Not just a spice blend..
Food grown and obtained directly from earth gives me a serene humility as it makes me appreciate us humans as just another species among millions of others who share this beautiful planet. Playing with dirt and plowing in a field even for a day makes one respect this earth a little bit more each day, and realize that we will all eventually turn into dust in mother earth’s embrace. With the current state of drought here in our country, it is a humbling experience to realize the fragility of humanity regardless of where we are on earth. Such events also make us stop for a moment and trace back our deep connection with nature and it's child - the farmer. It is said that farming was humanity's first profession. And perhaps not just a profession but the cradle of civilizations. From Indus river valley to river Nile, one can still stand in the ruins and imagine the cultures of human society that were being born around 5000 years ago. And they all were built on agriculture that thrived on the fertile river valleys. Farming was a way of life for humanity and looking back, one can see where the spirit of human resilience and hard work came from.
I was born and raised as a city kid who never really experienced a rural farmer's relationship of nature and nurture. Food came from grocery stores and boxed/canned/processed food was the 'real food'. And I really did not understood the concept of hard work behind the delicacy on my dinner table. Coming to the story itself I was never a vegan. Not even a vegetarian and loved my carefree microcosm of a world where being non-chalant was a sign of being 'rebellious.' Seeing my mom and aunts grind and blend spices using old-school stone mortar and pestle was an experience in futility for me, so I would argue in favor of boxed spices and instant mixes. Although close, I am glad I could not convince my mom to completely give up her masala grinding ritual.
The thing is – my paternal grandma and grandpa died even before I was born. All that was left of my grandma's legacy was this vegetable spice blend that took hours of grinding, tasting, grinding, tasting, tweaking this and that condiment, until my mom’s subjective tasting would finely agree to grandma’s spice blend recipe. All I was concerned with was the savory gourmet weekend after weekend. I also knew that this effort on my mom’s part was a sign of love for my dad as perhaps the taste was nostalgic to him and a fading reminiscence of his rural up-bringing and his own mom. He would always tell us jokingly that grandma taught my mom how to cook. The truth though is that my grandma taught both of my parents to cook.
Since I did not even have the slightest memory or clue about my grandma as a living person, I could never feel the human connection that a simple sense of taste could bring. This all changed during my time in medical school where I wasn’t prepared to see what I saw and experienced. The subtleties of what makes us human are sometimes lost between the lines of utopian idealism and enigmatic prose. People become statistics and feelings become an expanse of medical jargon built and fabricated on biological obfuscation. I say this because I was there when the earthquake toll rose from 73 missing to 75,000 dead in 24 hours.
I was born and raised as a city kid who never really experienced a rural farmer's relationship of nature and nurture. Food came from grocery stores and boxed/canned/processed food was the 'real food'. And I really did not understood the concept of hard work behind the delicacy on my dinner table. Coming to the story itself I was never a vegan. Not even a vegetarian and loved my carefree microcosm of a world where being non-chalant was a sign of being 'rebellious.' Seeing my mom and aunts grind and blend spices using old-school stone mortar and pestle was an experience in futility for me, so I would argue in favor of boxed spices and instant mixes. Although close, I am glad I could not convince my mom to completely give up her masala grinding ritual.
The thing is – my paternal grandma and grandpa died even before I was born. All that was left of my grandma's legacy was this vegetable spice blend that took hours of grinding, tasting, grinding, tasting, tweaking this and that condiment, until my mom’s subjective tasting would finely agree to grandma’s spice blend recipe. All I was concerned with was the savory gourmet weekend after weekend. I also knew that this effort on my mom’s part was a sign of love for my dad as perhaps the taste was nostalgic to him and a fading reminiscence of his rural up-bringing and his own mom. He would always tell us jokingly that grandma taught my mom how to cook. The truth though is that my grandma taught both of my parents to cook.
Since I did not even have the slightest memory or clue about my grandma as a living person, I could never feel the human connection that a simple sense of taste could bring. This all changed during my time in medical school where I wasn’t prepared to see what I saw and experienced. The subtleties of what makes us human are sometimes lost between the lines of utopian idealism and enigmatic prose. People become statistics and feelings become an expanse of medical jargon built and fabricated on biological obfuscation. I say this because I was there when the earthquake toll rose from 73 missing to 75,000 dead in 24 hours.
Years later, my scientific idealism was again shaken as a physician when I saw patients become 'subjects' and psychiatrists becoming victims of their own confabulation – the DSM-IVR. And this all brought me back to square one in my quest to know who and what I am. While science may provide the mechanistic understanding behind what we are, it will never have the answer to why? Perhaps we will never really know the true ‘why’ behind our existence, but this all ignited in me the passion to not limit myself in only asking the ‘What’ and ‘How’ of things. Asking ‘why’ behind the everyday things that we do may look like a futile lust for apocryphal tales, but this is what makes us human. And isn’t this what art is, or what science was supposed to be?
So upon digging my long-gone grandparents’ lives, I did find the why behind their Do-It-Yourself spice blend recipe. No, they were not exotic foodies, nor were they taste obsessed; they simply made their spices because there was no concept of boxed or bottled mixes. And their vegetarian-/veganism wasn’t based on poetic philosophy (since they never learned to read or write), they could only eat what they could grow! And when one's whole life food choices are divided between eggplant or lentil soup daily, it is only logical for one to go out of the way and create something unique only measured by a subjective feeling. And this is how I became part of the maker movement, since all that textbook inspiration I was looking to find was already there in my ignorant and illiterate ancestors.
This is why I surprised my mom when I expressed this intention to learn my grandma’s recipe. Since then, there are days when I feel extremely blessed, because savoring a good home-cooked meal is sometimes all one needs to forget the day’s struggles and sleep in peace. I wouldn’t lie when I say that this spice blend made me experiment more with cooking, and finally I was able to actually enjoy my vegetables – and the possibilities became endless since I could tweak the spice blend to my taste. The simple joy and pleasure in creating unique cuisines is as satisfying as Impression, soleil levant was perhaps for Monet. Art and creativity always intrigued me, but my school and work never gave me enough time to explore my interests. And thanks to this spice blend, my new fantasy with ‘why’ of things not only opened a world of artistic beauty, but also gave a meaning to my quest for brain science.
Without going on a long tangent, I will say just this much that music became a window in to the musician’s mind, art into the artists and written words into a writer’s mind. Scientific discovery itself became reinvigorating as I read more about the scientist than his science. I could actually imagine the larger-than-life creative demagogues as living and breathing humans with their own frustrations and self-doubt.
The October 2005 earthquake in Kashmir region changed my perception of life and its purpose. I used my rare medical school vacation after that life-changing earthquake experience to visit my grandparents’ village and the rural Punjab in scorching summer heat to learn more about my ancestors. What was supposed to be a small journey turned into a life-changing pilgrimage of self-discovery. I experienced communal living in its original form; not as an ideology or philosophy but because this is the only way of living these simple folk knew. They all shared the same water source for their crops, same pastures for their cattle, same rains, floods, droughts and harvests. Societal coherence in times of both hardship and happiness were the true embodiment of human spirit. While poor road infrastructure and extreme poverty had restrained the spread of mechanized farming, this did not stop them from their ancestral farming profession. They all tilled their lands together and sang beautiful mystical poetry as they sat around a ‘hookah’ at night and got lost in deep introspection under fading embers.
Coming back to my urban life that mostly involved spending time in the hospital, I started becoming conscious of little things that I never noticed before. What seemed to be the epitome of my life few years ago now felt weightless. I looked back at the effort that went behind superficial medical school admission essays and 10-page lists of honors and awards. Later in clinics, how routine it was to call patients as subjects and the false pretense of superiority, which has sadly become a hallmark of medical education today. No matter how much love me and my medical peers could claim for our patients, we simply had no clue what poverty and a life without jobs, education or dreams felt like. We all complained about our petty issues in life and endlessly argued over the theatrics of political bickering, while in reality we did not have the slightest clue about the people who created the precious commodities that surround us. Yes, that is when I got rid of my TV and really longed to just sleep at night in wild and look at stars. The kind of vacation that I and my friends would pay an arm and a leg for, is these rural folk’s everyday lifestyle out of necessity. Candle-lit dinners, grilled food and a lullaby of flowing streams; I finally understood what it meant when they say that poverty is a state of mind.
In the vast fields of Punjab, I was surprised to see the gleaming pride in the rural farmer’s eyes. While I cringed with a feeling of pity for their poverty, it wasn’t until my second long trip that I realized how much pity they felt on my worldview. During my final year of medical school, I remember asking my mom why people wear ridiculously bright and colorful clothes in Punjab.
“When you do not really own much and toil in the dirt every day, it gets difficult to see negativity or be depressed. Superficial fallacies do not define you. Your personality is not hidden behind label clothing and it is fun to make your own garments” was her reply.
It really made me see how ignorantly self-absorbed I was as I realized I could not stitch or mend my own clothes. Months later, to the same question I would receive a much simpler reply ‘color makes us happy’ by more than one rural farmer.
My last days in medical school were spent discovering the countless mystic poets who had lived this life in the same villages centuries ago. Reading Rumi, Bulleh Shah, Sachal Sarmast, Haq Bahu and many others was like a daily dressing of wounds in my soul. And the more I read, the more I found how their poetry is as fresh and deep today as it was centuries ago – ranging from everyday political stage theater to academic philosophy. Peace, love, respect for self-sustenance, tolerance, beauty and freedom were exactly the lessons that we needed as recession struck. What really surprised me a year later in my world travel (wandering) was the fact that completely disconnected indigenous cultures had all have their own people of wisdom who transcribed the same message.
From Pablo Neruda to Ernest Hemingway, ancient Lakota wisdom to Thomas Paine, Spinoza to Montesquieu, I gleamed with happiness to find the same message again and again. Reverence for the hands that plow the fields, that give life to an abstract idea in mind and that create something what was not there before. When I see the scientists, engineers, artists, makers, designers and creators around me, all I see is a rich embodiment of our common farming origins. We were farmers and we will always be farmers in our own unique ways. It is only when we lose touch with our origins that we lose our ability to find our way back home.
I jumped at the first opportunity when I was invited to celebrate the ‘vaisakhi’, which to my surprise and ignorance was a more revered tradition in these land-tillers than any religious festival. I saw people of all religion, caste and color get together and celebrate their commonness as simple humans with similar struggles. I saw for the first time a kind of dance that was completely outside of a club setting with no mention of sex, drugs, anger or racism. Music borne out of the earth for it's respect and not for money or fame. Bhangra was an icon of simplistic festivity that originated more than a thousand years ago to celebrate the harvesting season. It was the first time I really saw how and why this dance of contagious happiness was born. It was simply a farmer’s dance on beat of a single drum on seeing the land bear fruit after a season of daily toil and sweat. I will dance too if I tend to my plants and nurture them, protect them and feed them until they stand proud and beautifully laden with fruit and grain. As my dad says, harvesting for a traditional farmer is same as your child’s graduation from high school or college.
These farmers never relied on jobs, social security or anything but were happier than me. A completely illiterate, yet profoundly intelligent old tailor told me that the world belongs to people who use their hands to build – a message that I very vividly remembered years later as I heard Massimo Banzi’s TED talk.
So upon digging my long-gone grandparents’ lives, I did find the why behind their Do-It-Yourself spice blend recipe. No, they were not exotic foodies, nor were they taste obsessed; they simply made their spices because there was no concept of boxed or bottled mixes. And their vegetarian-/veganism wasn’t based on poetic philosophy (since they never learned to read or write), they could only eat what they could grow! And when one's whole life food choices are divided between eggplant or lentil soup daily, it is only logical for one to go out of the way and create something unique only measured by a subjective feeling. And this is how I became part of the maker movement, since all that textbook inspiration I was looking to find was already there in my ignorant and illiterate ancestors.
This is why I surprised my mom when I expressed this intention to learn my grandma’s recipe. Since then, there are days when I feel extremely blessed, because savoring a good home-cooked meal is sometimes all one needs to forget the day’s struggles and sleep in peace. I wouldn’t lie when I say that this spice blend made me experiment more with cooking, and finally I was able to actually enjoy my vegetables – and the possibilities became endless since I could tweak the spice blend to my taste. The simple joy and pleasure in creating unique cuisines is as satisfying as Impression, soleil levant was perhaps for Monet. Art and creativity always intrigued me, but my school and work never gave me enough time to explore my interests. And thanks to this spice blend, my new fantasy with ‘why’ of things not only opened a world of artistic beauty, but also gave a meaning to my quest for brain science.
Without going on a long tangent, I will say just this much that music became a window in to the musician’s mind, art into the artists and written words into a writer’s mind. Scientific discovery itself became reinvigorating as I read more about the scientist than his science. I could actually imagine the larger-than-life creative demagogues as living and breathing humans with their own frustrations and self-doubt.
The October 2005 earthquake in Kashmir region changed my perception of life and its purpose. I used my rare medical school vacation after that life-changing earthquake experience to visit my grandparents’ village and the rural Punjab in scorching summer heat to learn more about my ancestors. What was supposed to be a small journey turned into a life-changing pilgrimage of self-discovery. I experienced communal living in its original form; not as an ideology or philosophy but because this is the only way of living these simple folk knew. They all shared the same water source for their crops, same pastures for their cattle, same rains, floods, droughts and harvests. Societal coherence in times of both hardship and happiness were the true embodiment of human spirit. While poor road infrastructure and extreme poverty had restrained the spread of mechanized farming, this did not stop them from their ancestral farming profession. They all tilled their lands together and sang beautiful mystical poetry as they sat around a ‘hookah’ at night and got lost in deep introspection under fading embers.
Coming back to my urban life that mostly involved spending time in the hospital, I started becoming conscious of little things that I never noticed before. What seemed to be the epitome of my life few years ago now felt weightless. I looked back at the effort that went behind superficial medical school admission essays and 10-page lists of honors and awards. Later in clinics, how routine it was to call patients as subjects and the false pretense of superiority, which has sadly become a hallmark of medical education today. No matter how much love me and my medical peers could claim for our patients, we simply had no clue what poverty and a life without jobs, education or dreams felt like. We all complained about our petty issues in life and endlessly argued over the theatrics of political bickering, while in reality we did not have the slightest clue about the people who created the precious commodities that surround us. Yes, that is when I got rid of my TV and really longed to just sleep at night in wild and look at stars. The kind of vacation that I and my friends would pay an arm and a leg for, is these rural folk’s everyday lifestyle out of necessity. Candle-lit dinners, grilled food and a lullaby of flowing streams; I finally understood what it meant when they say that poverty is a state of mind.
In the vast fields of Punjab, I was surprised to see the gleaming pride in the rural farmer’s eyes. While I cringed with a feeling of pity for their poverty, it wasn’t until my second long trip that I realized how much pity they felt on my worldview. During my final year of medical school, I remember asking my mom why people wear ridiculously bright and colorful clothes in Punjab.
“When you do not really own much and toil in the dirt every day, it gets difficult to see negativity or be depressed. Superficial fallacies do not define you. Your personality is not hidden behind label clothing and it is fun to make your own garments” was her reply.
It really made me see how ignorantly self-absorbed I was as I realized I could not stitch or mend my own clothes. Months later, to the same question I would receive a much simpler reply ‘color makes us happy’ by more than one rural farmer.
My last days in medical school were spent discovering the countless mystic poets who had lived this life in the same villages centuries ago. Reading Rumi, Bulleh Shah, Sachal Sarmast, Haq Bahu and many others was like a daily dressing of wounds in my soul. And the more I read, the more I found how their poetry is as fresh and deep today as it was centuries ago – ranging from everyday political stage theater to academic philosophy. Peace, love, respect for self-sustenance, tolerance, beauty and freedom were exactly the lessons that we needed as recession struck. What really surprised me a year later in my world travel (wandering) was the fact that completely disconnected indigenous cultures had all have their own people of wisdom who transcribed the same message.
From Pablo Neruda to Ernest Hemingway, ancient Lakota wisdom to Thomas Paine, Spinoza to Montesquieu, I gleamed with happiness to find the same message again and again. Reverence for the hands that plow the fields, that give life to an abstract idea in mind and that create something what was not there before. When I see the scientists, engineers, artists, makers, designers and creators around me, all I see is a rich embodiment of our common farming origins. We were farmers and we will always be farmers in our own unique ways. It is only when we lose touch with our origins that we lose our ability to find our way back home.
I jumped at the first opportunity when I was invited to celebrate the ‘vaisakhi’, which to my surprise and ignorance was a more revered tradition in these land-tillers than any religious festival. I saw people of all religion, caste and color get together and celebrate their commonness as simple humans with similar struggles. I saw for the first time a kind of dance that was completely outside of a club setting with no mention of sex, drugs, anger or racism. Music borne out of the earth for it's respect and not for money or fame. Bhangra was an icon of simplistic festivity that originated more than a thousand years ago to celebrate the harvesting season. It was the first time I really saw how and why this dance of contagious happiness was born. It was simply a farmer’s dance on beat of a single drum on seeing the land bear fruit after a season of daily toil and sweat. I will dance too if I tend to my plants and nurture them, protect them and feed them until they stand proud and beautifully laden with fruit and grain. As my dad says, harvesting for a traditional farmer is same as your child’s graduation from high school or college.
These farmers never relied on jobs, social security or anything but were happier than me. A completely illiterate, yet profoundly intelligent old tailor told me that the world belongs to people who use their hands to build – a message that I very vividly remembered years later as I heard Massimo Banzi’s TED talk.
Since then, I have been traveling the world as a true ‘jogi’ or wanderer in pursuit of knowledge. A little endeavor to both learn as well as to teach the idea that there is world outside of textbooks and popular media, that 7 billion people is not a statistic but 7 billion unique minds with iterative ideas and thoughts. The more I have traveled, the more I have realized how little I really know about our world and about our human family, yet how conclusive our advanced sources of media are in their opinions about the world and it's inhabitants. I only found inexpressible joy when I saw how we all dance on our diverse tunes, yet the expression of emotions and the circle of life is astoundingly similar. This is one example of unity in diversity only expressed in dancing and movement!
I have been part of countless bhangra flash mobs. I cannot explain how many peoples’ hearts I could get to directly through a simple happy farmer’s dance; something that a dry endless discussion almost always failed in. I have shared this dance love a lot, but only in past two years have I literally spiced it up. Beginning from my friends and local organic food store, I have used my grandma's spice blend as a tool to bring a much larger issue in the foreground. That the solution to our strife-ridden world is not in books or banks but in our own hands. Each and every individual's own hands! Maker movement finds it's present day roots in the idea of sharing, open access, open source and application of creativity at individual level. But the real forefathers of Maker movement were the ancient farmers. And their successors still are a prime inspiration for us whether it is local farming, local education, local manufacture or local resource utilization. Tell me if this is not the pragmatic answer to local jobs, local economies and inherent community-building, and an end to world conflict.
Today's farmer is perhaps the poorest and most neglected professional, and his dedication and creative abundance is perhaps the least rewarded. Farmers around the world represent the largest human vocational subgroup, and if they are the least appreciated workers, then it is not hard to see through the temporal fragility of our economic fixes. The concept of sustainability is not something that academics derived. Even the first human farmer understood what it means to keep a balance with mother nature and drive sustainable food production. It is the same story for ecological homeostasis, reduction in carbon footprint and local community-building. Resilience is innately preserved in a traditional farmer regardless of his caste, color or nationality. And it is for this reason that any cultural refraction born out of such passionate rationality has a soul of its own. I saw it in rural fields of Punjab and I see it every day in shantytowns of Mississippi.
Today's farmer is perhaps the poorest and most neglected professional, and his dedication and creative abundance is perhaps the least rewarded. Farmers around the world represent the largest human vocational subgroup, and if they are the least appreciated workers, then it is not hard to see through the temporal fragility of our economic fixes. The concept of sustainability is not something that academics derived. Even the first human farmer understood what it means to keep a balance with mother nature and drive sustainable food production. It is the same story for ecological homeostasis, reduction in carbon footprint and local community-building. Resilience is innately preserved in a traditional farmer regardless of his caste, color or nationality. And it is for this reason that any cultural refraction born out of such passionate rationality has a soul of its own. I saw it in rural fields of Punjab and I see it every day in shantytowns of Mississippi.
And this is how Blues, Bluegrass, Jazz, Rock n Roll and everything that followed has a remarkably similar story to how a traditional Punjabi farmer's dance became the signature of Bollywood and trans-cultural representative of whole Indian subcontinent.
