Day: 21 April 2009

…you got to make the morning last
just kicking down the cobblestones
looking for fun and feelin’ groovy
Hello lamppost,
What cha knowing?
I’ve come to watch your flowers growing.
Ain’t cha got no rhymes for me?
Doot-in’ doo-doo,
Feelin’ groovy.
Got no deeds to do,
No promises to keep.
I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me.
Life, I love you,
All is groovy.

Simon and Garfunkel, The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)

Don’t you just love that song? All fresh and bubbly and oh so sixties.

But that’s not what this post is about. Instead, I wanted to use the first line of the song to talk about Capo. What a wonderful idea.

Take a song. Slow it down. Change pitch if you want. I haven’t done much with it as yet, I only have a trial version, but for sure I’m going to get the real thing. Capo is doing with music what Ribbit is doing with voice. All possible because we live in a digital age.

My thanks to Chris Messina for the heads-up.

[Disclosure: While I have nothing whatsoever to do with Capo, I am for sure involved with Ribbit.]

I love food. I love eating it, cooking it, preparing it, buying the ingredients. I love watching people cook. I love researching food culture and habit and folklore and history.

Yes, I love food. I love everything about food.

One of my all-time favourite dishes is made from ilish maach (a particular type of fish popular in Bengal), where the fish is cooked in mustard oil, with liberal use of mustard seed and chillies. When cooked properly, it looks something like this:

[My thanks to Indranil Sen and Jayashree Roy for the photo and for their wonderful recipe, which can be found here in Palki.]

I didn’t just come across this recipe randomly, I spent some time looking around the web for the right one: I was particularly interested in demonstrating a sense of the rich gravy that dominates my memory of the dish. And along the way I came across this article: The Mustard Oil Conspiracy. I’d read a good deal of Vandana Shiva’s work before, in particular those tracts and booklets related to the join between food and patents, but I hadn’t come across this one before. Unbelievable.

And you know something? More and more, I’m realising the truth of what people like Rishab Aiyer Ghosh and John Perry Barlow and Larry Lessig have been saying all along. Today’s battles about IPR aren’t about commerce, they’re about culture. There’s nothing more cultural than food.

Recent events suggest things are going from bad to worse now; the optimist in me thinks it’s “the darkest hour before the dawn”.

What next? I guess we should wait patiently for people to be arrested for selling kitchen equipment. On the basis that the equipment was used to cook food using “illegally” obtained recipes. Or something as ridiculous as that.

Yes, things will get ridiculous if we let them. Or sublime, as in the case of ilish maach. Our choice.