In My Hands Today…

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Sisters of the Sari – Brenda L. Baker

While vacationing in India, Kiria Langdon, the opinionated and driven CEO of a major company, meets Santoshi, a former slave who now works as a cleaning lady and lives in a shelter for homeless women in Chennai. Appalled by the conditions in the shelter, Kiria becomes obsessed with the idea of building decent housing for poor working women in India. Santoshi reluctantly agrees to help, even though she thinks Kiria’s ideas are too crazy to succeed.

Embarking on a rich journey of personal discovery, both women will learn invaluable lessons about themselves as they forge a powerful bond of sisterhood across the barriers of language and culture-a bond that makes anything possible.

Recipe: Rajma

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Another Punjabi dish which is is probably not as well known as it’s cousin Chole, but just as ubiquitous everywhere. This is a protein rich dish and is super yum with jeera (cumin) rice

The way I make it is inspired by Sanjeev Kapoor’s recipe. I remember seeing him make this on television many many years back and started making it the same way. Over the years it’s been tweaked, so does this make it an original recipe?

Punjabi Rajma

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Ingredients:

  • 1 cup dried kidney beans, soaked in water overnight
  • 2 onions, roughly chopped
  • 4 tomatoes, roughly chopped
  • 5-6 cloves of garlic
  • 1 inch piece of ginger
  • 1 tsp cumin seeds
  • 1 tbsp oil
  • Salt to taste
  • 1-2 tsps red chilli powder
  • 1 tsp coriander powder
  • 1 tsp cumin powder
  • 2 tsps rajma masala
  • Coriander leaves to garnish

Method:

  • Wash the rajma thoroughly and cook it in a pressure cooker for 4-5 whistles till it becomes soft. You can also cook it without pressure, in a pan, but it will take quite long.
  • Chop the onions and tomatoes and peel the garlic and ginger and chop them into pieces.
  • Heat oil in a pan and when warm, put in the cumin seeds. When it starts popping, add the garlic, ginger and stir for a few minutes. Then add the onions and stir and cook till they turns translucent.
  • Add the tomatoes next and a tsp of salt to help the tomatoes start watering. Let the tomatoes cook till they are mushy and well cooked.
  • Switch off the gas and let it cool completely. When cool, blend it till it becomes a smooth puree.
  • In the same pan, pour this puree and let it boil. When it comes to a rolling boil, add the cooked kidney beans, chilli powder, cumin powder, coriander powder and rajma powder. Check for salt and add more if needed.
  • Let this cook well and once the whole mixture is nice and thick, switch off the gas and garnish with coriander leaves
  • Enjoy piping hot Rajma with Cumin (Jeera) rice, Rotis or Nan.

Tips:

  • You can put a pinch of baking powder/soda while soaking the kidney beans overnight. This will soften it up. Remember to wash it well before cooking it to remove all traces of the baking powder/soda
  • You can buy ready-made rajma masala at any Indian store. I prefer to use the Everest brand, but you can use any that is available or the one that tickles your taste buds.

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In My Hands Today…

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My Sisters Made of Light – Jacqueline St. Joan

My Sisters Made of Light follows three generations of a Pakistani family as they make their way through life in the political, social, and religious maze that is their motherland.

This novel pulls readers into the compelling, heartbreaking, and often terrifying world of honor crimes against women in Pakistan through the life and family history of Ujala. Ujala decides to follow the path for which her mother has prepared her and pushes aside fears for her own safety to help other women escape from the impossible situations in which they find themselves.

2016 Week 14 Update

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A quarter of 2016 is over!! Where are the days flying and why? This has been quite a bad week for me, you’ll know why as you read on.

I never learn and repeat this mistake almost every week. I try to catch up on sleep over the weekend, especially by taking a post lunch nap. Saturdays are not so bad, but when I nap on Sunday afternoons, I sometimes have difficulties going to bed at a decent time on Sunday night. So this means Monday I am pretty beat at work. Usually Monday nights are ok and I manage to catch up. But this week, for some reason I didn’t sleep well on Monday aslo and so Tuesday I was a real zombie at work. In this sleepy state in the afternoon, I decided to go down to the cafeteria in my office to see if I could get something that would wake me up, but there was nothing and on the way back, I decided to use the toilet, and I am guessing you know what happened next! Yup, I dropped my phone inside!!! It was for just a second and the phone has a cover and dropped topdown (that is the top part only was in the water for that one second). And there started my phone problems….

Intitally everything seemed fine, but later that day, the headphone jack got locked, and since then my phone decided to just randomly show me the power off button and the home button has become hypersensitive. My phone is around 15 months old and while I can still buy a new phone, I don’t want to spend the money. I’ve been reading up and doing what my good friend Google says, so let’s see if I can push this another few months…Otherwise it’s money down the drain that I can ill-afford to spend now L

I was also very upset with BB (see my post of yesterday for more details) and have since spoken to him about this. I need to work with him on toning down his aggression. I do think he’s become more aggressive these days compared to a year or two back. I’m not sure if this part of being a teen or the result of the games he plays. I need to monitor this and do something about it. I know teens don’t like being told off, so need to do this very diplomatically. He was such a sweet, non-aggressive boy; don’t know why this is happening!

Work-wise, I’m down to 20 days today and there’s still no clarity. I did speak to the company which employs me and they haven’t heard anything from this company. Apparently something should have come over the weekend, clarity perhaps, on if contractors should be renewed and if yes, for how long. The site manager did let me know that she knows it will not be for one year, definitely less. So now I need to wait for Big B to come back to me. Otherwise I am going to ask them to look for a new position for me. Nothing much to do except one slightly big presentation for which I need some data which will only be available at least a week from now, some web presentations which will take me all of next week and then my handover report! I’ve already done more than 70% of that, so I’m going to keep that till the last week to tidy it up. I need to check with Big B who will be my replacement and then will tweak it accordingly.

Oh, my reading challenge, I almost forgot about it. I’ve been quite diligent about reading one non-fiction and non frivolous book for the past two months, need to just be slight more diligent about it. As of the 31st of March, I’ve managed to finish 74 out of my targeted 150 books which is almost 60% of the challenge! Most are the really fun books (romance and chick-lit which don’t take much time to go through, I can read a book a day for these), so I guess once I hit 100 books, I’ll have to revise my challenge numbers….

Well that was my week, let’s see what this week holds for me. Hopefully a much better week and a better month than the previous one. Have a wonderful week people!

2016 Sec 1 Week 14 Update

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Another week and another month has gone by! We’re looking at the first Semesteral or mid-year exams coming on very soon. The first exam is predictably Hindi which is two weeks from now and then towards the end of the month both GG & BB start their school exams.

GG’s week was more stressed out than BB’s. She had practice twice during school and once more on Saturday. Actually they’ve been having practice quite often on Saturdays, but because of her Hindi classes, her school is asking her to come only twice – the two Saturdays before the event. She comes home so tired when she has practice though and then getting up in the morning is a chore for her, but she has been a trooper. I also realise she’s matured faster than BB who still seems a bit silly to me, especially when I compare them (which I try not to do, but sometimes, it does pop in my mind!)
While GG did not too badly for her first series of class tests, she does need to do much better for this mid-year exam if she wants to top her class. I seriously think that topping her class and getting the school award will do wonders for her self-confidence. She suffers from a case of serious exam stress and this was the big reason she didn’t do well at the PSLE exams last year. We didn’t realise how bad this stress was until it was too late and now I need to get rid of it before she sits for her O levels. So an injection of self-confidence will help her a lot.

Her school concert is a day before the Hindi mid-year exams and so she needs to manage time to work on that too. She’ll be back home after the concert close to 11 and then the reporting time for the exam the next day is 7:30 am! The centre is a bit of a drive (approximately 30 mins) from our home, I don’t know how she is going to manage this as she is like me in the sense she needs her sleep or turns grumpy and cranky!

BB on the other hand was super cocky during his term 1 exams and this showed in his results! He actually failed in English Literature and didn’t achieve targets for any subject. In his case, though he does not study in a top school, I have noticed his peers and classmates, all get good scores. Again, if wants to win school and class awards, he really needs to buck up this term and needs to go up a full band for each subject. Hindi is of course going to be the weakest link, and I think I need to step up and especially from next month when I will be at home, which will co-incidentally be during their holidays, I plan to work out an intensive time-table for both of them.

Friday I got a very hesitant message from BB telling me he wanted to tell me something. My mom antenna went up and I immediately called home to speak to him. He told me his Form teacher wanted to speak to me. From the way he spoke, I knew something was wrong and asked him the reason. So the reason he told me was that during CCA on Wednesday, he accidently hurt his classmate with his penknife. They were using that to make balsam wood planes. So I spoke to his teacher and the story was slightly different. According to the teacher, the other boy wanted to see BB’s penknife and BB shouted ‘No’ while pulling it away from him and in the process, the sharp tip hurt the boy. It was apparently a deep cut and required stitches. I was quite upset to hear this. The teacher asked both boys to write an incident report and since their versions differed, he spoke to me. Now the impression I got was the teacher believed the other boy and the reason was he said, “The other boy is a top student and also a student councilor”. I don’t agree with this reason because I firmly believe that just because you are a top student and a school leader does not mean you don’t lie or twist the truth. I am not disbelieving the boy and know BB shoulders more of the blame, but I didn’t like the way the teacher used these words. This kind of reinforces my belief that in this society we live in, it’s just academic excellence which matters and nothing else! Which is very sad as you need all kinds of people in a society and just academic excellence is not a blueprint for a child’s success in life!

Anyway, BB has been asked to do another reflection and the teacher did say this incident will not be escalated and the other boy’s parents also are not pursuing it further, which is a huge relief!

So that was pretty much the children’s week.