I am a shame to my people
This Bengali Economics Phd student from Calcutta told me a few weeks ago that I was "like...only 5% Bengali, really." I was horrified and immediately resented
a) his stereotypical notions about American-born Indians and
b) his dorky ability to quantify my cultural aptitude (such a typical economist).
After my attempt to cook Indian food for myself this past Friday however, I am starting to wonder if he's on to something. Armed with a couple of pre-mixed masala (spice) packets, I attempted two relatively easy dishes: chana masala (curried chickpeas) and daal (lentil soup). After burning the onions and adding the ENTIRE masala packet (1 cup of spice vs. 4 tsp), I ended up with an impossibly thick, brutally spicy goo with a few chickpeas floating in it accompanied by a side of brown, lentily mush that for some reason smelled like marijuana. How is that even POSSIBLE? Refusing defeat and conviced that genetics was still on my side, I sat down and forced myself to eat it. Immediate stomach ache. I had some frozen pizza instead...with a side of shame.
posted by TKP @ 11:42 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Don't listen to that lame PhD student. You're all the more Bengali because, despite having been born in a different country, you still seek to understand India and your ancestry. You didn't have to do so; you could have dismissed India entirely, the way that your FOB economics guy did. If he's so authentically Bengali, then why's he in the US? Doesn't Calcutta have any universities? If he loves Bengal, maybe he should stay there; then again, the modern definition of a Bengali (or of any Indian) might be "one who leaves the motherland." If this is true, then he's right: you are NOT Bengali, as you actually want to go there and are willing to live in India. He's just another FOB grad student with dreams of a job with Goldman Sachs and an American passport. Keep cooking your lentils; they're tough.
Wait a minute, even this white girl from Wisconsin knows that chickpeas and dal don't go together!
(The only reason I know is because I once cooked kitchuri and dal, thinking I made a great supper for my shammi, only to be shamed by my mother in law, "Kitchuri - dal ek shathe kawa jai na!"
Here's to frozen pizza! ~ktz
Maybe the FOB's treat bengali-ness like my students treat basketball ability. Everybody loves to talk about how sick their cross over is, or how nice their jumpshot is and amongst each other my students do nothing but crack on each other about it. One time I went to play them and most of the students are pretty much garbage, my team won pretty easily, and I beat one of the better kids in one on one repeatedly. Yet the next day they were all in my face like "yeah, you liked that one shot I made. Where's your game at?" It seemed like the actual playing of the sport is somehow detached from the insults people would throw around about the game. Perhaps this is what the "douch-sack" does with his free time. Maybe they sit around and say "I'm so Bengali they're going to name my dorm room West-West Bangladesh" or "You think You're bengali, why I'm 20 times more bengali than you, and thats before I stop speaking english." So when the guy decided to quantify your bengali-ness, you should have countered back, maybe with "more like 5 HUNDRED percent" at which point your crew would need to gather around him and say "OOOOH, in your FACE!" and perhaps "YOU JUST GOT SERVED"
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