It’s ironic that those who were supposed to decide the fate of those programs based on President Trump’s executive order 14158 that wanted to stop DEI in US Government had zero idea of what DEI is, and aren’t really qualified to do the job in the first place.

Here are some excepts from the deposition of Justin Fox (JF).

Q: before joining the government in March of 2025 did you have any experience in government.

JF: No.

Q: Were you ever part of any political campaigns?

JF: No.

Q: Did you ever engage in any public grant administration before you joined government?

JF: No.

Q: Had you ever engaged in anything that required you to review scholarship for scholarly merit before you joined the government

JF: I can’t remember.

Q: How he knew Anthony Armstrong (the man who hired him)

JF: He's the father of one of my friends.

So literally a nepo hire: zero experience. 100% connections.

It gets worse though when he is questioned about his decisions to stop specific grants.

Q: So tell me why this project is DEI?

JF It's promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives

Q: Okay. What about diverse perspectives is DEI

JF: It's not merit-based

Later when asked about his understanding of what DEI is, JF respond “my understanding was exactly what was written in the EO (executive order)”. Not once, but like six-seven times.

Imagine the guy who took decisions on millions and possibly billions of dollars worth of grants and cannot even say what DEI is, and what criteria he used (hint: he used openai, not even the most meritorious grok).

JF : “It’s a broad bucket”

Q: “What is in the bucket”?

JF: “Gender fluidity … sort of promoting subsets of LGBTQ+ that might alienate another community” is what he finally came up with, before going back to “I need to refer to EO”

This is the thing though. Since he is white, no one will question his merit. At best, his intentions or his morality. But he is not alone. Let’s look at his supervisor Nathan. Another twenty-something startup founder and a college dropout. Again hired through connections. Or as we like to call it networking.

Q: “Do you think it's inappropriate in any way that someone in their 20s with no experience with grants for federal government was making personal judgment calls about what grants to cancel”

NC: “I think a person can have enough judgment from reading books and being well informed outside of traditional experience to make judgment calls about obvious things like a grant that literally lists DEI in its description to know whether it violates an executive order"

When asked which books he read that helped him make that judgement call he says he read no books!

The thing is, he feels entitled to that role because he was “taking a pay-cut” to do this. Exactly like MAGA say Trump is super-qualified to be a president because he is a businessman who could make a lot of money outside government (he had multiple bankruptcies, including a Casino, and he has earned billions of dollars now through his position as the president).

Look at other “merit” pickups by Trump to once and for all “stop the DEI non-sense”.

Defense Secretary: Pete Hegseth. Fox News Anchor. Alcoholic who came to work smelling of booze.

FBI Director: Kash Patel. No real investigative/law enforcement experience. Chosen because he was the author memo (Nunes memo), alleging that FBI officials abused their authority in the Trump-Russia investigations.

(Ex) Deputy FBI Director: Don Bongino. Podcaster.

(Ex) DA for New Jersey: Alina Habba. Sanctioned by judges for frivolous lawsuits on behalf of Trump. Never entered a federal court. No prosecutorial experience. Chosen for representing Trump in his hush money case.

Secretary of Education: Linda McMahon. Former professional wrestling executive. No experience with education policy.

(Nominated for Attorney General): Matt Gaetz. No experience. Had to take back his nomination with the threat of his history of dating a minor investigated by senate committee.

Sr. Counselor for trade an manufacturing: Peter Navarro whose books use a mythical expert Ron Vara to support his trade doctrine, only who doesn’t exist and is just a anagram of his name.

And of course, RFK Junior. The health secretary. Carrying a literal brain worm and anti-science attitude.

Of course, not all of these are white (most of them are). Kash Patel being a notable exception. But he is part of the “model minority”, and was picked up not for his experience but for that famous memo.

The thing is, though, that those who keep crying hoarse about DEI having destroyed merit are absolutely silent through these terrible terrible picks with no qualifications or relevant experience. Most if not all the anti DEI republicans confirmed some of these picks without protest. Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed despite his “beer monologue” and credible sexual assault allegation. Imagine a woman, or worse, a gay/trans person, with even a hint of inappropriate history being confirmed thus.

Those who hate DEI don’t hate the alleged end of merit. They hate the end of privilege. It’s loud and clear now, if it was not before. Because, somewhere, they know that what they call merit is just a continuation of birth privilege that has put them in positions most of them are not fit for. It’s the systemic deprivation through such a protected privilege that they are able to lord over others less fortunate. Merit, in a structurally unequal society, and extremely so, is just a DEI for for white men, in the way that the economic right defines DEI.

Before the foot soldiers of patriarchy, or the botified recruits of manosphere, come attacking like the armies of orcs in LOTR, let me explain.

Jab We Wed

This week, we celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Yes, we’re kind of old, and yes, we got married young, not exactly what we had planned when we started dating. But as they say, it all turned out quite alright. Note: this isn’t a promotion of early marriages (and I define any marriage where either party is under 30 as early). My opinion is that most people in their mid-twenties are not ready for what married life requires. God knows we weren’t. And those are also the years when people change the most, so there is a significant chance of drifting away, as the two change in different directions.

Looking back at the 2.5 decades, I feel that marrying a feminist woman was the best things I did for myself. Yes, you read that right. Especially you manobots! A bit of context: I was of feminist leanings even back then, but it was the bookish, no skin-in-the-game feminism/allyship. I was still full of (or should I say more than I am now) patriarchal — and worse, openly misogynist — tropes (“beauty x brain = constant” was one of the earliest things I said to my wife to be, before we were even dating, and somehow she still didn’t stop talking to me, something she was and is capable of) and conditioned instincts. I had so much to learn, and so much to unlearn.

On a lighter note, this reminds me of a scene from a Bollywood hit from my teenage years, Maine Pyaar Kiya, where the protagonist is confronted by his father when he decides to leave his rich family to follow his love.

Father: "[You don't] know how to walk on the roads"
Our Hero: "I will learn, Papa"
Father: “You don’t know how hard it is to earn money”
Our Hero: “I will learn, Papa”. 
Father: “What all will you learn? You don’t even know how to learn” 
Our Hero: “Love teaches everything”. 
 

Mic drop! Except, back in 1989 when the movie came out, there was no mic drop. Mics were too expensive to drop. But I digress.

The thing is, your philosophy, your politics, your belief systems, they are never tested till you have some skin in the game. Until there is a conflict of interest, till there is something at stake, you can champion anything, really. Isn’t that the whole “virtue signaling” thing (which I don’t particularly mind, given how prevalent vice signaling is)? But marrying a fiercely feminist woman put my beliefs to test. It made me see that patriarchy isn’t a theoretical construct to be debated and shamed, but a practical, everyday reality that needed to be fought. And some of the most difficult fights are with your family. A typical Indian girl would have spared me those fights by choosing to preempt them by submitting in advance. And I would probably have taken the easy exit ramp when presented thus, because who really wants a conflict? Except those who profit off it?

What’s strange is, I was raised in a relatively liberal family (for the time and place). Or so I thought. But liberalism in a country like India is many times just a veneer that comes off at the first scratch. Modernity in our society is very cosmetic — clothes, breaking food rules, casual drinking/smoking (again nothing wrong with any of it, but that’s where it stops). Patriarchy is so normalized in a typical Indian family, even a supposedly liberal one, that it’s not easy to see it in action, especially when it’s subtle … till you are forced to see it through the eyes of someone you love (yes this could be your mom or sister, but when its your partner, it’s about decades of your lives together, joined at the hips, so to say). It opens your eyes like no books can (not entirely true, I guess, but finding the books that can do it is not easy, especially the pre Internet world) .

But it’s not all is about conflicts. It’s also about learning to be a more authentic human, or as some like to say, “humanist”. People hide behind “I prefer the word humanist to feminist”. But humanism is a word so generic that it has lost its meaning, and definitely its bite. You can’t be a true humanist though, unless you’re a feminist, and anti-racist, and anti-fascist, and anti-caste, and pro LGBTQ … Each of those (and more) need to be embraced individually, because it’s so easy to not see how each and every social problem affects a specific category of people, unless one owns it, and makes an effort. Just claiming an amorphous humanism doesn’t make one a humanist. Which is why, being invested individually in these identities is game changing.

There are gateway drugs. And there are gateway bigotries. But there is also gateway empathy. If you aren’t born with it — and it’s a rare to both be born with it, or it not being destroyed before one reaches adulthood thanks to the society around us — you sometimes get lucky when you are initiated into it due to your life choices. I have seen so many men never fully break out of the patriarchal system, even while claiming to hate it, because they weren’t ever challenged, and it’s comfortable, for them. I mean it was literally designed that way! They took the exit ramp, because it was on offer, because it was easy. Yes love can teach everything, but not when we (can) take exit ramps. I was blessed. The battle wasn’t optional for me. Not without losing self-respect. Loving a feminist saved me.

Postscript: I don’t mean to imply that every cishet man should marry a feminist woman. Or that feminism will save everyone. I see enough “exclusivist” feminism that refuses to stand with other oppressed groups. White/Brahmin women centered feminism has traditionally shut out women from marginalized groups, and have oppressed men from those groups. Some of the best known feminist writers of our time have shown various shades of transphobia, Islamophobia, and so on. There is probably no gateway empathy. Empathy can be trapped in, what is called in the parlance of artificial intelligence is known as, “local maxima”. It can be extremely deep for an in-group and absolutely non-existent for out-groups. In life, there are no quick answers, no big-answer, only big questions, and a series of small answers. I’m aware of that. But I’m allowed a moment of celebration, ain’t I?

My Read This Day

Yesterday I met a — for a lack of better way to say it — Twitter friend , who is on India trip. We met only once before, last year, and while we hadn’t interacted a ton on Twitter, we clicked. Shared values. Shared privileges. Shared interests. It was a lovely two and a half hours meetup, over some real good food in Gather that started with a fantastic coffee — and I didn’t take a single food photograph through it.

To cut a long story short, he gifted me a Dutch chocolate bar: Tony’s Chocolonely. I had not heard of it, but I always appreciate people who give thoughtful gifts, where a gift also becomes a window to the world. He did give me a quick history of the brand, and today, I got around to reading about it.

The story is inspirational. The brand was started by Teun van de Keuken — a journalist who was enraged by the child exploitation/slavery commonplace in the Chocolate industry. Here is an excerpt from an article about Tony’s Chocolonely: Getting to Know Chocolonely.

So van de Keuken went a step further, turning himself into the police and asking to be arrested, and then asking a judge to convict him of driving child slavery, because he’d eaten a chocolate bar. Though the act made a big statement, much to van de Keuken’s disappointment, the judge refused to convict him.

They changed tack, and van de Keuken and the other journalists decided to change the industry from within and create their own chocolate bar. They called it Tony’s Chocolonely because it was van der Keuken’s “lonely fight against inequality in the chocolate industry”. This was in 2005, and since then Tony’s Chocolonely has gone on to become the Netherlands’ favourite chocolate brand, with 20% of the market share, and has been making major waves in the UK since it arrived in 2019.

Another interesting thing about the chocolates is that it does away with the regular square/rectangular pieces in favor of unequally divided pieces to highlight the inequalities in the supply chain.

Another design element was to change the standard square piece format of the chocolate itself to unequally divided pieces, in order to symbolise the unequally divided cocoa supply chain. “We still get complaints about that, but it is always a great excuse to talk about what is fair,” says Schaeffer. “We also see that it has become a conversation piece between friends and family.”

And their mission is not just to offer a slavery free chocolate, but rather to make impact on the industry to a level where all chocolate is slavery free.

A good gift can keep on giving.

My Song This Day

Music, like my other love, cooking, has a complicated history, and crossover creations that dip into multiple traditions. And to trace those influences, it teaches you so much about composite cultures that gave rise to sub-genres and sub-cuisines.

Presently, we’re watching an Irish-British thriller series How to Get to Heaven From Belfast (Netflix), and there I picked up this track. A “folk rock” or “pop rock” track with elements of Blues, alt Rock. A 2005 track that feels fresh two decades later.

My Third Thing This Week

So we’re at the last bit of the last day of the tag, so I’m finishing it with something I drew today. A bald eagle. It’s the the year of bald eagle, after all, right?

There we are then. Keep reading.

My Read This Day

Food cultures are complex. Not everything we think of as a food tradition is organic, and may be the result of political-economical forces. “Our Daily Ceeb” by Jori Lewis examines the case of Senegalese food moving away from their staple crop, millet, to a rice based food culture.

The emergence of ceebu jën in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century is likely due to a confluence of colonialism and cash-crop agriculture. It was a period in which the French were expanding their administrative footprint, conquering most of the country we now call Senegal and consolidating large swaths of the interior into a thing called the colony of French West Africa. During this time, Senegalese farmers started cultivating more peanuts, sparked by a demand from French soap makers for a suitable oil for their industry. Farmers might have grown peanuts on a small scale before, but now the market was so insistent that they started to put more land into peanut production, land that might otherwise have been dedicated to growing millet. Early on, French administrators and merchants recognized that inciting farmers to abandon their staple crops might create food shortages, but instead of promoting a more balanced approach, they developed an alternative plan. In 1857, the colonial governor wrote, “Let Senegal produce [peanuts] instead of grains, and we will bring them rice”—rice brought on French ships from other colonies in India and Indochina.

I come from a region of India where Jowar (great millet) and Nachani (finger millet) are were a staple food, grown on a fertile black soil with very little rainfall. Enter modern irrigation, the region shifted to sugarcane — yes, a almost rain shadow area cultivating a equatorial crop that needs tons of rainfall. Soon, the area shifted to wheat, coming from the “green revolution” in Punjab, the wheat bowl of India. So this Senegalese history seems weirdly familiar.

Today, Senegalese people eat about 125 kilograms of rice a year, on par with South Korean (124 kilograms) and Chinese (126 kilograms) consumers. If you invite someone for lunch and serve anything else—say, millet—you might hear a variation on this phrase: Suma lekkul ceeb dafay mel ni lekkuma dara—If I haven’t eaten rice, it’s like I haven’t eaten anything.

Curiously, both my grandparents (dad’s side) came from Konkan, the coastal Maharashtra, a predominantly rice growing/eating region. And I have heard a lot of people in my family using a similar line: without rice, dinner is not complete.

Talking about similarities:

Generosity is a core value in Senegal. If you come across a group of people sitting around a communal bowl for their midday meal, whether in a city or in a village, one of them will call out to you in Wolof, saying “Kaay lekk—Come eat.” If you’re wise enough to accept, everyone will shift slightly on their knees until a sliver of space emerges, and you will be handed a spoon or encouraged to eat with your hand (always the right, never the left).

I see this generosity in the working class people in India. Our watchmen, our cleaning staff, and other people from not so well off background always call out: come join us for lunch, ready to share whatever they are eating. Sometimes I am torn between a desire to join them, in an act of shared humanity, and the knowledge that, as it, they probably do not have enough food even for themselves.

Despite the effort to ramp up rice production, most of the country’s rice is still imported—more than 70 percent. Such dependence on imports means that Senegalese consumers are deeply vulnerable to the vagaries of world commodity markets. They are one bad Thai or Indian growing season away from a food crisis. All because some French colonial administrators nearly two hundred years ago decided that the peanut trade was too important for them to care whether people here could grow the food they needed to live.

The story of food is intertwined with the story of colonization.

My Song This Day

A “proto punk" / “garage rock” track that was languishing in my Shazam’ed playlist. According to Wikipedia:

The song's novel use of power chords and distortion heavily influenced later rock musicians, particularly in the heavy metal and punk rock genres.

Makes perfect sense when you listen to it.

My 3rd Thing This Day

Leaving my breakfast I made for me and my son. We are an egg loving family. And I’ve taken a lot of time to get my scrambles and my omelettes just right in a heavy cast iron pan. And yeah, that bread is homemade, too, so I can claim cooking credits for all of it.

That’s it then. See you tomorrow for the final installment. I hope to continue, just not post about it. Or maybe a weekly roundup for the time being.

My Read This Day

Today, as well, I was able to read more than one article. One I already quoted in a substack note. The other one, is a lovely little piece of food writing from The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024 edition titled: “My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas” by Kiese Laymon (link to the original piece).

I was driving back to Mississippi with my partner, a Black woman raised in the Northeast, when she commented how there were so many more McDonald’s and Subway restaurants connected to gas stations on I-81 South. “Isn’t it just so American that we will eat anything right next to literal oil and gas.”

The sentence shocked me. I’d never, ever thought about what it meant that so many restaurants on the way down to Mississippi from New York were parts of gas stations. That revelation tasted like crude oil. It didn’t taste fried at all. I remember saying, “Gotdamn. That’s so foul.”

And I’m still sure it is.

But I’d never really thought about the fact that my favorite restaurants, as a child, as a teenager, as an adult returning to Mississippi, nearly all served gas. And I never, ever thought of them as gas stations that served food.

So much of what we think as normal growing up is just something weird that was normal in the circumstances. In fact, we tend to think anything we see as normal. Till we don’t. The piece is not of just nostalgia, tho. Laymon manages to put a left hook in.

My favorite restaurant paid its most important asset, a human we called Ms. Joyce, as little as one could get paid to work in any restaurant. She was paid as little as one could get paid while smelling, and sometimes pumping, gas for folks unable to pump until her shift ended at 11 p.m. This, now, is part of my favorite restaurant memory too. And while I smell the memory as deeply as I’ve smelled anything in my life, I’m shole glad Ms. Joyce ain’t cooking, cleaning, or washing no more damn dishes in any restaurant on earth that serves gas.

Food writing is rarely about food.

My Song This Day

Time for some soul/funk. There is something about this genre that seems authentic. Today, I listened to Marion Black’s Who Knows. An earworm, if there were one!

My 3rd Thing This Day

Another day. Another walk. Another photo. Another flower tree.

Google lens tells me it’s called Scarlet Cordia (aka cordia sebestena).

Ok, that’s a wrap for today. See you all tomorrow, again, maybe?

My Read This Day

I’ve never quite been able to decide how Lolita, Nabokov’s most famous novel, and probably one of the most interpreted/dissected/hated/justified/… novels ever written, is to be read. While going through my links in the now terminated Pocket service for visual bookmarks, I found at least three articles about Lolita. None of which I had read. So I read “I Re-Read ‘Lolita’ In The Age Of #MeToo & It Was Even Worse Than I Remembered” and this paragraph kind of summed up a lot of what I felt about the book.

Nabokov’s defense of his novel makes sense. The most startling fact of Lolita is that it’s actually a beautiful novel, at least in terms of language and syntax, the rhythm of reveals, Nabokov’s irrepressible knack for alliteration. It is cringingly pleasing to read Lolita — if you can focus on the sheer musicality of the language in favor of forgetting that you’re reading about the sexual assault of a child by the man who effectively kidnapped her under the guise of stepfatherhood. But in the wake of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, can Lolita be read as anything but a story of predation, depravity, exploitation — and specifically, rape — no matter how stunning Nabokov’s prose might be?

The article was written a decade after the #metoo movement, but just before Epstein scandal really hit the news. In the context of Epstein, it probably gets worse, as we get to know about droves of rich/powerful men who were involved in the sexual abuse of minors and very young girls, and putting the question of agency and consent in the public discourse again.

In a manner all too familiar, Humbert frequently interprets the laughter, eye flutters, twitches, and fidgets of his young victim as gestures of consent. “She laughed, and brushed past me out of the room. My heart seemed everywhere at once,” Humbert notes, upon kissing Dolores on the mouth for the first time. Then, later, when he repeatedly gropes her: “She, to, fidgeted a good deal so that finally her mother told her sharply to quit it.” Later, when Humbert effectively drugs Dolores in order to abuse her in her sleep (Bill Cosby, anyone?) he says: “I held her. She freed herself from the shadow of my embrace — doing this not consciously, not violently, not with any personal distaste…” Humbert expects us to believe him, and undoubtedly some readers do. He is the only voice of authority on this matter, after all. He has gone to great lengths, as he later describes, to ensure Dolores's silence.

No reading of Lolita can escape these question. There are theories about it all being allegorical, when there is the story of the “real life Dolores Haze” that seems like the inspiration for the novel. So how do we escape the conclusion that, at best it’s a morality tale that shows rather than tell us — but the its lyrical prose makes it difficult to read it thus — and at worse the author’s justification of pedophilia. And although the latter may seem ludicrous interpretation, in the wake of the latest Epstein blowout, the way people like Alan Dershowitz, and some right-wing podcasters are either straight justifying or obfuscating around it, it seems not so far fetched. The depravity of men, including the so called “left liberal” figures like Neil Gaiman, when it comes to sexual abuse is so universal, that #notallmen becomes a laughable tag.

And any interpretative ambiguity is lost in its film adaptations, that seem to tell a story entirely from Humbert Humbert’s perspective. Lolita then becomes complicit in her own downfall, through her nymphet like behavior. Humbert’s ruminations that “It was she who seduced me.” becomes a valid angle of the story, thrusting “agency” onto a victim. The movie adaptations don’t leave us with a possibility that Humbert isn’t a reliable narrator.

So how are we to read Lolita in the wake of the #EpsteinFiles?

My Song This Day

OK, that was probably the most heavy stuff in this series, so let’s make it lighter. One of the “guilty pleasures” for many of us are some of the dumb series on OTT platforms. For me, for no reason whatsoever, I have been watching Emily In Paris, and have managed to be into Season 4, when I can literally destroy in a review. One good thing that has come out of it, though, is a bunch of French songs that I’d otherwise never have discovered. Especially the so called “yé-yé ” genre.

From Wikipedia:

Yé-yé (French: [jeje] ^ⓘ) or yeyé^[1] (Spanish: [ɟʝeˈʝe]) was a style of pop music that emerged in Western and Southern Europe in the early 1960s. The French term yé-yé was derived from the English “yeah! yeah!”, popularized by British beat music bands such as the Beatles.^[2] The style expanded worldwide as the result of the success of figures such as French singer-songwriters France Gall, Jacqueline Taïeb, Sylvie Vartan, Serge Gainsbourg and Françoise Hardy.^[3] Yé-yé was a particular form of counterculture that derived most of its inspiration from British and American rock and roll. Additional stylistic elements of yé-yé song composition include baroque, exotica, pop, jazz and the French chanson.^[4]

I learned the term today, but I’m sure a lot of songs used in this series will fit in the genre. Also check out an Italian Yé-yé from the same source (it even starts with ye-ye-ye ...

My 3rd Thing This Day

OK, for the third thing today, although it’s not “new”, I’m going to post a salad recipe that I made today, a Mediterranean style salad.

This is my go to Salad these days. Fresh. Zestful. And a great confluence of textures and mouthfeel.

Base: soaked and boiled kidney beans, finely chopped cucumber, tomatoes.

Vinaigrette: EVOO, Lemon Juice. Pepper. Salt. (Optional: Mustard)

Herbs: Coriander/Cilantro and Parsley.

Additions: Olives. Feta cheese (or any other cheese of your choice). Finely chopped bell peppers/carrots (ideally quick blanched and cooled). Seeds (Pumpkin/Sunflower/De-husked Hemp)

OK, that’s a wrap for Day 4. See you all tomorrow.

My Read This Day

I did read more than one article today. See! Aiming high helps. So the one I want to share today, is this article by Chase T. M. Anderson, a gay African American man titled “Understanding ‘Minority Stress’ Saved My Life”. I am fairly interested, and I like to believe, somewhat well informed about psychology, but I hadn’t heard the concept of minority stress (although, once I heard it, it was very easy to map it).

The phrase “minority stress” gained traction in 2003 when psychiatric epidemiologist Dr. Ilan Meyer published a seminal paper on the subject. Meyer defined the term as “stigma, prejudice, and discrimination that create a hostile and stressful social environment that causes mental health problems.”

As I would soon learn, America’s bigotry toward minoritized people is not only literally making us sick; it’s killing us.

(Bold emphasis mine)

It’s well-understood how a lot of health research, including mental health, is targeted to a dominant majority, so this is a double whammy.

And I wondered: If it took me years to hear about minority stress as a psychiatrist, how many others had never heard of this term? Are we thinking about mental health diagnoses and treatments for the minoritized properly? Are we ensuring discussions around possible minority stress are part of a patient’s treatment plan?

The author, himself a psychiatrist, didn’t have an easy access to this concept, so it indeed raises the question what of swaths of minorities, world over, and those who treat them?

My Song This Day

For a music fan with quite eclectic tastes, and who listened to loads of classic rock as a genre, and loved it, I always hates the Stones. It’s stupid really. but I hated Mick Jagger. And not as a musician, really. I just hated his looks, an instinctive hate, he represented all that was, how do I say it, perverted. And while I did give the Stones a listen, a few times, it never really reached me, their music. And then it started to, strangely, in my late forties, strangely, as I moved away from Rock as a genre (I still love it, but listen to it much less, as I moved on to Jazz/Blues).

My track today? Probably not one of their best known songs: Sweet Virginia. It just shows their versatility, the country influences, the brilliant saxophone and harmonica. Found it via Shazam again!

My 3rd Thing This Day

I will be lazy and post a photo that I took on my evening walk again. And why ever not? I’ve earned it! And yes, I love the sunsets. Even when they are defiled by the ubiquitous electricity wires.

See you all tomorrow.

Day 2, and I am already struggling 🙂. But the new me is not going to give up! So without a further ado, let me get into it.

My Read This Day

Yesterday, I picked up The Best American Food and Travel Writing, 2024, edited by . The more piece I’m reading from it, the more the central theme seems to be how food is political, just as it is personal. A fascinating collection already, and I’m not even half-way through it. Today I read Tell Me Why the Watermelon Grows by Jori Lewis (earlier published here).

A passage really hit me:

I was a self-conscious teen. I couldn’t help it. I had landed on the bright side of the tracking machine but there were only ever a couple of other Black kids in the honors and AP classes that formed the rhythm of my life. I often felt on display, singular, strange. I remember once having a conversation with my father about something I was self-conscious about as the only Black person around, although I can’t remember what. Was it someone who wanted me to play basketball? Or to dance? Or to speak like the sassy Black women they saw on TV? Was it a request to do something or wear something or, even, eat something? I think it must have been about food, because my father told me that he used to avoid eating watermelon in front of white people when he was younger. I knew then without knowing firsthand that watermelon was wielded by racists as a cudgel but I never imagined that he might have deprived himself of the juicy melon, not the least because it was ever-present in our house during the summer.

The simple act of eating a juicy watermelon, then, becomes political, because some racists use it to stereotype a whole population.

“For more than a century and a half, the watermelon has been a staple in America’s racist diet,” writes sociologist David Pilgrim in his 2017 book, Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors. “The depiction of black people eating watermelon has been a shorthand way of saying that black people are unclean (the fruit is messy to eat), lazy (it is easy to grow), childish (watermelons are sweet and colorful), overly indulgent (especially with their sexual appetites), and lacking ambition (the watermelon presented as satiating all needs).”

If you’re interested in the intersection of food and politics (I previously wrote about how this plays out in India with vegetarianism and meat eating in my post about the vegetarian takeover of dosa) please read the article (and indeed the anthology)

My Song This Day

This is an indirect Shazam find — found the artist/album via Shazam, but loved this track more. Freedom by Larkin Poe — a sisters band (Rebecca Lovell and Megan Lovell) with roots blues/bluegrass origin. This album — Peach — is trying to explore more of rock/alternative blues genres as they try to redefine their music, but still connected to their roots - even covering some well known root blues tracks. While it has its meh tracks, some of the tracks absolutely rip! Like this one, Freedom, which encapsulates the album’s syncretic spirit, giving a node to traditions of root blues/bluegrass/folk that the artists started with.

My Photo Dump This Day

For my evening walk, I again climbed a small (tiny?) hill nearby, and while this part of the world does not have a pronounced spring blossoms, which tend to be more spread out in species, one is still treated these days with some of the blooming trees with striking reds and yellows and purples … These are some of the pics from the hillside.

Indian Coral Tree, Yellow Silk Cotton Tree, Red Silk Cotton Tree, Palash Tree

Not a bad day at all, again, eh?

So what’s the tag I’m picking? I’m challenging myself to doing 3 things everyday where I’m doing something new:

1. Read one short article/blog-post

2. Listen to 1 new song (this is not necessarily new new, but I’ve a few — 400 actually — songs that I’ve “searched” with Shazam from films or TV series, that I’ve never listened to again, which are now imported to Spotify playlists.

3. Something new I learned, or recipe/food I tried for the first time, something I drew, a photo I took, or even an experience I had … It’s like a trump card, anything goes.

So that brings us to Day #1

My Read This Day

Today, I finished ’s piece right here on #substack, a response to an article about Indians reading habits (or the lack of it) from The Guardian. Anurag is one thought influencer from our country that we all need to pay more attention to, as he has this unique ability to (with apologies to him for using this phrase, now irreparably destroyed by Shekhar Gupta) cut through the clutter and find that unique insight. This article is a case in point. Go read it!

My Song This Day

One of my shazam’ed pick, this lovely track by The Faces. Growing up heard a lot Rod Stewart, but wasn’t aware of his stint with Faces (or the band, even). Love their sound. Gotta check out more tracks now.

My Dish This Day

Cabbage is not exactly the most glamorous vegetable. While I do like a couple of its Indian preparations (a “poriyal” style Tamilian recipe, and a much less forgiving Maharasthrian style one that can quickly degrade if not done perfectly), I had bookmarked this interesting recipe with minced meat. And it turned out so good that I think this is the way to make cabbage, trust me. Or at least one of the ways. This is a killer combo, with few herb/spices to dial it to 11 (mostly paprika, pepper, garlic powder — my addition, garlic), a good stock to bring in umami, and soy sauce (optional, again my addition) for a hint of sourness. I served it with some chili oil (just felt the right thing to do, and it was) and green onion, and I think a runny egg would be excellent too.

All in all, not a bad day at all!

Then again, life goes on, irrespective of politics. It has to. Under that arc, we have to survive, somehow. And one way is through reading.

In 2025, like the year before, I barely “read” paper books (or even ebooks). Most of my “reading” was in the audiobook format. Notable books that I want others to read?

Fiction

• Human Acts by Han Kang: A heartbreaking book from 2024 winner of Nobel Prize in Literature, so it hardly needs my nod, but it’s one of the best books I read this year.

• Wellness by Nathan Hill: Speculative fiction that deals with the very human issues. Worth a read.

• My Friends by Fredrik Backman: This is a book for our times. Backman is the balm that our fractured world needs.

• Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead: Historical fiction. A brutal book about the darkest period of American history. Now made into a TV series. Do read if you have the heart of steel.

• Babel by R.F. Kuang: An brilliant brilliant book. Hard to summarize in a line or two, but a genre-bending, speculative fiction dealing with complex themes of colonialism, and how control over language is part of the fabric of colonialism, and its interplay with gender, and race, class. A stunning book that everyone should read.

Memoirs/Food Memoirs:

• 32 Yolks by Eric Ripert: The making of the celebrity chef.

• American Nations - A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard: For sure it’s simplistic, but a quick way to make sense of American regional cultures through their origin tales.

• Around the Table by Diana Henry: A collection of essays related to food and memories of food. Some of the finest food writings you’d read.

• Slow Noodles by Chantha Nguon: Another tale of survival against all odds, of grief and loss, and grit, threaded together through recipes and food memories, this is as good a memoir that you’ll ever read.

• Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Another superlative food memoir. Poetic writing.

• Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy: Needs no introduction, but since the world is neatly divided into those who hate her writings, love them, and love to ignore them, this is one of the better memoirs coming from Indian writers. Roy has her faults, but my god, what a life!

General Non Fiction:

• Ingredients by George Zaidan: A title that doesn’t do justice to the book. It does cover a lot of food chemistry but the best part of the book is where he talks about the scientific process for the absolute dummies. Must read for everyone, I would say.

• Meet the Savarnas by Ravikant Kisana: An absolute must-read for India’s dwij Savarna (like me) to introspect, and to change. A mirror we badly need as a community. Critical caste theory.

Not a full list by any means, but just a notable few. I was able to complete my Goodreads Reading Challenge of 30 books. But I’d be carrying over at least ten books to 2026 — started but not finished. The story of every year. But made worse this year.

I plan to read more history in 2026. Let’s see how that goes!

Modern living is full of such micropressures. We tend to talk about microaggressions, but when I looked up the word micropressure, I got only its literal meaning (nah, Google helpfully asked me if I meant microprocessors). But in the current times, there are these micropressures we seem to experience, many thanks to our own expectations, even of leisure, of me time, of rest.

I’m reminded of an old Garfield comic strip where John tells Garfield, “You have a nice peaceful, long, restful nap”, and the pressure of it makes it impossible for Garfield to sleep. He comes back and smacks John, “I don’t need that kind of pressure”. When I first saw that in my late teens, I laughed hard. Now I nod at its wisdom. None of us needs that kind of pressure. Even to relax or rest.

But keep aside that extreme. Do we take ourselves too seriously when we put a value on our time? Time well spent. Productive time. Time invested in future growth. Time invested in self-maintenance. As opposed to the time wasted! God forbid. We’re always on a shot clock, by the nature of human mortality, and we can’t even see the shot clock. And so we have to justify leisure to ourselves as an investment in our mental well-being. What Stephen Covey, that now forgotten, but once superstar self-help guru, would call: production capacity. The P/PC paradox, where sometimes one has to do something not immediately productive (maintenance to enhance production capacity) in order to increase overall production. For god forbid, we had a forced downtime because we didn’t take care of our productive capacity!

I’m not saying it’s not important, just in case the tone suggested I’m making fun of it. Nah, I’m going further. The fact that we have to justify self-care in the service of overall productivity, as a means to a productive end, is the source of many micropressures. That we as a culture have put productivity at the center of human existence, and it dictates our relationship with our own time, our leisure, our ruminations, our pursuits of what is trivial outside of the gospels of productivity. The source of our ennui, our inadequacy, lies in our acceptance of the productivity gospels intellectually — our acceptance of being a cog in the wheel, a brick in the wall — while our heart craves for the freedom to be, which includes, nay posits on, the freedom to be unproductive. A profound acceptance of leisure as a legitimate human experience, not just a means to a greater end — that is what we need to get back to. Or maybe it’s just me.

During the preceding seven days we had spent in Japan, strangely, we had not visited any Shinto shrine (we had been to Buddhist temples). So after a stroll in the lovely Kashima castle ruins (where we found some sakura bloom), we headed to Kashima Jingu (jingu is a Japnese word for shrine). The road to the shrine is lined with tall trees, and the shrine is beautiful and peaceful.

On the way we saw lined up containers of sake, with tags. We asked our friend and guide about it, and learned that this is a common practise at Shinto shrines. Sake is considered a gift from the gods and is offered to the deities as a ceremonial gift (also accompanied by rice cakes). Sake offered thus is called omiki. During the Shinto New Year's celebrations, the sake is offered to the attendees. You can read more about this here.

As we roamed around the campus, with multiple small structures in traditional Japanese style, all built in the middle of what looked like a small conserved forest, we saw another stall that got our attention. It was lined up with colourful structures the size of large helmets (or even bigger), and again asked our friend what they were. These, we learned, are called Daruma dolls, and what’s conspicuous about them is their eyes, which are left blank when you buy them.

The Origin Story of Daruma Dolls

As I read more about the Daruma dolls, I got to know that they are inspired from a tale of Bodhidharma — who is widely believed to be the founder of Zen Buddhism — where he sat meditating for nine years without moving, and in the process his arms and feet fell off (thus and disembodied head as a Daruma Doll).

The origins of Daruma dolls can be traced back to the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, who is considered the pioneer of Zen Buddhism in East Asia in the 5th century. Legend has it that Bodhidharma sat facing a wall and meditated for nine years without moving from the spot. This feat took a toll on his body, causing his arms and legs to fall off. There’s also a belief that he cut out his own eyelids because he fell asleep during this meditation period. That is why Daruma dolls are limbless and have no irises. The first Daruma dolls were made as good luck charms for members of the Shorinzan Daruma Temple in Takasaki City, Tokyo. The temple’s founder made these New Year charms and gave them out to the community. People would visit the temple to receive these charms in hopes that they would bring good fortune and ward off evil.

Daruma dolls became more popular in the Edo period (1603–1868) as bringers of good luck, and by the 19th century, the general belief had evolved into assumptions that the dolls could make dreams come true. The Shorinzan temple still exists in Takasaki today and is the venue for an annual Daruma Doll Festival. Tasaki City also makes the majority of Daruma dolls in Japan using traditional hand craftsmanship.

(from Daruma dolls - Guardians of Dreams in Japanese Culture).

The ritual, named kaigan, is to make a wish (or set a goal) and then paint only one eye (the left one). Then the dolls are kept at a display in offices/homes. And after a wish is fulfilled (or a goal is met), the other eye is pained. The dolls are then burned in a ritualistic manner: daruma kuyo. It’s a Buddhist symbolism of "beginning and end”.

Ironically, I noticed these figurines first in a Shinto shrine, and not in Buddist temples I had visited before. It’s a testament to the syncretism of religious traditions in Japan that a Buddhist artifact is seen prominently in a Shinto shrine (Shintoism is a pre-Buddhist, native religion of Japan).

You can also think of these dolls as a productivity tool. By setting a goal and having a one-eyed doll on a display to remind you of it, is a good way to encourage yourself to complete what you have started. Exepct a Daruma productivity app, if one isn’t available there already.

I will leave you with another thing I noticed around the shrine. At more than one place, I saw a tree seeming to be falling down being supported by a wooden log or a structure — something which I have never seen anywhere before. On further reading I realized that in Japanese there is a word for this — you guessed it — tradition: yukitsuri. Typically, it’s employed in areas of heavy snowfalls, to protect trees against damage by the weight of the snow, although it seems to have progressed beyond that, into a culture of preserving old trees in general.

They say travel is the best teacher. After this trip, I agree wholeheartedly. There is so much to learn from other cultures. And Japan being an island that has had a long period of self-imposed isolation (before the West ended the isolation in the mid nineteenth century) has meant Japan has many interesting cultural traditions that are unique to it. When one drops “my culture is the best” stance, and starts to look at various cultures with an open mind, to learn something from each of them, travel becomes meaningful beyond just an escape. There is so much wisdom in the world, scattered through lands and culture, religions and philosophies, that a life is never going to be enough to learn it all, but we can try to do our best.

I discovered Questlove (Ahmir K. Thompson, the African American Drummer, and much much more) accidentally when his book “Music Is History” landed in my recommendations on Audible. The book blew my mind. I mean, I’m very close to completing my fifth decade on this earth, and yet, I've not learned that I know nothing. But anyway, I hungrily picked up another of his book: “Hip-Hop is History”, and it starts with a mention of his “film project” about the forgotten “Black Woodstock”. This got me interested, and I dropped the book and searched for the documentary by Questlove (I said “much much more, didn’t I?).

Summer of Soul, the documentary in question, has a secondary title in brackets “...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised”, won the 2022 Academy Awards for Best Documentary (Feature). And luckily, it was available on Hotstar. So I watched the two-hour documentary for about four hours. Taking notes, getting my eyes teared up, googling for this or that. And it’s crazy that I didn’t know of the documentary, and worse, the “Harlem Cultural Festival” in 1969, literally the same year of Woodstock.

Some interesting tidbits about the “Black Woodstock:

• About 300,000 people attended the event which was free for everyone

• Black Panthers provided the security before the cops finally arrived, but the Panthers hung around, not taking any chances

• The festival was taped, but the tapes had no takers, and were archived for decades

• Stretched over two months (six Sundays), it featured a stellar lineup

• The Moon landing happened on one of those Sundays. And CBS covered the festival in its context: “There was a large crowd gathered in Harlem this afternoon. For some of the reactions …” says the CBS anchor in the footage in the documentary, handing it over to Bill Plante, the correspondent who says, almost condescendingly: “ There are 40,000, perhaps 50,000 people at Mount Morris Park in Harlem, but they are not here watching the moon landing. They are here at the Soul Festival, part of the third annual Harlem Cultural Festival. And for many of them, this is far more relevant than the mission of Appolo 11”.

It’s a fascinating documentary about an event that should have been in our collective memories and popular history, but strangely was relegated to the forgotten corners of American history, to be unearthed fifty years later. I’d highly recommend if you are interested in music, the history of music, the history of racism, or just want to discover some great artists and be exposed to some stupendous cultural commentary.

Culinary World

One of the finds on YouTube Food Universe for me is America’s Test Kitchen, the Cook’s Illustrated channel, specifically, their sub-stream: Techniquely With Lan Lam. I love her calm, composed, and confident delivery, as she teaches about culinary techniques. The video that got me hooked is this one: “For Better Browned Meat and Veggies, Just Add Water”. Now if you thought that she’s magically browning meat/veggies with water, of course, that’s impossible (at least on earth, it’s possible at 4 times the atmospheric pressure, where you have other problems than browning foods efficiently). The Maillard reaction that is needed for browning starts above 140°C, and all the water in the pan would have evaporated long before that temperature is reached. But what this interesting method does is that it saves time, and more importantly, it leads to an “even” cooking as the surface of the food browns.

It is a game changer, seriously, for stuff like onions that can go from pink to brown to black in no time if high heat is used, and take forever to cook on low heat (leading to painfully slow browning), and not to mention, the uneven cooking that comes with it — the burnt surface with relatively raw insides. Check out this video for more (also for the excellent sauce for baked/braised chicken that comes with it):

Word World

It was through Iranian Rappers and Persian P*rn, a travelogue by Jamie Maslin (an a OK book, if you ask me) that I learned about the origin of the word “assassin”. What’s certain is that the word is a Roman makeover of ḥashshāshīn, a Persian word that is allegedly a pejorative for a worthless person.

The Wikipedia entry for “The Assassins” says:

The Assassins were founded by Hassan-i Sabbah. The state was formed in 1090 after the capture of Alamut Castle in the Alborz mountain range of Persia, which served as the Assassins' headquarters. The Alamut and Lambsar castles became the foundation of a network of Isma'ili fortresses throughout Persia and Syria that formed the backbone of Assassin power, and included Syrian strongholds at Masyaf, Abu Qubays, al-Qadmus and al-Kahf. The Western world was introduced to the Assassins by the works of Marco Polo^[4] who understood the name as deriving from the word hashish

Jamie Maslin tells a story of this Ismaili cult that allegedly lured its followers with maidens and get them to kill religious and political leaders under the influence of hashish":

His group were widely feared and for good reason, as they weren’t adverse to a bit of beastly barbarity—their specialty being the murder of religious and political leaders. It’s purported the assassins’ crafty leaders would lure their followers into the castle’s beautiful gardens where irresistible maidens would tend to their every need and get them hopelessly stoned out of their minds on hashish. Nothing wrong with that, but on the downside they would then be sent out to commit murder under the belief that their leader, Hasan Sabah, had the magical power to protect them from harm’s way and that he could whisk them off to paradise.

Interestingly, according to a Reddit post, the root of Hasheesh in Arabic is Hashsha, and the word Hashaash that derives from it means “to reap”. So ḥashshāshīn is literally “the reaper”, and here we complete a circle, if this is true.

Even the story about “promise of paradise” seems to be a made by the Crusaders to makes sense of the Fidayeen nature of the assassins’ attacks. Language and etymology are windows to history and myth in ways nothing else quite is.

All in all, a very interesting week of learning. Thanks for reading.

Links/References:

• NPR Review of Summer of Soul

• Questlove - Black Woodstock, Black Erasure & Black Joy | The Daily Show

• Interview of Questlove | MSNBC

• Assassin Etymology | Merriam-Webster

Word World

It never ceases to amuse me how languages evolve, and how words and phrases take on new meanings. As I explore more of the culinary world through food memoirs/blogs/podcasts, I keep coming across interesting words and phrases for concepts unique to specific cultures, or sometimes different words and phrases for the same concept in entirely unrelated cultures.

For instance, recently I learned that Korean has the word son-mat (손맛 ): a composite word “hand-taste”. Growing up in Marathi culture, far away, I’ve heard a Marathi sentence “तिच्या हाताला चव आहे” (her hand has taste, literally). I’m sure this is a pretty universal concept, even if not every language has a word for it.

Speaking of the “taste of the hand”, here is an interesting tidbit from the world of sourdough baking.

If you bake a lot of sourdough bread, your hands might look like your loaves. Bacterially speaking, that is. The microbes found on bakers' hands mirror the microbes within their starters — the bubbly mix of yeast, bacteria and flour that's the soul of every loaf.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/11/12/665655220/sourdough-hands-how-bakers-and-bread-are-a-microbial-match

Now we don’t know (or maybe we do, but I’m not sure) if these bacteria on the baker’s hand change the taste of the sourdough breads they bake, but we shouldn’t be terribly surprised if that were to be proven, right?

Anyways, that brings us to the phrase for this week: Fare la scarpetta.

This Italian phrase’s literal translation would be: to do the small shoe. What does that even mean, you ask? Well, it’s a phrase used for “licking the dish clean”. How is that related? Imagine taking the last small piece of bread and curling it into a small shoe-like shape to lick clean last of the pasta sauce on the dish. Why does Italian need a phrase for something like this? Because in typical Italian dishes, the sauce has all the intensified flavors (especially the ragu or such meat-based sauces, slow cooked over a long time) and to waste it on the plate would be, well, culinary sin. Okay, that’s my theory, but I’m pretty sure it’s not entirely off the point. But do read this for a little more context (there is also, supposedly, a class angle to this — including a rather “un-mannerly” act, especially for European culture, to lick a dish clean) La Scarpetta on Miko Davies Blog.

Podcast World

One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is Good On Paper by Atlantic where host Jerusalem Demsas and their guest challenge popular narrative with data with data. One of the recent episodes of this podcast takes a look at the legal “rights” of slaves before emancipation and the Civil War — especially for interactions between the blacks themselves, but even, curiously, between whites and blacks. Therein I learned another shade of meaning to the word “privilege”. While blacks had no formal constitutional rights like the whites, I learned, they were accorded some privileges that meant they had some sort of quasi-rights that were respected by other white people. While this doesn’t lessen the evil of slavery, it’s an interesting piece of information to learn about.

You can check out the episode here: Good on Paper: How Slaves Used the Law

Quote World

From podcasts to quotes on podcasts. Recently I listened to the Korea-related podcast episode on The Empire Podcast (William Dalrymple and Anita Anand). The American General Douglas MacArthur went rogue on President Truman, who fired him (MacArthur). Wikipedia article about General MacArthur refers to a Time article which quotes President Truman saying:

I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

This quote is so fantastical, that I had doubts about whether it’s true. Turns out there are doubts.

The source is Merle Miller, who in 1973 described remarks that Truman had allegedly made to him in interviews in 1961 and 1962. In 1974, Miller came out with an “oral biography” based on the interviews.

In a 2006 book, however, historian Robert Ferrell said that he had listened to the tapes and concluded that Miller’s book was “a gross literary fraud.” Miller, Ferrell wrote, “changed Truman’s words in countless ways, sometimes improving the literary effect. Adding or subtracting words, he thoughtfully added his own opinions. He inserted his favorite cuss words. . .

From https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/did-truman-really-call-macarthur-that/

BTW, he’s one of Donald Trump’s favorite Generals.

“We need you to be as bold and determined as the immortal General Douglas MacArthur, who knew that the American soldier never, ever quits” he said during an address at the United States Military Academy in 2020.

The learning: not all quotes are real. Even if they are on Wikipedia. Especially if?

Related Links:

• Trump’s 2020 Address at United States Military Academy.

• Introduction to Slavery and Class in the American South: an abstract

• The Empire Podcast Ep #173: The Koran War: Dividing the Peninsula

• Medium post: Scarpetta: The Italian Word for Dipping the Sauce on the Plate with a Small Shoe, or Bread