Monday 5 October 2015

Cooking Heals: PITFB Fried rice and pyaazi

With the playback project i realized that the season of losing had begun. It all started with people telling me that i had lost weight. Soon after i lost my cinematographer. D Jeet let me know that he wouldn't be working with me in Diploma project. One week into prep (Pre-production) my producer and line producer withdrew from the project because Ramana, my producer wouldn't be in Kolkata during the time of shoot. Oh yes, even before that Aalayam, my editor had let Ramana know that he wouldn't be working with me. His department started forcing me to work with him and i as usual didn't budge. I approached my senior, Subha, and he agreed to edit for me. This is outside the rules, so basically i am royally screwed.

D Jeet and i started going on recce without a producer and without money and almost decided upon a location. But while this was happening an epiphany happened to me one morning. Vai Vow came with the good news that his film had been selected for Munich film festival and they would even provide for his to and fro travel. I got really excited and laughed. Then he said victoriously that a lot of films had been sent and only his was selected. That sentence hit me hard in the head. The obsessive compulsive that i am i couldn't hear anything else after that. Even though i had not thought of that aspect till then the realization struck a severe blow that i felt i was bleeding. What he said made me think that my own work will never ever be selected anywhere and that my own film making was absolute crap. I didn't know how to make films. I started crying. It looked really funny and embarrassing. I was crying after having heard a good news. Vai Vow was worried and i tried all i could to make him understand that it had nothing to do with him or with what he said, it was just one of those lines which made you think of all things under the sun and feel like shit. So i cried till afternoon, got a terrible headache and then slept on it.

I started working from the start like how i had after my DV film which was certified shit. I was back to square one. I felt like a loser. I was depressed. So i turned to cooking. That is how i decided to make fried rice after one night i tasted the fried rice they made at the mess and felt sorry for people who ate it.

Like i said i like the colours while cooking. Hence the customary picture of beans and carrot. I used my favourite gobindobhog rice. I prepared it the previous night. It was still a little sticky. I made raita (salad) because Vai Vow loves it and had a bit of it myself (i hate curd in most forms, raita is still okay).


I used her recipe which she said always ended up looking indian somehow. I like flawed food. It makes me feel at home.
Then when i was sad again after a few days (i swear sadness after break up is so much better than sadness after life changing realizations) i decided to make pyaazi which is ullivada of non-mallus. I got the recipe from the most energetic cook on screen i have seen, Mia Kitchen. Sometimes after attending screening at main theatre most of us make a stop at the couple which makes pyaazi, aloo bhaja, gobi ka pakoda etc next to hardworking tea shop . It was when Subha once, some months ago gave me a pyaazi from his packet that i realized what they were selling and what was called pyaazi was ullivada. So i was again a loser who never had that for over two years of being here.




Anyway the ullivada i made tasted good. I had it with a little ketchup. Since we ate all of it before sethuvamma came i will make it one of these days. I can also try and prove that even though i didn't learn how to make films, i learned how to make ulli effing vada