A proud bowl of Laksa
Have you noticed that sometimes youTube algorithm gets stuck and wants to show you a particular video. It happened with me recently and the video that kept popping up on my stream was, “How to make 8 Kinds of Laksa from Southeast Asia” by the Analytical Cook. South Asian food is complex and I have barely scratched the surface of this complex cuisine. The thought of grokking eight different kinds of a complex dish was overwhelming but at some point, I gave in and started watching.
A few minutes into the video, I realized that I have been growing “Laksa leaves” in my yard. I have known them as Vietnamese coriander or rau răm (persicaria odorata). They don’t look or taste anything like coriander, but the reason I had started growing them is because they had looked unfamiliar. I am a sucker for unfamiliar herbs. The reason they have continued growing is because of its nature, it is a hardy perennial spreader in the USDA hardiness zone 9-11. For the last two years, I have been using them somewhat haphazardly – they remind me of the pepperiness of the Indian paan leaves (piper betle).
The Analytical Cook was presenting how to consume the laksa leaves correctly and that too in huge amounts! In a Laksa curry, these leaves are foundational.
My rau răm was in desperate need of a trim and hence, I decided to make a bowl (or four) of laksa. I chose simplicity – tofu skin and tofu for protein. The laksa paste was prepared in Vitamix and contained lemongrass stem (homegrown), onion, ginger, and galangal in an oil base. For color, I decided to rely on turmeric, a subsequent splash of coconut milk gave the laksa a golden color. The broth was made by hot steeping ginger skin, laksa stem and leaves, muddled makrut lime leaves (also homegrown) and lemongrass leaves. For spiciness, I used my salt fermented habanero chili sauce (habanero/orange capsicum/celery). For the salt and sour, I added fish sauce and makrut lime juice. For the sweet, I added some jaggery, a highly prized date palm jaggery (khejur gud) from my hometown, an ingredient I use on special occasions. For toppings, I used store bought buna shimeji (brown beech mushrooms) and sugarsnap peas. And the final touch – a sprinkling of finely chopped laksa leaves.
You bet I was proud. Not because it tasted great – south Asian curries taste great by design. But because several of the ingredients were labor of love – the two dozen year old makrut lime tree that started its life in a small pot and now grows wild in the yard, the lemongrass bunch that I had propagated from a store bought one (and a clone is waiting in a glass jar on my window sill for the next planting), the rau răm that I had neglected the last two years, and the salt fermented chili sauce.
If, like me, you decide to make Laksa, don’t forget to read the Analytical Cook’s further analysis (link).
A Kashmiri winter dish
Two summers ago, I grew a bunch of vegetables in my front yard. Outcome – I ended up with way more than I could eat, so I was drying. Mostly herbs. But that got me curious about dried vegetables. About the same time, I had learned about Kashmiri dried vegetables, Hokh Syun (link). For Kashmiris, it used to be necessity back in the days when snow would isolate villages and homes. Now it is a childhood memory food for most. For me, it is curiosity. So I dried some in my trusty dehydrator – eggplant and bottle gourd. Both were store bought but the vegetables were unusually tender, so I could pretend that they were from my kitchen garden.
I have been meaning to cook these dried vegetables for a while, and I finally got around to making the dried eggplants, wangan hachi, earlier this week. I rehydrated the dried eggplants in salted boiling water – they were nearly cooked in the process. Like Bengali cooking, Kashmiri cooking starts with heating mustard oil to smoking point and then cooling down to normal heat. I dropped a couple red chilis, a generous pinch of cumin seeds and let them splutter. Then I added sliced onion and minced garlic and let them soften. To that I added the powdered spices (turmeric, kashmiri chili pepper, fennel) and let them loose their raw aroma. And to all that I added the rehydrated eggplants and a splash of hot water. The eggplants were so soft that the vegetable took on a bhartha consistency. Once the liquid cooked down, I added a bit of milk and let the vegetable medley reach a consistency I wanted. And finally, I acknowledged that I had run out of cilantro leaves.
I paired the sabzi with a ragi (finger millet) roti and yogurt raita.
I have been trying flatbreads with a variety of gluten free grains. One of my prized possession is a countertop mill. It allows me to buy grains and mill on demand, it lengthens the freezer free shelf life compared to buying whole grain flour. Ragi roti is wonderful when you add a bunch of onion and make a super soft dough. I used cooked leek tops instead of raw onion. I flattened the soft dough on a hot griddle with wet hands to shape a rough flatbread – I call it roti, but flatbread is more appropriate. These flatbreads are thicker than roti and take some time to cook. I don’t use ghee when making flatbread, but I imagine what it would taste like if I added ghee instead of neutral oil.
Again, I have never eaten Hokh Syun before, so I only had my imagination to rely on. The eggplant had a strong eggplant flavor. The mustard oil had given it a desirable pungency. It reminded me of bhartha without the smokiness.
The vegetable was great with the flatbread.
Experiencing a Laba porridge
Once again this year, I am hoping to celebrate cultural festivals around the world, via food. Last time I did this, it was 2023 and I was still grieving from the world wide impact of COVID. Back then, we were still eating meat intermittently (check out our celebration in honor of Mardi Gras). By no means have we gone vegetarian now, but animal meat consumption is minimal these days. We still have tinned sardines around for the days when quick access to high quality protein is required. Anchovies and nduja continue to flavors an occasional stew or pasta dish. This year, I have put myself up for a harder challenge, cooking vegetarian forward celebratory meals without going overboard on the joys of simple carbs.
For January, after some careful thinking, I decided to celebrate the Laba festival. Part of the selection process includes the learning about a new culture and custom. Part of it is finding a specific dish associated with the cultural celebration. This year the Laba festival coincided with India’s Republic Day (and my aunt-in-law’s birthday) and fell mid-week. Wikipedia notes that La is the twelfth month and Ba is the eight’s day and Laba is a knock on the door, announcing the upcoming Lunar New Year. On this day, it is customary to eat the Laba congee, also known as the “eight treasure congee”, a combination of grains (rice, millet, barley), beans (red, mung) and dry fruits (jujube, nuts, lotus seeds). I also read that the congee can be had sweet or savory. We make savory porridge five times a week, so I settled for sweet laba congee. I raided my pantry and concocted my congee mixture of purple rice, millet, white quinoa, hulled buckwheat groats, chana daal, and caviar lentils. I flavored it with bay leaf, walnuts, raisons, dried figs/apple/apricot/pear slices and dried mulberries. For sweetness, I added a hint of brown sugar.
I wish I had dried jujube, but I didn’t. It isn’t uncommon to find fresh jujube here in California. Maybe I will dry some for the next Laba congee. I also didn’t have un-popped lotus seeds in the pantry, a common Chinese stew ingredient. I had only the popped ones, a common Indian snack. I wish I had a reference for what it should have tasted like. Dishes like congee are often simple dishes that evoke a sense of comfort that I associate with mom’s cooking. To me, Laba congee was just a variation on the 250+ wholesome porridges that I make every year – this one had more ingredients than most and I am sure my gut loved it.
The closest cultural porridge for me is the Bengali khichudi. It is made with hulled split mung beans that are dry roasted and an heirloom rice called Gobindbhog (food for Lord Krishna). The combination of pungent mustard oil and umami ghee lends a unique flavor to the dish. The spiciness often comes from generous amounts of black pepper and ginger. It is often finished with Bengali garam masala (made from warming spices like cinnamon, green cardamom, and cloves) and eaten with fried pappadams and a sweet tomato chutney (sour desi tomatoes and sweet dates). For me, the taste of khichudi is the taste of winter. Mom would make khichudi often during our short winters. During the season, dad would request this warming dish every week. For mom, it was a fuss free meal unlike typical multi-coarse Bengali meals. As kids, we loved it because it didn’t require us to wrangle the fish bones, a skill one eventually acquires with practice.
Chaos overhead, the Rosette
Monoceros (unicorn in Greek) was named in early 1600s and is therefore, referred to as a young constellation. For us, northerners, it is a winter sky constellation. It is about 100 light years across and 5200 light years away from us. On the galactic scale, it is close, it is in the Orion spur of the Milky Way (link) close to sun. In NASA image of the rosette nebula, I notice the blue (oxygen) and the yellow (red/sulphur and green/hydrogen).
Rosette nebula in this image is photographed in the second half of January from our courtyard, with integration of approximately 100 minutes.
Chaos overhead, the heart nebula
Chaos Overhead
We are continuing with our rough drafts of the deep sky. We have a tiny courtyard, our house is built around this courtyard (a cultural memory of Indian homes) and is lovingly branded the Aangan “courtyard” house. Taking deep sky photos from the courtyard has its pros and cons. The big pro is we live here. We have high speed internet. Every clear night comes with a possibility where we are experimenting and learning from our successes and failures. Gemini is at our beck and call and helps us troubleshoot like an old friend. The big con is that we have an intimate courtyard (by design, but at the time of the design, we weren’t into deep sky photography!). It is a wooden deck that responds to traffic going by. There are massive trees on two sides, including a heritage oak. And a mess of electric poles and wires on the other two sides (reminds me of back home!). What we have is the overhead and a small time window – say 2-3 hours with our current efficiency of 50% (i.e., 60-90 minutes of image integration time).
We shared our horsehead and flame nebula image with our home architect, Lynn, and in her words, “it feels like a little glimpse into the chaos of the universe”. I hadn’t thought of the physics driven universe as chaos, but in many ways it is. It is quite purposeless. It doesn’t care that a couple of humans, sitting on this pale blue dot of a planet are painstakingly observing.
Hence, the series, Chaos Overhead. It will mark a series of deep sky objects observed from this little courtyard, mostly rough experiments that we hope to improve as we skill up.
Ostinato and circles
This is first post of the year and I am starting with a resolution, a small mental shift to explore.
Apparently, the word ostinato in music is a stubborn short melodic repeat, a persistent unyielding pattern. Very recently, I heard the word in the context of Fela Kuti’s music in Jad Abumrad’s new podcast, Fela Kuti: Fear no man. Before Jad’s podcast, Fela’s Afro Jazz music was out of context for me. After the podcast, the context has become somewhat surreal. Jad’s podcasts, this and Dolly Parton’s America, are exceptionally powerful that way – they combine the best of journalism with the best of music.
I grew up in post-independent India. I come from a family that had to leave their land in Bangladesh, post-partition, to start over in India. As a child, I read about colonialism in history books but I didn’t have time to think about the everyday remnants of colonialism. Today, I understand these remnants a lot better and how they cling decades after. And when I think about them, I get resentful. Within that personal context, now that I know Fela Kuti’s context (to the extent one can really know what one doesn’t live) his music sounds like the rumble before the thunderstorm.
Musical ostinato has always made me anxious. It isn’t a drone (e.g. Duduk) that I can set aside. It leaves me wanting to move to the next bit. In an ostinato, time appears to glitch, a déjà vu that you can’t get out of. Fela uses ostinato heavily – it seems to go on and on, for minutes, for tens of minutes. And then, wham, the vocals appear. I barely understand the lyrics but what I understand makes me want to know more. Fela’s live audiences claim that they experienced what today we associate with the mind altering properties of magic mushrooms. Musical experts who understand ostinato suggest if you let go of the need to move on and embrace the ostinato, you can get into a trance like state. The pattern itself invites you to explore the interwoven sub-patterns. Fela would get his audience in a mind altered state and he would then say what he had to say:
Lyrics from the song “Zombie”:
Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go
Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop
Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn
Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think
Lyrics from the song “Expensive Shit”
Hen Alagbon o
Them go use your shit to put you for jail
Them don turn my shit to expensive shit
My shit na exhibit, it must not lost o
The seemingly light hearted lyrics hide a revolution (and you will need to listen to Jad’s podcast) – it is a sum total of his experiences and his spirit, the colonialism that surrounded him, the ideological genealogy that he inherited from his mother, his own incarcerations, and the beatings. He comes out of jail in bandages, writes about his time in jail and he is put back in jail. It feels cyclical.
Coming back to the ostinato – a day is a circle, a relatively small one at that. Sun goes up, sun goes down. I get restless when the days seem like they are repeating themselves – wake up, eat/work, sleep and repeat. What if I could embrace that seemingly tedious circle – wake up, eat/work, sleep and repeat – with grace. There will invariably be sub-patterns to enjoy like a found object of delight during a neighborhood walk (last one was an unexpected cluster of mushrooms). There will be cycles of moon and some nights when the moon isn’t full, it would result in stargazing. There will be larger cyclical patterns like the flowers in the spring, the hikes in the summer, the red and gold leaves in the autumn, the mushrooms following first rains, and the bursting waterfalls in the winter. Then, there will be the long awaited vocals, like a travel to a new land.
A rough draft of a horse and a flame
As far as deep sky photo goes, this is a rough draft of a future photo – the horsehead nebula and flame nebula in the Orion constellation. It is the photo I have been waiting for since we took the first photos of the Andromeda galaxy. When I started, and even now, there aren’t many deep sky objects I can name by sight. The horsehead has a characteristic shape etched in my mind by NASA Hubble images. It is also a beginner deep sky target that offers an opportunity to get infinitely better as skills progress.
On shoulders of giants
This photo isn’t my memory. It is my mom’s memory. I was too young to remember. I have memories of seeing this photo in my mom’s album. I do remember dad’s watch. He wore it for many years. It was a little loose on his wrist and would invariable climb up or down and swing about. I remember his glasses. Again, he wore them for many many years. They went out of fashion and came back into fashion during his lifetime. I remember his thick curly black hair. In my childhood photos, my hair is curly like his. I remember his broad shoulders and his chest press machine. He had a resting unhappy face but he would laugh very easily. I am like that too. I have inherited his hands and feet as well, narrow and small.
After he passed away last year, I read tributes of his colleagues. Many remembered him very fondly. One story touched my heart especially. This was someone who was newly posted to his office, the National Institute of Communicable Disease (NICD), India’s equivalent of CDC. In those days, job postings of civil servants was decided by government committees. It was his first day and he was nervously waiting to speak to my dad whom he only knew by reputation. Dad had kept him waiting for a bit. And then when they met, dad bombarded him with many technical questions. This colleague had felt that my dad’s interview was a lot harder than what he had gone through in the government’s bureaucratic process. At the end of the interview, he was assigned his first job by my dad and that job was to present the office at a prestigious conference the very next day. He was scared at first to speak at the conference, but as he participated, he felt more and more confident, eventually coming out feeling victorious. He went on to work with my dad for many years and referred to my dad as a great mentor of his.
Read the rest of this entry »A winter ramble
I was feeling restless this Monday. Even though it was a working day, I decided to go out on a short afternoon hike. Further inland from where we are, the tule fog had descended on the central valley and was squatting for solid 3 weeks and counting. Here in the Bay Area, the sun was up, but it didn’t carry warmth. The morning dew was still lingering and I noticed spider webs. There were so many that the grassland looked covered in dandelion tufts. I go to this park often, I am sure I have been over couple dozen times in the last three years and the web tufts managed to surprise and delight me.
The grassland itself presented diversity this early in the winter – the fallen leaves, dry grass from last season, new generation of grass, moss and other shrubs existed side by side. I chose a trail I take less often and came across a large deer family and this afternoon, they chose not to run away upon seeing me. Later, on the same trail, I found my local oyster mushroom foraging patch!
Read the rest of this entry »Take the greens by the stalk
We have consumed more greens in last two years than we ate the entire last two decades. I have our CSA (Live Earth Farm) to thank for that. Red beets come with lively green tops. Baby carrots come with leggy green tops. The turnips come with eager green leaves. The fennels come with delicate frond wings. Then there are just the greens on stalks – the rainbow chard and the spinach and the collard greens and the lacinato kale and the russian red kale and the winterbor kale. And of course there are herbs – the cilantro, the parsley, the rosemary, the scallions and the basil. These are not your anemic slim bunches that you get at the grocery store. The leeks come whole i.e. twice the greens of your grocery store bought ones. And finally, the heads, the salads, the radicchio etc.
There is no way you can waste them. These are no faceless farmers from another continent. They are located in Freedom, just a hop, skip and jump away. The food is grown on a land that I call home and I am convinced that small scale organic farming is backbreaking labor of love.
So, I have been cooking these greens in all possible ways. The unexpected greens from the carrots, turnips, fennel and beets, the stalky greens, the heads of greens, the herbs. And the greens don’t just stop with CSA – the real backyard giveth onion weeds, the oregano buds, the mint, the sorrels, the lemongrass, the makrut lime leaves, the fig leaves, and the bay leaves. Sometimes there are microgreens in a box by the window.
… and it has been exhausting. Like I have been running a marathon. All the cleaning, chopping, drying, freezing, pureeing, powdering, …
Read the rest of this entry »Cosmic loneliness
Today’s story is not about philosophical loneliness, it is about the practical one, the one at cosmic scale.
“Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a distance of over 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), as part of Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.” –Wikipedia
In the Pale Blue Dot photo, a medium size 666 x 659 pixels, Earth is less than a pixel (0.12 pixels), suspended in a beam of sunlight. This photo was taken at the request of Carl Sagan, who wanted the Voyager to turn around as it passed Neptune’s orbit and picture earth. He went on to speak about this photo, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” Thirty four minutes after that photo in 1990, the Voyager I camera was permanently turned off. Carl Sagan wrote his book Pale Blue Dot in 1994 and he died in 1996 at 62, battling a rare bone marrow disease.
It has taken me 30 years to truly understand what Carl Sagan meant when he said “That’s home”. And that only happened when we found our passion to capture photons from these far off light sources.
Read the rest of this entry »Our Pleiades
These photons from Pleiades landed on our camera sensor, so there!
We first noticed Pleiades in Anza Borrego, about the same time last year. We were camping (link). I add the photo below of Pleiades that we took back then.
Our stars bind us. There is perhaps no where else in the universe where the stars looks the same as it does to earthlings. Pleiades is bright enough that they have been part of ours folklores (link) since the beginning of our story telling.
Read the rest of this entry »Homage to my lineage
As I live, I gain memories. But as I live, I lose many of these memories. This is my attempt to hold on to some memories dearly.
Read the rest of this entry »
I too like to take the scenic route when I cook!
When I took a whiff of Matsutake mushrooms at Signona’s, I knew that I would have to make Matsutake Gohan. My version has Minnesota Lake wild rice, the ghost varietal, matsutake mushrooms, pearl couscous, pine nuts, dried tomatoes, salt fermented plums, green Szechuan peppercorn, black cardamom, bay leaf, cinnamon leaf and leeks. This meal was in honor of the Day of the Dead, a tradition I have adopted to honor those who are are no longer with me today. The first to pass away was my grandad, in fact, it was many decades ago this day. I was still a child then. He used to write long letters to me and might have played a strong hand in nurturing my contemplative nature.
The phrase “I Like to Take the Scenic Route When I Cook” is the title of a November 2025 newsletter from Yotam Ottolenghi. My cooking style has been described as my love language. I don’t see it that way but I didn’t have words to describe it until I came across Ottolenghi’s Nov newsletter. And then it clicked. I too prefer the scenic route when I cook. In any month, there is at least one day when I would just like to open a can of sardines and a bottle of wine for dinner. But most times, food is a journey, sometimes an hour, sometimes a day or three, and sometimes, a few seasons.
Here are some of the journeys I undertook with this dish.
Read the rest of this entry »October art
This is my third ink and second art. The first two are from the fourth decade of my life and form a contiguous piece of art. The very first ink is cherry blossom. The second ink extends the first with a young playful elephant playing amidst the cherry blossoms. The style of the first art is a rather non-traditional tattoo and more like a watercolor sketch. I have been going after my spirit animals. The land animal is the elephant. The water animal is the humpback whale. If I were Anyanwu from Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, I would shape shift into these animals. My first art is showing signs of fading. I could get it touched up, but I am embracing the wabi-sabi. I still have a decade to find my wind animal spirit. My tattooist, Dawei Zhang is semi-retired now. The whale showcases Dawei’s skills as a photo-realistic artist.
My pumpkin carving journey continues – this is the third year. Following last year’s debacle with Ravana and the stupendous effort of carving 10 pumpkins, I decided to stick to one pumpkin this year. I had chosen Goddess Kali as the theme. She is one angry Goddess with skull and sword vibe and she had felt very apt for Halloween. I thought I was being clever when I had chatGPT generate the template. Only when I printed the template on the day of Halloween, I realized it was too small and carving skills needed for the template far exceeded what I had to offer. So, I shaved the pumpkin instead. Not that shaving is any easier than carving, but it was either shaving the pumpkin or quit. And I wasn’t going to quit. I decided that I was going to be wiser next year. For this year, I was simply going to be grateful if my sharp instruments didn’t slip and I didn’t accidentally chop of Goddess’s eye or nose or tongue.
First photograph of a nebula
There are probably a million photos of galaxies and nebulae that look astounding. So why take another one, an amateur one at that?
Read the rest of this entry »Festival of (star) lights
Diwali, a festival of lights.
This year’s Diwali ended up being a festival of star lights at Death Valley National Park, the darkest sky that can be, amidst a federal government shutdown.
We had made a call earlier in the summer to sign up for a star gazing event organized by Eastern Sierra Observatory, in Panamint Valley. The site was by the side of a county maintained dirt road, Indian Ranch road. The organizers are astrophotographers themselves. They were quiet until a few days before the event. An earlier flash flooding in August had resulted in closure of several roads in Death Valley. Three weeks ago, the federal government had shut down resulting in the shutdown of National Park Services. It had rained recently and as a result, the county road was badly rutted in places. The organizers had crafted a detailed and helpful email on road access – “Take Hwy 58 from Bakersfield and not the twisty Hwy 178”, “Whatever you do — first navigate to Ballarat first”, “Do not approach the county road from north”, “The road is bumpy here and there, so drive slowly”, …
I wasn’t sure what to expect. This was our first communal star gazing event. On one hand was the government shutdown and poor road conditions. On other hand, the 2025 Dark Sky Festival in Death Valley National Park, held in Feb, had reported over 6,800 attendees. Our camping experience hasn’t yet prepared us to deal with a primitive campground. The site was going to have porta potties, but not water. Instead, they were going to bring large telescopes to look at planets in our solar system and star clusters that are million light years away. I couldn’t stand the idea of star gazing while being unbathed for 3 days in a hot valley. So, we had also checked into the Panamint Springs Resort. The rutted county road meant we were going to be driving an hour each way from Panamint Springs Resort (daytime) to the campsite (nighttime) and back, but it also meant that we were going to be fed, washed and rested. Even then, I was a little apprehensive. I needn’t have been.
In the end, 150-180 vehicles had congregated at the event, not thousands. They were respectful of the dark sky. Everyone used red lights when they needed to use a light. There was no music playing. While the historic temperature averages predicted 60-90F, we ended up with 50-85F. As far as Death Valley goes, it was positively balmy weather. They had suggested bringing 12 inch stakes and we were glad to have followed the suggestion. We experienced gusts of wind throughout our stay. It was particularly windy when we were setting camp. I remember feeling a brief moment of panic when we weren’t sure if we would be able to put up the tent. But we did and the tent stayed put. There were a couple of welcome surprises – a starlink WiFi access and a food truck.
It couldn’t have been better star gazing experience. We have been going to Pinnacles National Park (Bortle 3), but Death Valley sky is darker still (Bortle 1). We would get to the campsite by 4 or 5 pm, and set up photography gear. During earlier part of the evening, there were organized events. One evening we listened to a panel of astrophysicists from Caltech. We looked through giant telescopes and saw globular cluster and rings of saturn. We ate simply. We would select the star cluster and set up the photoshoot program and catch a snooze before moving on to the next star cluster. Each night we ran two programs. We managed to shoot several hours of Andromeda galaxy, Pleiades cluster, North America nebula and the Orion nebula. These are relatively large objects in the sky – easier for beginner gear and skill set. The location of the site caused a dome like effect, the night sky was surrounded by mountains on the horizon. The desert landscape meant no tall trees to interrupt the view. It was stars as far as eyes could see. And more with binoculars. And more still with camera. Along the milky way, nearly every pixel was occupied by a star. We saw meteors. We saw satellites.
It was not an unpleasant experience sleeping (somewhat fitfully) while listening to the periodic shutter of our DSLR. I woke up with a start once because a donkey was braying. The occasional gust made the tent cover flap and added to the fitfulness of the sleep. We would wake up early, wrap up the gear and drive back to the Panamint Spring Resort. There we would grab breakfast, enjoy a hot shower, catch naps, inspect the photography artifacts from night before and plan the upcoming night’s shooting. On the very last night of our stay, we decided to skip the campsite and shoot from the resort’s well maintained campground. Our neighbor was a loud group that kept the fire going until well past midnight. The sky was so dark that it didn’t stop us from being able to see the stars, infinite of them. For the first time, I could actually see a nebula, the Orion nebula, through binoculars.
Stars make me happy and sad at the same time. More than anything, they make me want to live my life at its fullest. I truly believe that there are millions of intelligent species elsewhere in the universe and we are not unique. Heck, our planet has thousands of intelligent species! I want desperately for SETI to succeed. But I have finally come to grapple with the fact that there is simply no way for us to hear observable noises from another planet for a long time. That long time is perhaps a million years. Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, which likely hosts a human like intelligent lifeform or two, is over 2.5 million light years away. Humanity has been making observable noise only the last two hundred years. Even as I write it, I want to hold on to a little iota of hope.
This year’s Durga Puja
For last decade, I have made it my practice to listen to Chandi Path (“Mahisasur Mardini“), on Mahalaya, the first day of Durga Puja, early at 4 am. This is the day, the Goddess takes form to slay the half man half buffalo demon Mahisasur. This year, on Mahalaya, we were at Paicines, it was a new moon night and we were busy shooting Andromeda galaxy. By the time, we were tired of star gazing and shivering, it was well past 3 am. Could I have listened to Chandi Path with coyotes howling at stars? I was too exhausted to appreciate the beautiful chants of Birendra Krishna Bhadra. I eventually listened to Chandi path 7 days later while making breakfast and thought about my fellow Bengalis who congregate by the oldest radio shop in Kolkata to listen to Mahalaya (link).
Read the rest of this entry »A blue oak woodland in summer
Blue oaks are native to California and are endemic. Meaning, they should be everywhere in California and be nowhere else. They aren’t as easy to spot as their name would have you think. Blue oak aren’t blue. Describing oak leaves as blueish-green may help when the light is just right. Describing the leaves as leathery doesn’t help in California where most of the vegetation tends to have leathery leaves. I would have to walk around with an acorn+leaf chart to match them. Our most common oaks, are the coastal oak (bristly tips) and the valley oak (have lobes). The valley oak grows tall and has twisted branches and lends a queen like elegance to the landscape. The coastal oak often look like they have fought hard to survive, a sherpa who can keep climbing forever. Blue oaks have been elusive to me in Bay Area preserves and parks. Rangers tell me that most of the existing blue oaks are on private lands.
Last weekend we found ourselves on such a private land, the regenerative Paicines (Pai-seen-us) Ranch. We had gone looking for astrophotography opportunities. During our stay, we learned about their Blue Oak forest and I had to take a look. When you live in California long enough, oaks become as fascinating as the Redwoods. One year, we noticed the coastal oaks in our neighborhood masting (link). I want to find acorn flour so I can make flatbread but I don’t want to start with harvesting acorns even when the trees are masting. This trip, the cottage we stayed at, the Cheese Cottage, was next to a large Valley Oak specimen. The cottage’s patio was high up enough that I was practically sitting in a tree house. It allowed me to notice the oak galls up close.
Here are few photos of the blue oak woodland. I present them in black and white. By the time we explored the woodland, the sun was high up and the shadows were stark. It is the end of summer here and the grasses had turned into straw color. The leaves were covered in dust. If it were spring, the woodland floor would have been covered in blue lupines, and the blue dicks and my photographs would have wanted to reflect all that color.
The fascinating Sitka spruce
I recently heard a joke and this is how it goes: “What do you do if you are lost in the Icelandic forests?” You just stand up!
Downy birch (Betula pubescens) was the backbone of Iceland’s native forests. It covered 20% of Iceland prior to Norse settlement in 9th century. Over harvesting and free range sheep grazing has left Iceland devoid of its native forests. While Iceland appears beautiful to a visitor and is on bucket list of every hiker, Iceland’s soil erosion is described as catastrophic. The seedlings that come up against the soil quality odds have a further hard time surviving sheep grazing. Those that do survive struggle to grow into trees with a vertical form and grow as shrubs instead. In places where reforestation is afoot, Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) are coming to rescue. The Sitka spruce can withstand far adverse conditions than the native birch, including standing up to coastal salt and high wind. So, they are being planted first and when they mature, the more delicate species are grown in the nooks protected by Sitka spruce. To learn more about Iceland’s reforestation challenges, go on to watch “How do you grow trees in a treeless land?” (link)
For me, Sitka spruce is a memory switch. It reminds me of a trip to Alaska where I had fly-fished for salmon standing in waist deep glacial waters while watching a bear mom catch salmon for her two toddlers.
Soon after I had seen the Sitka spruce first hand, Gordon Hempton had referred to Sitka Spruce as nature’s largest violin. Gordon describes the recording event on his website: “I’ve positioned my microphone system that replicates 3-D human hearing inside a giant Sitka spruce log. This tree grew in the nearby rain forest and then floated down the Bogachiel River before coming to a rest (temporarily) at Rialto Beach. The wood of this tree species has special properties that make it ideal for crafting violins, guitars, and other acoustic instruments because the wood produces a sound when exposed to the slightest vibration. But here, instead of a bow drawn across violin strings, the sound of distant surf is powerful enough to cause this Sitka log to produce its own deep, harmonic concert.”
He had shared with some of us the sound this violin produces. I am musically challenged, to me it had sounded more like united heartbeats of creatures that had congregated by the ocean, hearts fluttering in mild anxiety, in heightened anticipation…
Everybody has a got a rhythm…
… I decided that I could no longer wait to find mine. After decades of sitting still at a desk, I am finally starting to embrace movement. If you asked me to describe my body’s rhythm right now, I would probably say that it is one foot after next, bipedalism.
When I was just learning bipedalism, my mom had enrolled me in a Kathak school. It was so long ago that I don’t have any memories except the ghungroo, the little bells on one’s anklets, they made sound in unison with every stomp. Perhaps my mother put the ghungroo on my feet to entice me to dance.
These bells are often strung on a red felt pad and the dancers color their feet red. It is visually captivating to see feet in red dancing with rhythm, speed and exhilaration.
I was in a small town, it had a single Kathak teacher. My mom tells me that I had to stop learning Kathak because my teacher died, he fell off his balcony while drunk. I had imagined this skinny older individual who was practicing the Chakkars (the spins in Kathak), and then fell off the balcony. I remember that when I would do the Chakkars, I would drift and get dizzy. I imagined that he did too, not knowing then that those practiced in the dance form, neither get dizzy nor drift while spinning.
I could have restarted when we moved town, and we moved across many a towns, but I was already preferring to sit still.
Read the rest of this entry »‘Lick of paint, lick of paint.. half an hour. Give us a biscuit!
I thought I would end the San Juan Island travel stories by asking chatGPT to illustrate Roy Franklin’s three-car system of landing on cow pastures at night. Roy would have three cars positioned to show where the “runway” was located — one at the near end with headlights pointing forward up the field, a second crosswise to the landing area with lights pointing across it to mark the midpoint, and the third at the far end with red brake lights showing the end of the landing area.
After making sure that chatGPT understood the landing setup, I asked it to illustrate. Here is what I got:
This wasn’t logically correct, so I asked chatGPT to explain what was wrong with the illustration and it cleverly responded as follows: In Roy Franklin’s system,
- Car 1 (near end) → should be inline with the runway, headlights pointing straight ahead down the strip (toward where the plane will land).
- Car 3 (far end) → also should be inline with the runway, red brake lights facing the oncoming plane (to mark the end).
- Car 2 (midpoint) → should be perpendicular (crosswise) to the runway, headlights pointing across it, creating a visual midpoint marker.
So yes, it said with confidence — Cars 1 and 3 ought to be parallel to the plane’s landing direction, while Car 2 is crosswise.
So then – I asked, go ahead partner, give me a correct illustration this time. And, this is what it produced next, wondering aloud what else it could do for me:
And I said, thank you, not today. You clearly need some tea and biscuit after all that thoughtful work.
Did you ever watch Fawlty Towers episode “The Builders” (Season 1, Episode 2). Basil Fawlty decides to have some construction work done at the hotel while his wife Sybil is away. Against her instructions, Basil hires the unreliable and cheap builder O’Reilly instead of the competent builder Sybil prefers. Predictably, everything goes wrong. O’Reilly and his crew botch the job. When asked to fix his mistake, O’Reilly tries to downplay the scale of the mistake, and uses the line: ‘Lick of paint, lick of paint.. half an hour. Give us a biscuit!’.
Across the Puget Sound
Today’s story is about a small plane flight. It originated from Boeing Field, Seattle and landed in Friday Harbor Airport, San Juan Island. Apparently, San Juan Island is in Salish Sea’s banana belt. The arial view of the Puget Sound is described as the highlight of this short flight.
These planes are tiny. In addition to the two pilots (ours only had one), it can accommodate eight passengers. There are four rows of seats, each row has one seat on either side of the plane. There isn’t much between you and the outside – the 6000 square miles of the sea, the Olympic mountains, the straits of Juan de Fuca, the 400 islands and unending blue sky. These planes fly low, and I had packed my binoculars in my day bag, ready for island spotting (and really hoping to see whale activity on the ocean surface). Statistics doesn’t quite apply to one’s own situation. The day we flew out, all the precipitation that is statistically due in the banana belt in the month of August fell on this one day in August. As a Californian, who has often picked up the phone to watch a fire report, I am not averse to rain. However, given everything the ride over the Puget Sound had to offer, all I got was the clouds.
Orcas of Salish Sea
It will be underwhelming to just say that I loved every minute of this four hour trip. It was a thrill of a lifetime, although wish me luck, I want to have many such thrilling adventures in my life. A weekend trip to San Juan Island materialized the dream of seeing the orcas up close.
Before the story, we have to start with the confusing terminology – killer whales. A – Orcas are not whales, they are largest members of dolphin species. B- Some of them might be whale killers, but not in our neck of the woods. Here in our pacific northwest, the resident orcas exclusively eat chinook, the fattiest salmon. The transient orcas eat marine mammals like harbor seals and porpoise. They eat what their grandmother taught them to. Frankly, their persnickety eating habits remind me of some members of my own family!
In the language of Haida, orcas are called Sgan (sometimes written as Sgaana or SGaana). “The word for killer whale in Haida is “Sgan” which means “supernatural,” and also “the chief of the underworld.” In mythic times, killer whale was chief of the underworld. They say that when you go underwater to visit the territory of the killer whales, it’s no different from being on land, except that because you’re in their world, you see them as humans.” — Robert Davidson, internationally acclaimed Haida artist
Back to the story. My first interest in orcas coincided with my interest in the gentle humpback whales. I am now convinced that humpback whale is my spirit animal. These two species are not friends so, and therefore, my position on orcas is not particularly friendly. That is not to say I don’t admire the grandmother orcas. One of my favorite wildlife program is The Wild with Chris Morgan. Listening to the episode, “Evesdropping on Orcas: Love, Grief and Family“, I have grown to appreciate how close they to human kind. I am not known to be fond of humans either.
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Locomotoring 