the 15th of January 2006, our 3 tonne backyard ornament became as weightless as a rubber duckie.
From an out of context piece of architecture to a sublime form willed upon by sea and wind, anything but inanimate even in the placid waters, meeting each crest and gust with a feline eagerness to break moorings and spread-eagle.
I know now why every one claps furiously when the space shuttle is launched, there is little else to do when the mind orders you to fly!!

Anyway, garlanded by public demand to inspire solemn thoughts; as, the Dalai Lama of Tibet; the Moogum of M'bwango; the temple of Apes in Ceylon; the Crocodile, the Cat and the Onion of ancient Egypt; the Mufti of Moosh; the hair of the dog that bit Noah, etc, Eldemer, survived her first test of structural integrity with coconuts loosing the battle between ship's bow and coconut.
Coconuts replacing the traditional bottle of Champagne, because we are in Kerala and Champagne costs money and money does not grow on trees, but coconuts do.

Ship christenings in the days of the Vikings were marked by the spilling of blood, human sacrifices and incantations by high priests to appease the gods.
During the Middle Ages, papal representatives having found more pressing uses for human sacrifice agreed that a libation of wine – offered as the vessel hit the water – is just about as good a substitute for the earlier blood sacrifice. And coconut milk being one of the many liquids that serve the Keralites in place of state religion is a worthy replacement as well.

For more than a century, the tradition throughout the world has been that women christen ships. A resource that our project has marked dearth of. The job hence falling to the able humerus-es of Mrs. Dominique Radhakrishnan and Mrs. Karen Nejedly; what with our boat having 200% of the usual manifest of hulls and all.

All in all a day that couldn't have gone better and a day that couldn't have been been hotter, a shipload of people that could not be happier or sweatier and the excitement is only just beginning.

Punni-mal!

The city of Ernakulam is beginning to look up. A casual survey while driving from one place, the name I can't remember to another I can't pronounce. Revealed puns that would make any connoisseur of really really bad jokes, such as myself proud!























The picture below required calesthenics on the foot board of a Kerala private bus that any body with a windage or inertia greater than my own is ill advised from attempting. But, it had to be taken, for a particular friend, you know who you are!

There was a another one a few weeks later which said," Rang de buns and tea" which you would appreciate as well.

I know this is something I have been holding back. It is information that I can’t withhold forever, it is bound to come out sooner or later and it might as well come from me. Yes….
VH1 is channel 42 on the television here.
It was the first thing I checked and as a frontier reporter I can assure fellow VH1-o-philes that in the deepest darkest parts of Kerala; steeped in ritual, coconut oil and practically every know form of banana based comestible. You will find the briny warm nimbus of pre-packaged 14 minute segments of really awesome music!

On the same subject, the show I was watching was “VH1 classic” and while I was wondering if the only way to get oneself out of seventies polyester pants was by squeezing yourself out of them like toothpaste. There was a commercial break and then the show returned with unmistakable Casio keyboard on steroids beginning of a “Spice Girls” song. I think it is called “Spice up your life!”

I remember losing my appetite as a food-eating machine of a teenager to that song. So, I will leave you with a selected portion near paragraph 1 and the definition of “classic” from the dictionary that comes free with every 5 Kg bag of Surf Excel and leave you desperately clutching at an analogy that fits.

Spice Girls - Spice Up Your Life Lyrics
La La La La La La La La La
La La La La La La La
La La La La La La La La La
La La La La La La La

Yellow Man In Timbucktoo
Colour For Both Me And You
Kung Fu Fighting Dancing Queen
Tribal Spaceman And All That's Inbetween

Colours Of The World
Spice Up Your Life
Every Boy And Every Girl
Spice Up Your Life
People Of The World
Spice Up Your Life
Aahh

La La La La La La La La La
La La La La La La La
La La La La La La La La La
La La La La La La La

clas·sic (kl s k)
adj.

Belonging to the highest rank or class.
Having lasting significance or worth; enduring. :a classic piece of research.
Of or characteristic of the literature, art, and culture of ancient Greece and Rome; classical.

All rise!... and a little bit Sambar.

Much like most South Indian families, all of us including the German Shepherd were brought up on rice.

I understand it's wondrous versatility. A meal that did not have an allotropic modification of good clean white rice was certainly not satisfactory and generally proscribed. I remember a particular "very tamilian" friend of mine who after finishing off 200% of a KFC zinger burger meal, four slices of pizza and two softee ice-cream units. (A bangalorean will recognise that we were on Brigade road, walking downhill from MG road. )

Went home that evening to elicit genuine pity from his mother that he had survived all afternoon on nothing but bread.
Rice is bankable currency. It's value dearer than mere nutrition.

The group that I live with takes their eating seriously. A genuine reason for gripe amongst most of the crew at the end of the first week was that motivation was impossible to muster when they were being subjected to the punitive encumbrance of dealing with the rice available in Kerala.

"Sir, What kind of rice it is here! Full quarter inch outer-dia.!"

By the miracle of modern day lorry technology an emergency ration of high quality rice worthy of a Bengalooroo-ean was imported from back home. When I say emergency ration I don't mean survival packets like the Cadburys, Fruit and Nut gift pack I got shipped to myself by Fabmall.com; but those gigantic bags of food that find themselves hurtling out of B-52 bombers at small impoverished famine stricken African nations.

I am informed that the the first consignment of 30 kilograms; the approximate weight of the treasury of the small impoverished famine stricken African nation, was consumed in all of ten days at one meal a day. So if one were to work out the energetics of our consumption, assuming the thermodynamic calorific value of cooked rice at, 611Kcal/100gm, then the crew is burning an astounding 8125 watt-hours a day just to survive! Now I am not sure but fairly certain that is more than the power generation capacity of any small impoverished famine stricken African nation.
You know you are leading a life of decadence when a East Somalian wall socket can't sustain you.

Well anyway, I am also mildly amused by the tacit feudal order that seems to have established itself at the dinner table. You have the imperial bourgeois class of one, V. Dhamodaran, executor of the funding requirements of all and sundry. Whose monetary munificence determines if one gets 7 parottas or 12 for breakfast, or if one is scheduled to the kerala "quarter inch" rice or treated to the "“sona masoori". The rest of the crew is nested around his omnipotence in a hive like system. It is efficient and it ensures everybody gets some sambar when they need it.
And is - some would argue- exactly what is needed in most small impoverished famine stricken African nations.

Home bon homie

So I am sharing accommodation with a droll bunch of tradesmen, a list inclusive of, but not exclusive to V Dhamodaran, S/O K. Venugopal Naidu, Suresh Kumar, S/O Divakaran Nair, C.K. Mohanan, S/O C. Kunjunni
N. Gopal, S/O Nanjunda Swamy, I. Charles Paul, S/O Irudhaya Nadhan, T, Puttaswamy, S/O D. Thimmiah
Narayana Swamy, S/O Munni Thimmiah, V. Kannan, S/O Venkatraman, L. Muthu, S/O Lakshmana Achary and
K. O. Francis, S/O K. O. Ouseph

Which makes me the only "homie" whose nightly undress does not include mundu snapping, (possibly to eject bandicoots that might have been trapped within.) I am also; it turns out a source of infinite hilarity. Everything from my classification of the chocobar as a revered food group, interoperable with any square meal. To the fact that I claim ownership to a pair of pyjamas with very dignified business suit like pockets sewn onto them.

But, it isn’t just me. The group is a techni-coloured melee of characters, demeanours, motivations and burping sounds.

I think the very fact that a group this disparate is able to survive living together is testament to how all encompassing this project has become to us, not to mention how woven in to the enigma of its figure-head we are. It is what binds us unites us. It is always the reason we all wake up, the reason altercations have to be mollified and the stuff that fills the awkward silences.

Corpus Alienum

For me moving to Kerala was a start I was eager to make. I was eager to assimilate and be assimilated. But, it is the ridiculous stuff that really lets you know you’re still an outsider. A damn khaki shorts wearin’ picture takin’ tourist.
Like the other day, we had prawn curry on the menu for lunch.
Now like most kids know, it is a well-established fact that every action has a culinary consequence. You decide to Cherry Blossom, every thing within a four foot radius of the shoe rack including the dog for the sake of colour coordination- you know dinner is going to involve steamed pond scum and other things that salute the colour green and textureless mushiness.
The geography teacher gives you an “A” mostly because your volcano unlike the others' puny baking soda-vinegar fizzy fountains, is capable of obliterating class 7A- and Voila! Viva la Deep frying!
Something in the rank of Prawn curry at home would be warranted by ….a coronation of some sort!?! So naturally I ask our galley chief what the occasion was.
To which, he looks at me with the expression that one makes when he realizes that the person he has been talking with is being cheeky with him and says, “Prawn was there ?!”















Now I KNOW I am not in Shivajinagar anymore.

I remember a friend telling me about vegetarians in the Bengal justifying their consumption of fish, calling them water lilies.
Well in Kerala; the backwaters are your carpool lane, your tub, your toilet and your grocery store.