Author: JP

 

 

 

A new year is upon us, particularly if we are of the Gregorian persuasion when it comes to calendars. Even if we aren’t of that persuasion, it helps to have a label to refer to a bucket of time, particularly when said bucket comes in 365-day sizes. I hope and pray that every one of you has the opportunity to reach and extend your potential in the year to come, in 2015. I hope and pray that each and every one of you continues  to learn about life with passion and patience — and laughter in 2015. That’s what I wish for myself, and that’s what I wish for you.

It’s already been a big year for me. I started a new job yesterday, one that I hope and expect will be my last traditional job, at least for the next five or ten years. I loved the job I was doing; and yet I’ve always believed that

… to everything there is a season …

[RIP Pete Seeger, one of the many personal heroes of mine to have shuffled off this mortal coil last year. Thank you for entertaining and enlightening us. Credit must also go to Koheleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes, for providing the original inspiration].

[This gives me a reason to link to the wonderful Seekers version of the Seeger song. As if I needed an excuse.]

The season that is upon me now is one of great joy, as I look forward to becoming a grandfather. It seems only yesterday that I walked my eldest child down the aisle; “yesterday” was over five hundred days ago, and in a few weeks time a new generation of my family will walk this earth.

I am so very excited.

And yet.

The season that is upon me now is also one of considerable sadness, as I enter an age where I am required to attend funerals more often than marriages. Death and taxes are painful in their certainty. The generation that begat me and my wife is now approaching fourscore years on this earth; Ray Kurzweil notwithstanding, Father Time has been busy. And it’s not just my parents’ generation: a friend, colleague and erstwhile boss (from a few decades ago) passed away a couple of weeks ago; shortly before that, another good friend from that era lost his wife. My thoughts and prayers are with them and with any and all of you who were bereaved last year. May God go with you.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been quieter of late here. That’s not a temporary thing. As I grow older (I turned 57 a few weeks ago) I find myself listening more, reading more, thinking more.

I’m also spending time decluttering my life, putting things into order, cleaning up the detritus of decades. It’s been quite instructive doing that, having to decide what to keep and what to throw. And then having to decide how best to archive the “keepers” and how best to dispose of the rest. And then having to decide how best to share what I’ve done with others, so that the legacy lives on. Archives are only useful if people know they exist and can get to them easily and conveniently. In this context, David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous was salutary in its usefulness. If you haven’t read the book yet, may I suggest you rectify that state of affairs forthwith?

And so to 2015. Already a momentous year for me, with a new generation on its way soon. And a new set of opportunities to learn from every day at work.

Some years ago I was quoted as saying

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There is only life”. 

I haven’t changed my mind about it in the years since. There was a time when I lived my life in different non-overlapping compartments. Home. Work. Friends. Church. Pub. Bridge club. Golf club. That sort of thing. As I grew older, something strange happened. The compartments started merging. Over time it all became just one compartment. Life.

With that in mind I’ve tried to ensure that the things I think about, the things I read, the things I talk over with friends, the things I learn about and from, the things I work on —- I’ve tried to ensure that all these things have some common themes, some learning that I can take from one context and apply in others.

That’s what I will continue to do in 2015. For what it’s worth, here are some of the themes that will occupy me over the next twelve months:

Collaboration : Many of the problems we face today are global in nature and often interconnected: climate change, energy, water, food, disease, nutrition, youth unemployment, extremism, cybersecurity. Hitherto inalienable concepts like identity and privacy are under severe strain. The institutions that were designed to help solve global problems appear to be no longer fit-for-purpose, deeply ingrained with values that relates to obsolete political and economic orders.

Polarisation : It’s not just about institutional structures, there are cultural changes afoot as well. There’s a Blefuscudian aspect to everything nowadays, as people debate which end of the egg is the one that should be broken. Life used to be so much easier when people only argued about the mathematics of celestial beings atop sharp metal objects.

There was a time when two-party states worked, when terms like being elected, being in government and being in opposition meant something. Over the past four or five decades these meanings appear to have changed. People seem to be more hung up about being re-elected than about actually serving the people or for that matter governing. Years of subtle gerrymandering may have resulted in larger numbers of returning districts or constituencies becoming one-horse races, with increasing homogeneity of the electorate. Democracy is done a disservice in consequence, and it becomes harder to get anything done.

Modern “democratic” countries seem to be in the same boat as the global institutions they belong to, with governance models that aren’t quite fit-for-purpose. Every debate is filled with polemic and hatred, every argument is grounded in polarised and intractable starting points. Discussions that should have been about “true” or “false” are now carried out across the plane of “right” and “wrong”, a moralising fervour that can operate independent of the facts. [In this context I’m looking forward to seeing what Justin Farrell has observed about this phenomenon as he studied diverse contexts ranging from Yellowstone through KKK to BP]. The last two decades of arguments on climate change, on GMO, on fracking, these are symptomatic of this moralising malaise.

Increasing inequality:  The breakdowns in our ability to decide and to act are taking place at a very inconvenient time. Economic inequality appears to be on the rise globally, as does youth unemployment. “Failed state” is a term whose frequency is likely to go up; such environments become magnets for disaffected, disenfranchised constituencies, exacerbated by the inequality and endemic unemployment.

The need for objective, reliable data: These debates and dramas are taking place with a lot of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow about: there’s sound,  there’s fury, there’s idiocy, and quite a lot of nothing being signified. [And yes, it’s reasonable to charge me with being one of those idiots. My intention of talking less and listening more and thinking more and learning more is in the fervent hope I can become less of an idiot in the process.]

Many of you reading this post work in an “information age” job. Your time has come. Your skills are needed. Really needed.

That is why I agreed to serve as a trustee of the Web Science Trust some years ago, in the belief that the principles of the web are the very ones that can help turn back the waves of polarisation, disenfranchisement, disaffection and inequality.

That is why I agreed to serve as a trustee of the Computer History Museum, helping preserve and make accessible the artefacts of history of the Information Age.

Both these institutions are working on issues that need your help and support. If you want to get involved, do let me know.

That is why I have so enjoyed learning from Marc Benioff and all my till-a-few-days ago colleagues, working in an environment where the principles of the Foundation are deeply embedded in day-to-day activities, and where the tools, techniques and enablers of collaboration get adopted and adapted at frenetic pace.

New tools, new skills, new ways of approaching things: As with anything else, there’s always a sense of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. And yet I think there are some significant differences. We’re not going to solve many of the arguments we face without better, reliable, objective, emotional-frame-free data. Which means we’re going to have to learn much more about the provenance of the data, about corroboration and fact-checking, about the context in which the data was gathered, about the conventions used to represent the data, about the conditions under which the data was archived and made accessible.

We’re going to  have to learn much more about the “ownership” of the data, particularly as each and every one of us becomes a sensor at the edge of a hyperconnected world, augmented by orders of magnitude more sensors both around us as well as within us.

That in turn places considerable pressure on some of the ways we looked at identity, at privacy, at intellectual property. The rules and tools for these were all built for a time that is long past, a time that will not return.

We’re going to have to learn a lot more about how to make the data accessible and comprehensible to greater and greater numbers of people; we’re going to have to learn about “the future of search is verbs“; we’re going to have to ensure that open data is a natural part of our lives, at personal, corporate, state and even at global levels. If you say tomah-to and I say tomay-to, the risk of polarisation increases. In this context it’s worth looking closely at the sterling work being done by the Open Data Institute here in the UK. Yet another institution that deserves your support in all the forms that you can provide.

Yes, data is the lifeblood for this change: There’s so much more to learn about how we use and gain value from the investments we make individually and collectively in data.

There’s a collective intelligence viewpoint, where our ability to act as distributed sensors helps create the information base we need to inform us on a number of key debates. In such cases, there is often the likelihood of benefits accruing to society at the same time as harms accruing to the individual. We need to learn about this and ensure we do things the right way.

There’s a predictive analytics aspect, as we learn to spot patterns we could not see before, a sightedness that comes from having deeper, broader, more accurate and more accessible information.

Yes, data is the lifeblood of this change.

As I said before, many of you have the skills and motivation needed to make a difference.

in 2015, you have the opportunity as well.

Happy New Year.

 

 

 

Yesterday an old friend, Jael Silliman, someone I grew up with, posted an article about the disappearing Jewish community of Kolkata. [If you get the chance, you should read The Man With Many Hats, which she published last year. Powerful.] Our families were neighbours through the late 196os and throughout the 1970s, and in those days it was normal and civil for people to know their neighbours and be friends with them, even in big cities.  Jael’s sister was my first-ever girlfriend, and we still keep in touch, our families meet.

When I read Jael’s article, it took me back years, to a time I still think of as magical. The photographs above, taken from the article, represented people I knew, people I’d known since childhood. In fact Jael’s mother was the first adult to confer upon me the right to call her by her first name, something I found hard to do given my upbringing and conditioning. So Auntie Flower she remained and remains to this day.

The Calcutta I grew up in was as secular as I can imagine secular to be, a society where we weren’t just tolerant of others’ beliefs, we celebrated with one and all. At home and at school, a person’s faith was not an issue. We recognised that people of different faiths had different cultures, languages, diets and festivals. And we celebrated with one and all.

We understood when someone had come of age, and completed the requisite rituals. We knew the badges and tokens that signalled those rites of passage. We knew what it meant if one day your teenage classmate came to school with a shaven head, and offered our condolences in classic abrupt-yet-authentic schoolboy style.

Maybe I saw things from a narrow elitist point of view then: after all, I was part of an English-speaking family, at least two of my grandparents had graduated from university, I lived in fashionable “central” south Calcutta and went to a fee-paying Jesuit school and college. But from what I can remember, the tolerance I remember wasn’t born of relative affluence. Everybody celebrated Burra Din, it was a “great day” for all regardless of your beliefs or culture; everyone knew their Navroz from their Hannukah, their Navjote from their Bar Mitzvah. Everyone knew when it was Ramzan, when it was Id. [At school, this really mattered. Some of our best sportsmen were Muslims, and when Ramzan cut across the football season, some of our best players couldn’t play. Yup, Jesuit schools had Muslim students. And Hindus. And Parsees. And Sikhs. And everyone else.]

The “catholic boys” would have their First Communion and the Brahmin Hindus would have their Poitay, and both were treated with the deference and dismissiveness of youth. That went for all faiths, for all rites of passage. Respect the ritual and then move on.

Except for the food.

We never forgot the food.

Every rite, every ritual, every festival, every cause for religious celebration, meant an invitation. An invitation for everyone. Of course there were some closed areas, some holy-of-holies, some places you could not go. Of course there were things you couldn’t partake of, and others you wouldn’t partake of. People who ate beef spent time with those who worshipped sacred cows, without sense of conflict or tension or even hypocrisy. People who worshipped fire  and whose dead were placed in towers enjoyed the company of people who cremated their dead along with those who buried them underground.

Biryani and boti kabab, dhaba murgh and dhansak, dosas and idlis, coexisted peacefully with marcher jhol and sandesh and rossogolla.

We never forgot the food. Priorities.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Archives.

Jael has been spending time building momentum and support for collecting and making available archives to do with Calcutta Jews, and I was delighted to see how that’s been developing. Take a look at Recalling Jewish Calcutta and you will see what I mean. Incidentally, if you do spend time with those archives, make sure you watch the video of Flower Silliman explaining how to cook Aloo Makala. I will never forget the first Friday night I was invited to join the Sillimans (who lived two floors down from us) for Shabbat, and I was introduced to the dish. Heaven. You don’t know what I’m talking about until you’ve tasted Flower’s Aloo Makala.

There’s enough evidence to suggest that we human beings are born storytellers; even in my generation we had stories that were passed on through the ages by people who knew how to tell the stories, accompanied by people who knew how to listen to the stories. Telling and listening, two sides of the same action. Every good storyteller is a good storylistener, that’s how good storytellers are made, in the same way that every good teacher is a good learner. Learning and teaching, again two sides of the same coin. You can’t be good at one without being good at the other.

Of late, you can’t go anywhere without being told about the importance of narrative, of the stories. Not surprising, because we spent time, decades, in a broadcast age where the interactivity of storytelling was broken. [The same thing happened with education, and I wouldn’t argue with the hypothesis that many other forms of discourse and engagement, like government, got broken similarly].

So it appears we’ve rediscovered the importance of storytelling, even if we still have some way to go to rediscover the skill and the art of telling/listening. But it will happen.

And when it happens, it will happen in new and magical ways, because we’ve discovered the ability to persist our stories and to make them available easily and cheaply. Vorsprung durch technik.

So when I see the efforts that people like Jael make on building these archives, I want to help, and I want to make sure that others who feel similarly can help as well. Expect to see a coda to this post explaining how to donate to this and similar archival causes.

Incidentally, the kind of internet and the kind of web conceived by people like the ones below was founded on principles of freedom, of democratisation and affordable access. [Three of my all-time heroes: Tim Berners-Lee, John Perry Barlow, Vint Cerf, all in one photograph, what more could I ask? ]

 

Archives aren’t just about preserving our past, our roots, our stories, our heredity; they form part of the fabric of our present and our future, and today we have the ability to augment our storytelling and our story listening with web-based archives. Augment, not replace. Augment.

[Incidentally, my first foray into the Internet Archive was when I was hunting for something specific. Grateful Dead music. John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was one of the first documents I read that made me begin to understand what the two other people in the photograph above had wrought, with the help of many others].

I’ve been researching my own roots using the web, and for some years now I’ve been Reconstructing My Grandfather; I never really knew him, and I feel I will understand my father better by getting to know his father, albeit while remote in time and space. I recognise it’s a real privilege for me to be able to do that, a privilege made possible by the internet and the web. And by archivists. Worldwide.

We may not listen to archivists, we may not think they speak, but the archivists are some of the key storytellers of our age.

Talking about stories. I saw this via the BBC early this morning. I’ve been following Matthew Teller’s Tales From The India Office for a little while now, and really enjoying it. It’s an amazing set of stories, and just think of the convoluted route by which they got to me. Online via the BBC, informing me about a ten-year partnership (of working on archives) between the British Library, the Qatar National Library and the Qatar Foundation. Go figure.

In the past, history may have been written by winners. History today is being written by participants and made available by archivists. Storytellers.

I just loved the story of the Official Who Put “Love To Patrick” In Letters To His Boss. The obituary extract of this official’s predecessor is itself spellbinding:

 

This morning, as I read about Love To Patrick, my brain was still jangling with what Jael had written about. So on a whim I searched the British Library/Qatar archives for “Calcutta”.

And, amongst many other things, this is what I found:

 

Full circle. The Basra Date Palm. Requested for the Botanical Gardens in Calcutta. Basra, whence Jael and her antecedents came to Calcutta in the first place. It may even be that the person who sent the plants later decided to follow those plants eastwards.

One day we will find out what happened. One day we will find out who Patrick was. One day I will know more about my grandfather and my father.

One day. Because of the passion of archivists. And because of the vision of people like Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, John Perry Barlow, amongst many others.

Archivists, wherever you are, I salute you. Thank you for all that you do.

Photo from Tumblr dedicated to climbing goats

When I moved to the UK in 1980, the curry enthusiast in me quietly died. “Indian” restaurants weren’t Indian. I’m not trying to be pedantic and distinguishing between Indian and Bangladeshi: in fact, as someone who was born in Calcutta and lived there for 23 years, Bangladeshi food would have been more recognisable by me than most other cuisines from India.

“Indian” restaurants weren’t Indian. A large number of them appeared to be run by people from Sylhet, but that wasn’t what made them UnIndian. It was the bill of fare. Meat Madras? What was that? Chicken Vindaloo? Was that even possible? Lamb Kashmir? What were these things?

If someone told you that a restaurant was “European” what would you understand or expect? Smorgasbord accompanied by moussaka, crepes fighting it out with blinis? Paella and provolone? Blood sausage and bufalo? Schnitzel and szczawiowa?

That’s how I felt when I was told I was in an “Indian” restaurant? Indian what? Indian how? Punjabi? Generally North Indian? Gujarati (and primarily vegetarian)? South Indian (and once again usually vegetarian?)? Bengali? Andhra? Anglo-Indian? Goan? What kind of Indian?

When I entered the restaurant, I was none the wiser. The menu might as well have been written in Finno-Ugric. So I starved. More importantly, I was starved of capsaicin. Home-cooked curries provided by well-meaning friends often contained apples and raisins and decades-old curry powder. Pubs began to offer curries as well, which usually meant someone had cooked a chili con carne and added some turmeric very late in the day to currify it. I starved.

It was hard to get used to the fact that most Indian restaurants had already adapted the cuisine to deliver what the local populace wanted; that vindalho and Bangalore and Phal and Rezala had just become shorthand for hot/very hot/very very hot/and so on, directed primarily towards the Dortmunder lager crew.

I starved. When I could afford to go to pricier Indian restaurants in London, and when I could afford to travel further, I found real Indian cuisine. Restaurants clearly signalling what kind of food they served, menus that contained things I recognised. But that took time.

There was a way out. A simple way out. And it was this. Go to one of the Sylheti Indian restaurants, speak in Bengali, ask for “staff curry”. And you were taken into the bosom of the restaurant, served what the workers would eat when they finished work, and it was heaven. A catch. You had to wait till nearly closing time before “staff curry” would be ready. But it was worth the wait.

One of the quirks of staff curry was that it was made up largely of leftover ingredients, so you weren’t sure what you would get. But it would be Bengali and spicy and recognisable and taste like heaven. There were other bonuses. Sometimes I would be asked to make sure I came back there a few days later, when they would have hilsa. What Calcuttan could resist?

Most days the staff curry was excellent. Occasionally it was way better than that. Meat that came on the bone as well as off, in succulent gently-chewy mouthfuls of manna. [Reminded me of Moira St neighbour Allan’s incredible pork curry, with the pork “boiled in oil” …. because the doctor said he couldn’t have fried food…]. There was something about the meat that took me back years, decades, half a life. So I had to ask. And they said “lamb”. I wouldn’t budge. So they said “mutton”. I was unmoved. They hummed and hawed. And confessed.

Goat.

Photo courtesy Sampaparispassion

Goat curry. What joy. And how I’d missed having it. I must have been 15 or 16 when I first had it, had it regularly for five or six years, and then missed it for a similar period. Never again.

That love for goat curry instilled a fascination for goats that has stayed with me ever since. Amazing creatures. They can climb anything, get anywhere.

 

 

When I first went to Capri I was struck by a number of things. How beautiful it all was, the magnificent views. The price of a cup of coffee. And the relative inaccessibility of the island. While arguments continue as to the origins of the name, the locals insisted it was “Goat Island”, a place dismissed by early would-be settlers on the basis that only goats could climb it. I’m with the locals.

A recent video that made its way to me via the internets makes this point forcefully:

The Huffington Post article also points t0 a Tumblr dedicated to goats standing on things.

Goats didn’t just give their name to the island of Capri. There is an argument that yet another of my staples, the wonderful caper, may come from the same root. While this is a topic of much dispute, I am comfortable with the view expressed by locals in many parts of Italy, Turkey and Cyprus: capers grow where only goats go.

If it walks like a goat and it talks like a goat, it’s a goat.

Where would I be without capers? For one thing, no puttanesca, which would be terrible. [Incidentally, there’s another row brewing over the origins of that dish].

Amazing creatures, goats. Naming constellations in the skies. Labelling islands in the sun. Pointing towards pieces of our food. Helping protect us and shoe us, even feed us. So many of my favourite Spanish cheeses are made from goat milk, particularly the tronchon.

The queso de tronchon even makes its way int0 my favourite book, Don Quixote. [Incidentally, I collect anything and everything to do with Don Quixote. Different editions of the book, in different languages, with different illustrators. Figures and figurines. Objects ranging from buttons and necklaces and boxes and book covers through to bottles and even tables and cabinets. If it’s Don Quixote, I’m interested. I have a few hundred items already, so I may not bid for everything].

Amazing creatures, goats.

I know, it’s been a while since I posted anything at all. Been busy reading, listening to people, thinking. Lots to think about. More of that later.

Maccher jhol. A spicy fish stew common in eastern parts of India, principally in West Bengal and Orissa. [I suspect it’s common in Bangladesh as well, I just haven’t experienced eating it there].

It’s spicy, it’s pungent, and so I don’t get the chance to cook it that often. I’ve had a few days to myself at home, and I didn’t pass up the opportunity.

Some of you wanted me to share the recipe. This I am doing. But I decided I’d go one step further and talk about openness in general using the construct of a recipe to illustrate what I’m trying to say.

Recipes are nothing more than sets of ingredients with instructions on how to combine those ingredients using a set of tools in some standardised way to make something consistently edible, perhaps even pleasing, as a result. Inputs. Some planned outputs. Instructions as to how to get to the outputs from the inputs. Instructions on the use of the tools, implements and equipment required.

You get my drift?

Now let’s move on to making a recipe “open”. What would such a recipe look like?

1. Open and unfettered access to the recipe itself, in as simple a form as possible

First and foremost, make sure that the content of the recipe can be got to by anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere. Unfettered. No lets or hindrances. Today, the commonest way someone has access to something is when it’s in text and available on the internet, readable by a browser without any proprietary plug-ins, not requiring some other software to “read” the recipe. Tomorrow, text and reading may not be the answer, or at least not the only answer. Maybe people will start listening to things again, or watching, or imitating. Maybe their choice will depend on their profile, their preferences, the constraints they operate under. I recognise that this post is not open enough just by it being in English. Which means that someone else will have to translate it in order to enfranchise non-English speakers. Which in turn means that I have to avoid using idiom in the recipe proper. “Add a smidgen of paprika here” may not be suitable for machine translation; paprika will work but smidgen may prove difficult. You say tomayto and I say tomaht0. Bear that in mind.

2. Based on using common tools, techniques and equipment

I don’t like using microwave ovens. I have used them, but usually when others want me to heat something up for them. But at least I have a microwave oven, which means I don’t get left out if a recipe requires me to use one.

It’s something to think about. Sometimes I’m looking around for a recipe and I see words like “Now use a food processor to….” and my heart sinks. Or “at this stage insert a meat thermometer into…”. Not everyone has a food processor or a meat thermometer. For some people, even “Now weigh out precisely 2 ounces of…” is a problem. When you start thinking global, you have to understand what equipment, tools and techniques are truly common, are truly likely to be generally available. That’s core to an understanding of openness.

3. Presenting ingredients in a way that bits can easily be substituted

People will want to substitute bits for a variety of reasons. The commonest one is that of availability. For maccher jhol, eelish or hilsa is not that easy to get in the UK. [I know where and how to get it, but it’s always frozen and never locally sourced]. As we learn to care more deeply about local sourcing of ingredients, we have to think harder about how recipes are presented. The next commonest reason is that of preference, for religious or lifestyle reasons. Dishes involving beef or pork or shellfish or for that matter meat in general need to have a level of substitutability built in. For that matter, there may be someone who prefer to go hungry rather than eat tofu, so they too need to be accommodated. Once you’ve dealt with availability and preference, the main reason you’re left with is allergy or equivalent, an inability to cope with a particular ingredient. Some of my US friends have an aversion to coriander, or at least to what they call cilantro. I’m told there are large groups of people who will not eat garlic under any circumstances. And sometimes it’s more shades-of-grey: my family will handle only the low end of the Scoville Index when it comes to capsaicin, and they are not alone. For a recipe to be global and open and accessible, options on substitutability must be built in. Now this doesn’t have to be done in a spoonfed way, and not necessarily for every ingredient either. Common sense should be allowed to prevail. At the very least we need to be able to avoid branded lock-in ingredients; once that is done, perhaps all that is necessary is for the main two or three ingredients to have substitutes identified in the instructions.

On to the recipe for Maccher Jhol itself.

I find that a photograph of ingredients often helps me understand what’s going on. Now that may prove a problem for someone who only has access to text, or who’s listening to this post, so I have to make sure that the ingredients are clearly listed rather than just shown.

It’s also helpful to start the recipe with a clear indication of a few things, even before we come to ingredients and instructions. The number of servings. The minimum equipment needed. The total preparation time. So it is with instructions for anything. Think about the customer.

The first part of the recipe should deal with these criteria.

 

Fish stew; Eastern Indian style; no nuts, no wheat; you select the “heat” level

4 servings

A kadhai or wok or circular frying pan with deep sides is best, but any frying pan will do.

Total preparation and cooking time: 40 minutes.

Ingredients

8oz or 225gm of a firm fish, cleaned, filleted if needed and cut into half-inch slices (the original dish uses hilsa or rohu, a form of carp. You can use other carps or even salmon or trout. You don’t have to de-scale the fish).

1 large potato, sliced sideways. You can leave the skin on. [Here I am avoiding the word “scallop” in case it doesn’t translate].

1 bulb garlic, peeled and chopped finely

2 large tomatoes, chopped crudely

5 shallots, peeled and chopped into slices (use 2 medium red onions if you can’t get shallots).

1 cup peas (if you prefer, use cauliflower or gourd).

4 chillies, trimmed and cut lengthwise. (Remove seeds if you want it milder. Leave out altogether if you don’t like chillies).

1 bunch coriander, chopped fine. (Use scissors rather than a knife).

1 inch ginger, chopped fine.

2 tsp salt

2 tsp cumin powder

2 tsp coriander powder

1 tsp dried powdered ginger

Half cup mustard oil (if not available use vegetable oil)

2 tsp mustard paste (only if mustard oil is unavailable)

1 tsp turmeric

1 bay leaf (optional)

2 tbsp plain yogurt (optional)

1 cup water

1/2 cup fish stock (optional)

1 tsp sugar

2 cups rice

Cooking instructions:

Step 1: Prepare the ingredients. Clean, cut, slice, chop as needed to get to the list above. When you finish, you should have something that looks like this:

Step 2: Take half a teaspoon of the cumin, coriander and turmeric powders, mix with the mustard oil and optional yogurt, and rub the mixture into the flesh of the fish. If you’re not using mustard oil, use vegetable oil and the 2 teaspoons of mustard instead, but leave out the yogurt in that case. Set the fish aside.

Step 3: Pour the remaining oil into the kadhai or wok. Heat the oil; once the oil’s hot, gently slide the fish slices in, cooking until they begin to brown, on medium heat, turning over once. Remove the fish and set aside. In a separate pan, boil water for the rice. Once the water’s boiling, add one tsp of salt, bring to boil, add the rice.

Step 4: Add the remaining cumin, coriander, turmeric, salt. Stir. Add the potato slices. Saute on medium heat until the slices begin to brown.

Step 5: Add everything except for one handful of chopped coriander, the water, fish stock and sugar. Stir gently for a minute. Then add the water and the fish stock (if you’re using it). Reduce to a simmer.

Step 6: Add the sugar. Stir. Bring back the fish. Stir very gently. Cover and let the whole thing simmer for five minutes.

Step 7: Drain the rice. Serve the rice on to plates or bowls. Take the stew off the heat, garnish with the coriander, serve.

 

 

Happy eating.

Let me know what you thought of this post, of the recipe, of the ideas behind this post, what worked for you, what didn’t.

And thanks for reading this far.

 

I learnt yesterday that the Cotswold village of Little Rollright was up for sale for the princely sum of £18m. My first reaction? I wonder if Steve Winwood knows about this. Why? Because somewhere in the back of my mind, a song started playing:

 

Many of these

Can be seen

In quiet places, fields of green

Of hedgerow lanes with countless names

But the only thing that remains

Are the Roll Right Stones

Winwood/Capaldi, Roll Right Stones: Traffic: Shootout at the Fantasy Factory, 1973

 

I can still remember the first time I heard the song, the first time I held a bashed-up copy of the album in my hands. I can still remember wondering whether all Traffic albums were shaped like this:

 

The only other Traffic album I’d seen and touched was The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, an album I loved so much I now own the original artwork to the cover below. I don’t think anyone else bid for it at the auction!

:

 

I’d heard other Traffic albums, but I’d never actually seen those in the flesh: usually they were copies of copies on cassette tape, this was Calcutta in the early 1970s. “Foreign” albums took time to get there, if ever. No Traffic album was ever released locally, so we relied on the booming Grateful-Dead-Taper-like trade in informally recorded cassettes, the higher the quality, the higher the price. Pre-recorded cassettes were rare, as were original LPs. For these, we were beholden to the influx of hippies eager to convert their vinyl into various other substances, usually of the smoking variety. [And yes they inhaled, Mr President]. There were other routes, but rare and sparse. We could go down to the Kidderpore Docks and walk down Smuggler’s Row there, to see if there were any Taiwanese “imports” of our favourite music there: photocopied covers sealed in thin polythene, Chinese titles and descriptions, cheap ultralight vinyl. Very rarely, someone in our circle of acquaintances, usually very well-heeled, would actually leave India’s shores and bring some albums back. Occasionally, foreign diplomats would hold some sort of yard sale as they disposed of their belongings before moving on, and you could get rich pickings there. But most of the time, it was off to Free School St to tap into the hippie trade.

 

I can’t help but smile as I think of myself singing along with Roll Right Stones without a clue as to what the lyrics meant. No internet. No Web. No Wikipedia. No personal computer. No mobile phone.

But I was curious, so I found out, once it was possible for me to find such things out. When you’re passionate about music you’re interested in everything about music: the people, the places, the times, everything. I was lucky to be born at a time when the vein of music was rich. I still spend most of my time listening to the albums made between the early 1960s and the mid 1970s, there are probably over a thousand really good albums made then. Of course I listen to Indian classical music, particularly flute; to Western classical music through the ages; to various forms of jazz; to a lot of folk; and even to some stuff made since 1974. I’m sure there’s been incredible music produced since, incredible music produced before. I just don’t have the time to listen to everything, and if I had to choose, then choosing the music that’s familiar to me is a natural thing to do. Especially when it’s so good.

Such specialisation leads to joyous possibilities. I’ve been able to watch many of my 1960s and 1970s heroes perform live, in concert. I’ve been able to meet a bunch of them personally, have conversations with them.

And I’ve been able to visit places that were just phrases in songs until I visited them.

Like Roll Right Stones. Or Penny Lane. Or Strawberry Fields. Sitting at the Albert Hall and thinking about holes in Blackburn. Standing on the platform at Preston, or walking down Hampstead Fair. Experiencing the fog on the Tyne. Finding out where Omemee was (though in the end I couldn’t get anyone to take me there. But I managed to get to Massey Hall). Passing Newport News and thinking about the Navy man stationed there, or seeing signs for Biloxi and asking myself, was Narcisissma from Pomona or Biloxi? I could go on, but won’t. You get my drift.

Sometimes my visits had tinges of sadness in them. Going past the Dakota Apartments; wandering around Pere Lachaise; listening to the music at Threadgills; having steak at Croce’s. [Incidentally, if you’re ever in San Diego, make sure you go there. Especially if you’re a fan of Jim Croce. Ingrid Croce is still there most days.

There are places I remember.

Whatever our memories, we tend to remember the people we were with when those memories were formed. The places we were. The times we had. The music we listened to. The food we ate. The books we read.

People, places and times. The basis of memories.

Music, food and books. So often, triggers to those memories, embedded in our senses. Not just sight and sound and taste, but touch and texture too, even smell. Like smelling the valves heating up in the radio as it came on.

We live in a connected world where everything can be recorded, and our very concept of memory will be challenged. Recorded things can be changed more easily than what’s in our heads.

We live in a world where we use our senses to engage with information, perhaps like we used to do. No more keyboards, no more printed material. And that too will come with its challenges.

We can spend hours, perhaps days, arguing about how our world is being made worse by technology. It’s not the technology, it’s what we do with it.

A point made beautifully by Yiibu here. People in emerging nations are doing magical things with those very technologies.

In the meantime, I give thanks that I can write a post like this, making all the references I want to make, using a medium that others can read all over the world, if they so choose.

There are places I remember.