Tingling Tastebuds

Taste, the timeless temptress,
Tantalizing recipes born of a tempestuous mind,
Created on this very earth
And yet so utterly divine.


Every great chef is first a born epicure, however, every epicure is not necessarily born a great chef. And that is where my problem begins. Unfortunately, as you may have guessed, I fall into the latter rather than the former and I stare with wide - eyed jealousy at all those with 'the touch' who effortlessly create mouth-watering pieces of culinary art. Despite my obvious shortcomings in this field and blatant lack of experience, I decided to test the very limit of my cooking proficiency.

It was a wednesday like any other. The stale stench of despair hung heavy in the air as the week was far from done, yet everyone was tired from the exertions already undergone. In this sordid atmosphere I took up my shopping list and set out on a quest to track down everything that I needed. While mentally repeating Tolkien's "The Road goes ever on and on, Down from the door where it began....." I journeyed through aisle after aisle of food stocked high. In the narrow moria-esque cavernous tunnels of the supermarket Fred Meyers, I gathered all that would be required to create an epic feast which would be forever remembered as Legen-wait for it-dary!

The kitchen was crowded as it often is when 8 storeys worth of people come to a single place seeking sustenance but I refused to be denied. I would play the waiting game and wait I would till most of the people had cleared out before setting my plan in motion. So, setting my purchases within the communal fridge, I retired to my room biding my time. At the stroke of midnight, (actually it was 10 p.m in Alaska but that doesn't sound nearly as dramatic; I'm sure it was midnight somewhere else in the world though) I made my way down to kitchen and began what would culminate in the pinnacle of my cooking achievements. Never before had I cooked three things simultaneously (and after this experience, probably never again) but I made it look effortfull because effortlessness comes only to great chefs. In any case, at the end of the night I had before me enough rice to feed a hundred hundredths of me, Rajma (kidney beans) cooked in an onion rich gravy and Fish (Cod fillet) cooked in a light tomato gravy. Thankfully, this veritable feast went unnoticed by my Indian compatriots otherwise I am sure I would have tasted none of it! After gorging on it myself, I am now ready to share my culinary creations with all those who wish to consume it.

I may have a long way to go, but I'm definitely on the right track when it comes to cooking up a storm!

Mastering a Science

It's been a while. A long time in time and much longer as far as life - changing events are concerned.

Around four months ago, I was in the thick of things in the management entrance exam scene and even managed a decent score (93.8 percentile is something I find acceptable at least), preparing for interviews when suddenly all that was turned on its head! I finally got a call accepting me into the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in their "Master of Science in Petroleum Engineering" graduate degree programme. At long last, a school I could afford to attend and I was only to happy to accept.

My perceptions of Alaska at that time was a wintery wasteland blanketed perennially in snow quite like the planet 'Hoth' from Star Wars. Truth be told, when I first stepped out of the Fairbanks airport, there was nothing in view to dispel that notion. The next few days only served to reinforce it. The sudden change from 40 degrees centigrade above zero to 40 degrees below combined with extreme jet lag meant that I was unavoidably sick. However, work was at hand and a ton of paperwork awaited me. Thankfully, modern medicine can work wonders. That along with Japanese thermal clothing technology gave me the edge to survive.

Bit by bit, my negative image of Alaska started to thaw as I came in contact with the people of the university. Unfailingly polite and abundantly cheerful, it was easier than I thought to adjust to the new environment. Course work piled on, work loads waxed and waned and exams rolled by.

It's been an odd few months. I went from being desperate to get into the right graduate degree programme to having multiple universities calling on me. I went from extreme heat to extreme cold and more importantly, I got used to it. But what stands out over everything else is the huge amounts left for me to learn in Petroleum Engineering. Learning new things, relearning and updating the old. It's a long journey on this road to mastering a science.