Elizabeth Eapen - Livemint.com
ABOUT RECENT POSTS
Member since 02-27-2009
Last visited 08-31-2009
Timezone 5.00 GMT
Total Posts 19
Post Rank 0
  • Monday, August 31, 2009
    Posted at 11:27:00 AM
    Once the charms of Bed Bath & Beyond had waned (it held good for a couple of hours, I must admit, while I pondered, among other weighty matters, the relative merits of a bamboo chopping board and a silicone cake tin), my friend Anita and I made our way a couple of nights ago to Havana Alma de Cuba , on 194, Christopher St, in the funky West Village in Manhattan. Fortified by a couple of mojitos and some (short-lived) live music, this is what we ate. Tostones Rellenos (green plantains with shrimp fricasse): We are no strangers to the green plantain.
  • Wednesday, August 19, 2009
    Posted at 7:07:00 AM
    Call it my piece de resistance . Or my comfort food. Or the one thing i can cook at (literally) a moment's notice and be sure of success. I'm always surprised when I hear of meen (fish) molee (fish in coconut gravy is a simple description, but read all the disclaimers below) talked of as being difficult to make... When you read my easy recipe below, you'll know why. Cousin Sanjay's Manhattan kitchen is as good a place as any for the business of fish molee. Light filters gladly in through the 23rd floor window that overlooks a strangely.
  • Wednesday, August 12, 2009
    Posted at 10:37:00 AM
    Architect and writer Gautam Bhatia's series of rants against our unplanned cities (read the 'City Centre' articles here ) concluded in Business of Life last month. A recurring grouse is that "in dimension, scale, numbers or aesthetics, what people want and what the city offers are opposing and often unmanageable compromises". While one of the arguments Bhatia makes is for a cohesive urban fabric, my own grouse is that at the end of the day we are between two stools: we have neither the planned city, which would obviously make.
  • Thursday, July 16, 2009
    Posted at 5:10:00 PM
    A recent article in Mint quotes Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric Co, as saying "there's no such thing as work-life balance (for women) ..... there are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences." Sounds rather ominous. Is it really as cut and dried and never-the-twain-shall-meet as all that? Surely many of us who also work outside the home try to achieve the balance through the choice? Of course, every choice comes at a cost, and sometimes its worth every rupee, sometimes it's a rum deal. In this.
  • Thursday, July 02, 2009
    Posted at 4:00:00 PM
    The Met department says there will be less than normal rainfall this year. But then so many of these pronouncements are like dew in the morning. Briefly alive, and soon gone. And another, or rather many others, will take its place tomorrow. South-west monsoon reaches Delhi, is the Met’s latest. The time spent filtering all this information, whether on oil prices, the state of the Sensex or the monsoon, becomes more an impediment to enjoying the here and now rather than a value-add to life. This great truth occurred to me this morning as I sat on.
  • Sunday, June 21, 2009
    Posted at 2:22:00 PM
    I always thought my father could have been a character in The Great Gatsby . Sartorially, that is. He wore perfectly tailored white full-sleeved shirts and white trousers to work every day, and had a good collection of silk ties. Of course, by the time I came into his life, he had almost hung up his work clothes and certainly his formal suits, so my acquaintance with his wardrobe was all second hand. In a big teak wardrobe hung a small collection of formal clothes, carefully shielded from dust under transparent plastic covers. They all bore the.
  • Wednesday, June 10, 2009
    Posted at 3:34:00 PM
    Its difficult to think such a time existed, living as we do when everything is either ‘live’ or 'breaking’, visually across a screen. It was a time when auditory sensations could be in gorgeous technicolour, a time when the timbre of a voice flirted with the flavour of the spoken word to conjure up incredibly vivid, sensual images. A youtube video that I watched on a colleague’s blog (read it here ) this morning gave me goosebumps. It also evoked emotions of a warm July night 29 years ago, when two young men, one a Swede and the other an American.
  • Tuesday, June 09, 2009
    Posted at 2:46:00 PM
    This is one of those questions. If only we knew the answer! But for a long time, I thought that it was a question men asked and asked so often it had acquired the status of something more exalted than a cliché. But do women themselves know? Will they admit to being sometimes confused, as is only human? Do men know what they want? asked a friend who happened to stop by my desk as I was typing this. I guess others will ask it too, so let me say, I’m not getting into that for now. Certainly there’s more to the first question than can be addressed in.
  • Friday, June 05, 2009
    Posted at 5:26:00 PM
    How far would I go for a taste of home? Pretty far, as I discovered this afternoon. Two friends (one Malayali and the other Bengali) and I decided to have lunch at Kerala House, very near our office, on Jantar Mantar road. Inspired by a review in the new issue of Time Out Delhi (read it here ), we braved the 42-seeming-like-50-degree heat for what we hoped would be an authentic, value-for-money lunch. I hadn’t been to Kerala House in months, and never to the canteen, and so trusted the reviewer’s description of the building as “one of the prettiest.
  • Wednesday, June 03, 2009
    Posted at 5:40:00 PM
    I am as outraged as any right thinking person about the attacks on Indian students in Australia. While there are some I spoke to, including a former colleague and friend who has just finished a course of study at the University of Melbourne, who say "Indian media seems to have gone nuts with the story", I will stick my neck out and say that even if it was just one incident, let alone two or three, its reprehensible. Racism in any form or shape is reprehensible. Whether its white against other colours (and who decided white is better? Would.
  • Tuesday, May 26, 2009
    Posted at 2:27:00 PM
    It's strange that I should be asking myself that after what was supposed to be one. Last week, a friend bought me lunch at one of the newest luxury hotels in the city. Minimal is more, we agreed ( sotto voce), as we walked around the controlled precincts. Long, silent, sun-dappled boulevards, virgin Khareda stone underfoot, muted tones of olive and brown and beige all around. Very classy. Very exclusive. Very singular. How much, I was soon to discover. In this perfect setting, a pair of pigeons saucily flashed décolletage on the glimmering water.
  • Monday, May 18, 2009
    Posted at 8:08:00 PM
    Hustled between TV and computer screen, the printed word and the spoken one, trying to take in and understand all that was being said about the elections, has left me quite dazed after the weekend that was. As ‘breaking news’ merged into ‘breaking results’ and everyone fell over everyone else trying to express that one thought or idea that would sum up the result in some unique way, I went cock-eyed and pea-brained trying to make sense of it all. So in the end, whether it was an honest and dignified PM, NREGA or the farm loan waiver, an Opposition.
  • Wednesday, May 06, 2009
    Posted at 10:46:00 AM
    I once visited a home in which bookshelves formed a dominant part of living room décor. No problem with that, except for the "look at me" manner and the military-like precision in which they (all hardcover) were displayed. They all seemed relatively untouched and, if I may say so, unread. The whole thing seemed a bit like an uneasy relationship. Just for a point of debate, wouldn't you agree that there's something about ‘seeing' the books one loves, something about living with them in close proximity. It's like a comfortable.
  • Thursday, April 23, 2009
    Posted at 5:24:00 PM
    Said a forward that landed in my inbox this morning. And yes, we all know it, but perhaps we need to remind ourselves about it more often. I've been thinking about the rise and fall in the price of airline turbine fuel (ATF) and the resultant rise and fall in the price of airline tickets over the last few months. We carry a news item on this in our paper almost every day. The up again and down again has an alarming frequency and equally alarming sameness. Airlines and travel agents are falling over themselves in the rush to offer deals and super.
  • Tuesday, April 07, 2009
    Posted at 12:27:00 PM
    It will take more than a recession or a downturn to curb the spirit of optimism. The new weekly news and features magazine from the RPG Group, called OPEN , which hit the stands last week, is proof of that. And I would say amen. We can't be a ‘troubled global economy" for ever, can we? But this is not so much about OPEN itself, though I found it visually appealing enough to buy a copy on Saturday. Other than the "oh no, not Pakistan again" feeling about the cover story, I found it a largely engaging read. I also noticed a couple.
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