minimalistindian

Who are we without our memories? What invisible line connects us to the past and propels us into the future? Travel with me, there will be food and literature

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

My mother used to make a sweet amla pickle that my taste buds still remember. Now that she is no more, perhaps that recipe is lost forever. But I made two versions of my own, one sweet and one savoury. And somehow I tasted her pickle and felt closer. Guess which is the sweet one?

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

@NoelaniMusha @nilufar_hm Yes I should right!

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

@menonvarsha True!

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

@menonvarsha Oh yes I have learned to read package labels after being taken for a ride a few times 😅

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

@Ayudhika1310 Well said

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

@BuiltToBetter @TheWholisticDr Good one!

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

@ShivAroor Studying Animal Behaviour in University I realized that we are not so special compared to (other) animals and they also have abilities that we like to think are unique to us. It was a humbling experience. I think basic animal bevavior should be a compulsory subject for all.

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

And here is the beautiful paragraph that caught me the first time I randomly turned a page -
"The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened... A biography of longing."
If we dig deep enough, we all have such a story hidden deep inside within us, don't we? 2/2

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

Rereading one of my favourite novels - Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. The sheer beauty of the words render me breathless...one can tell a poet wrote this novel, there is an economy and lyricism to every sentence. The gripping story of a Polish boy in the 2nd Word War.
1/2

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

Cooked a tangy sambhar and made a salad with pomegranate to balance out the spice. Served with millet. Took a couple of morsels and figured out it was DELICIOUS. So better late than never, took a photo to remember on those days I feel unmotivated to cook/don't know what to make

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

@menonvarsha That's funny!

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

Now that mango season is over, I am reliving the joy through my old videos

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

Nature painted with clouds on its sky canvas today

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

A lesson in resilience like none other!

[Parimal @Fintech03]

The Ultimate Murphy's Law in Astronomy!

In the 18th century, the ultimate holy grail of physics was measuring the exact distance b/w the Earth & the Sun. Edmond Halley had figured out that if scientists scattered across the globe simultaneously timed the exact microsecond the planet Venus crossed in front of the Sun (a Transit of Venus), they could use trigonometry to calculate the scale of the universe.

These transits only happen in pairs, eight yrs apart, once every century.

The French Academy of Sciences appointed Le Gentil to go to the French colony of Pondicherry, India, to record the 6th June, 1761 transit. Armed with state-of-the-art clocks & telescopes, he set sail from Paris.

Le Gentil’s ship spent months sailing around Africa. Just as he was nearing the Indian coast in early 1761, a massive geopolitical complication occurred: the 7 Yrs' War had escalated & the British had just captured Pondicherry from the French.

The captain of Le Gentil's frigate freaked out, refused to dock & turned the ship around to head back into the open ocean.

On 6th June, 1761, the day of the grand transit, the sky over the Indian Ocean was pristine & completely cloudless. But Le Gentil was stuck on the deck of a violently rolling warship. Because his telescope was swaying up & down on the waves, his precise timing data was completely useless.

Most people would have packed up & gone home. But Le Gentil realized that traveling back to France & returning would take yrs.

So, he decided to just hang out in the Indian Ocean for 8 yrs until the next transit in 1769.

He spent nearly a decade wandering around Mauritius, Madagascar & Manila, mapping coastlines & collecting biological specimens, all while counting down the days until 4th June, 1769. By 1768, Pondicherry had been handed back to France via a peace treaty. Le Gentil triumphantly marched into Pondicherry & the French governor welcomed him like a hero. He built a magnificent, high-walled observatory out of the ruins of an old palace, calibrated his massive clocks & waited.

The story does not end here.....

For the entire month of May 1769, the weather in Pondicherry was absolutely flawless. Day after day, the sun shone with pristine clarity.

On the night of 3rd June, Le Gentil looked at the clear, starry Indian sky, checked his instruments & went to sleep completely confident.

He woke up at 2:00 AM on 4th June to begin his final preparations. He looked out the window. A solitary, freak storm cloud had rolled in from the ocean, completely blanketing the sky directly over his observatory. Le Gentil watched in absolute, paralyzed horror as the clouds remained perfectly thick for the exact duration of the transit. He wrote in his journal: "I felt doomed, I threw myself on the bed, w/o being able to close my eyes."

Exactly a few hours after the transit ended, the clouds parted, the storm vanished & the sun shone brilliantly for the rest of the day. To make it even funnier, he later received letters confirming that in Manila, the city he had just left, the sky had been completely clear. He had spent 9 ys in exile just to watch a cloud.

Broken in spirit & suffering from severe dysentery, Le Gentil packed his bags for France.

The story does not end here also...

His return ship was wrecked by a hurricane off the coast of Africa. He had to hitch a ride on a Spanish warship, finally walking into Paris in October 1771... 11 yrs, 6 months & 13 days after he left.

When he knocked on his front door, he discovered the ultimate system error: because none of his letters from India had reached France due to wartime ship raids, he had been legally declared dead.

His wife had remarried, his relatives had enthusiastically plundered & divided up his entire financial estate & the Royal Academy of Sciences had given his prestigious seat away to someone else.

It took years of intense lawsuits & a personal intervention by the King of France to get his money & his scientific seat back. But Le Gentil proved to be as resilient in life as he was in astronomy, he eventually remarried, had a daughter & lived happily for another 21 yrs, leaving behind a legendary memoir about his Indian misadventures.

So the next time your internet drops/a cloud ruins an eclipse for you, take a deep breath & remember the Frenchman who spent 11 yrs in India just to get ghosted by a single cloud & find out his wife had replaced him.

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

Farm fresh strawberries, red outside And inside

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

@Fintech03 Could not agree with you more! We need to transform mindsets! You are spearheading this movement with such valuable information. Time to take it forward!

[minimalistindian @minimalistindi]

Modern health sensibilities have labelled all deep fried foods as bad. So it is worth knowing that certain crunchies were invented by our ancestors for a good reason. E.g. the beloved yet maligned murukku... my favourite South Indian deep fried snack, has a fascinating origin!

[Parimal @Fintech03]

The connection b/w the South Indian Murukku (that crunchy, coiled, savory snack we all love) & the ancient medical treatise of the Sushruta Samhita is 1 of the most brilliant, hidden examples of how ancient Indian snack food was originally engineered as preventative medicine.

When people think of the Sushruta Samhita, they immediately think of plastic surgery, rhinoplasty & complex surgical tools. But Sushruta was a holistic genius. He knew that the ultimate goal of medicine was to ensure a patient never needed surgery in the 1st place.

Volume 1 (Sutra Sthana, Chapter 46) contains an entire, massive section dedicated to Ahara-tattva (the nutritional science of food). And this is where the fascinating origin story of the Murukku begins.

In the Sushruta Samhita, Sushruta categorizes deep-fried pastry items under the broad family of Bhakshyas (cooked, chewable foods). Among them, he singles out a distinct item called Śaṣkulī. Over centuries, as the Sanskrit word Śaṣkulī traveled across different regions of India, it underwent phonetic shifts: In the North & West, the word evolved through Prakrit into Chakli (retaining the circular, coiled meaning).

In the South cultures translated the physical action of making it, twisting the dough giving us the beautiful descriptive name Murukku (which literally means twisted in Tamil).

Sushruta was deeply concerned with the concept of Agni (metabolic digestive fire). He categorized foods based on whether they were Guru (heavy to digest)/Laghu (light to digest). He noted that deep-frying grain dough in ghee makes it highly caloric & strength-giving (Bala-vardhana), but it can be incredibly heavy for the stomach.

To fix this chemical problem, ancient Indian cooks did something brilliant that Sushruta documented: they introduced Masha (Black Gram/Urad Dal) into the rice flour matrix. By mixing rice flour with roasted, ground urad dal, they created a complete amino acid profile (rice is low in lysine but high in methionine, while dal is high in lysine but low in methionine).

A few might think why did Sushruta spend time documenting a fried, coiled snack in a medical text meant for surgeons? Because of shelf-life & thermodynamics.

In ancient India, monks, traders & soldiers traveling across vast empires needed food that met 3 strict scientific conditions:

- It could not contain moisture (water causes bacterial spoilage).
- It had to be compact & physically rigid so it would not crumble into dust in a horse carriage.
- It had to be nutrient-dense to sustain high physical exertion.

By taking the Śaṣkulī dough, piping it into tight, concentric, interlocking coils (which structurally reinforces the snack against breaking) & deep-frying it until 100% of the water content evaporated, ancient Indians invented the ultimate preservative-free, shelf-stable survival ration.

When you hear the crunch of a Murukku today, you are literally tasting a recipe that was vetted, chemically balanced & medically approved by the Father of Surgery himself, Acharya Sushruta, 1000s yrs ago.

So, the next time you serve Murukku/Chakli with tea, you can proudly tell your guests: You are not just eating a snack. You are consuming a highly engineered, ancient Ayurvedic military ration designed to preserve human tissue :))