odzer’s blog

This post is in response and in protest of Chandigarh Administration and its Department of Environment. I will continue to put updates periodically unless the notification to ban plastic bags is either withdrawn by the Administration or is struck down by the courts. It is now my intention to fight the government on this online because I see this as a mega downgrade in my quality of life. All of those who are affected by this ban in any way are requested to use the contact me form (opens in a new window) so that we can formulate strategy to fight this ban. Regular posts will continue on this blog as usual.

Last week I wrote a letter to the Director of The Department of Environment, Chandigarh Administration. His name is Mr. Ishwar Singh. I did not really expect a reply but I had this faint hope that the government here does reply to the e-mails of the people who they supposedly represent. It seems they give two hoots! So I am transforming my private e-mail to the Director in to an open letter. The e-mail ID that it was sent to is dcf@chd.nic.in. Please Mr. Director if you read this letter do leave a reply!

Dear Sir,

I am writing to you regarding the recent complete ban on plastic
bags that your department has strived to impose upon the public of
Chandigarh. This ban is ill conceived and unfair. At the most it is
just a publicity stunt of your administration at the cost of the
quality of life of the people of this city. I intend therefore to
oppose this law in the media and on the internet to raise awareness
regarding how illogical it is. I am going to raise some points in
this e-mail and direct your attention towards them and as the
director of the agency responsible for environment in my city I
imagine it is your responsibility to respond to each of them.

1) Paper bags offer no alternatives : Paper takes up far more space
in landfills than plastic ever will. It takes more energy to
recycle paper than plastic and paper is basically made out of food.
It is more detrimental to use paper than plastic as carry bags.
Paper bags in Chandigarh are lousily made (and that is putting it
lightly) and they can not be used to carry heavy loads. They break
and people who carry supplies in them often face situations where
they have leaking, broken, spilit or falling produce from their
bags.

2) Plastic is recyclable and since it is not sourced from precious
wood it should be recycled. The administration will have to recycle
plastic anyway since you have not banned plastic packaging so why
not do it on a larger scale and recycle plastic carry bags as well?

3) Carrying your own bag to the markets may sound as the ideal
solution but it is clearly not. Consider my own case. I am an
impulsive shopper and I can shop even if I have not planned to do
so. Carrying your own bags means that you are restricted to the
amount that can fit in the bags that you have taken from home. This
is preposterous. Is the administration not restricting commerce
now? What right does the government have to influence consumer
spending and behaviour in a free, fair and a democratic country?
Does the government now expect every individual to carry a backpack
all the time? This is clearly draconian and unacceptable.

4) Jute or Paper bags do not make suitable carrying receptacles for
several products especially dairy and meat products. Newsprint
paper bags used in this country are toxic because ink is not meant
for human consumption! Why has the government not taken action to
ban those?

5) Plastic bags blocking drains is not an adequate excuse to ban
such bags because such blockages result from either the
administration or the municipal government’s failure to clean up
this city or from the problem of littering. Instead you should have
focussed your energies on cleaning up the city, recycling,
modification of  public behaviour by encouraging segregation of
waste etc.

6) Environment can not affect commerce and the economy at large.
With alternatives available to the consumers today such bans are
irrational. I intend now to do most of my shopping outside of
Chandigarh in the adjoining towns because they do not have any bans
on carry bags and as such I find that far more convenient than
spending my money on either jute bags or trying to carry goods in
paper bags that do not last for even seconds let alone hours.

7) Other countries have no such measures and still do not get any
problems by using plastic bags including the excuses the
administration is giving like chocked drains. It means that
basically like I said earlier you are punishing the public for your
failures.

Overall your agency is responsible for the welfare of the people of
the city and its environment and I expected better from it than
imposing blanket bans which do not succeed in any case. I will be
publishing articles, blogs, starting petitions, writing to
newspapers and giving interviews wherever possible in highlighting
the quality of life issues that this law has led to in this city so
that similar laws are not adopted elsewhere and public opinion is
created for the revocation of this erring notification. Any
comments that you make will of course be subject to public
disclosure therefore. I am sure as a public servant your are
committed to the answering of queries of the people in your area.

You have my warm regards,

odzer

Today I made an Apple cake. They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away, I sort of believe it. Anyway I macerated around one apple in some brown sugar and some cinnamon and then used that to make a cinnamon apple upside down cake. It came out better than I had expected and to I have today documented the cake extraction process which is always the worst part for me because I have to wait for the cake to cool down and the aroma of cinnamon and apple’s is simply irresistible. I had originally planned to add some walnuts to this cake but I could not locate any in my fridge so I wonder whatever happened to them, may be I just need to clear it out. Fridges have this nasty habit of gobbling up things that never return back.

There is something very Dutch about Cinnamon and Apple’s. It is something that I have always related with the culture of The Netherlands. Somehow ever since I was six years old I have almost always had something or the other to do with that country. Anyway after the cake cooled down I enjoyed a slice with my afternoon tea and put the rest away for the weekend and hopefully beyond.

Law and Order is important, it was also a very nice TV show. In any case the reason I am writing about this is because I had the chance to visit our wonderful District Courts today. Do not worry I am not suing the Chandigarh Administration for banning plastic bags yet! It was on a completely unrelated matter where a friend of mine needed to get a traffic ticket cleared. Now how he got this ticket in the first place is very interesting. He claims that he was driving at the speed of 45 km/hr when some over zealous Chandigarh Police cops stopped him and fined him.

After a ticket is issued here, you can normally either pay the fine directly at the Chandigarh traffic police lines or you can wait to appear before a judge. It is never a good advice to pay the fine directly because it is much cheaper to pay the fine at the courts. That is the standard wisdom of the process. Now what makes it more interesting is the rampant corruption outside the courts. All you need to do is meet the people who manage the parking outside the courts, ask for a friendly guy who will for a hundred or two hundred rupees assist you in paying your fine and getting back your drivers license or registeration. This is is the reality of India. A country where any idiot with around 20 US$ can get a license to drive and even if he makes a mistake can get away by paying around 10$ at the courts.

Is it convenient sure. What are the consequences of it though. Fatalities on the road everyday. Around 250 people die everyday in India every day on the roads and the streets. It could be you, it could be me. It appears to me that somehow this is not a priority for Chandigarh Administration or any other local government but somehow plastic bags are a priority! I am not going to rant about the bags now but it was just an example. What comes to my mind is that they have simply given up on licensing, traffic tickets, road education or any reform. It is simply not a priority any more. So if you are ever outside the District Courts to avoid paying your fine or looking for an easy way out just remember the face of the last person you saw dead on the road. I am sure all of us that live here have seen one.

I tried to cook spanish rice and it was tasty!

I have made some spanish rice but since I did not eat them as a side dish and I needed something substantial since a man can not live on rice alone I tossed in some mince. It gave it an interesting twist. Although it seems that I have made far too much and I still have leftovers in the fridge! I have never cooked spanish rice before but it seems it is an interesting dish. The flavour is quite nice and very herby. Although I am sure Vikram would be able to tell me more about this because I think the original recipe comes from Tex-Mex cusine.

I have been eating quite a lot of rice lately so I can say that I am bored with it now. I promise no rice to come for a while now. Its amazing though what you can do with leftover food sometimes that makes it more interesting although spanish rice is strictly not a leftover food recipe. I fried the leftover spanish rice the other day with an egg and it gave quite interesting results.

This post is in response and in protest of Chandigarh Administration and its Department of Environment. I will continue to put updates periodically unless the notification to ban plastic bags is either withdrawn by the Administration or is struck down by the courts. It is now my intention to fight the government on this online because I see this as a mega downgrade in my quality of life. All of those who are affected by this ban in any way are requested to use the contact me form (opens in a new window) so that we can formulate strategy to fight this ban. Regular posts will continue on this blog as usual.

Today I went to drop off my mother who came to visit me and decided to drop in to one of my favourite stores to buy some snacks. We had decided to visit the store because it looked like rain and we had nothing better to do anyway. After shopping when I went to checkout the man tried putting a pack of Yakult in to a paper bag but since it had come right out of a fridge it had condensation on it and the paper bag just fell apart in his hands. So he proceeded to wrap it in newspaper and I insisted on a plastic bag. Of course knowing well he can not give me any. So they had the guy at the checkout making these beautiful and neat packages in old newspapers. Old Newspapers!!!! I have no idea where these newspapers have been before they were deployed as packaging material could even have been the store owners kitty litter lining for all I know and I am sure newspapers are toxic to humans much more than plastic bags ever can be. Then he proceeded to wrap the package with a nice plastic tape….Do you see the irony here?

Now I have this huge parcel for just a few snacks and if I were to carry home my weekly groceries in newspaper wrap it would take me around 50 of these. Do you think anyone can reasonably carry such packets. Could you imagine even carrying around 4 of these if you had been to 4 different stores? When I reached home the wrapped Yakult had already made the newspaper soggy though you can not see that well in the picture here. I just made it home before the rain broke through though if I had been some minutes late the paper would have melted away leaving me again with picking up soggy drenched produce from the pavement. Oh and all those magical jute substitute bags will not be available because all those poor NGO worker types can never match the supply by making jute bags with hand. We have 1.5 million people in this city and you can multiply that number with anything you like in your mind to imagine how many bag substitutes we need.

I intend to continue to write articles detailing about my adventures in the ” plastic free ” wonderland we call Chandigarh.

At the beginning of this week I cooked a very quick lunch. Eggplants with chicken and miso and a spinach, walnut and tomato salad with Japanese doreshingu (sesame) dressing. This is really a very easy dish and makes for a quick stir fry lunch. All you need to do is basically cut up the eggplants soak them up a bit in water to take the bitterness away and stir fry them with some chicken, some mirin, some sugar  and add miso at the very end. I must admit I did not follow any Japanese traditional recipe for this but followed my own instincts and the result was quite nice really.

The salad was pretty basic as well all it had was spinach, tomatoes, walnuts and the salad dressing. Since I was cooking for two on that particular day it was enough food.What I love about Japanese stir fry dishes is the quickness with which they can be accomplished although what I miss about East Asia the most now I guess is the variety of greens. India is a vegetarian country but strangely there are very few greens available here. I must also say Indian salads are atrocious and are the weaker point in the cusine here. I hated eating sprouts in India mainly because they stank to high heavens, the moong daal one’s smell of death really. When I was in Japan i discovered that we do not let them sprout fully and that is why they are so uninteresting and boring. It is difficult to make sprouts here on your own because most seeds are treated with insecticide and are for sowing purposes only. Although I can try with moong sometimes because the daal is meant to be consumed but hedonist tried it once when she was living in India and I think she had quite mixed results.

Today I am doing two posts on account of a nasty surprise I had when I went shopping. The ban on plastic bags in Chandigarh is severely affecting our lives and we are harassed beyond words. I am using some really strong language to express my opinion today. Although this has eroded some of the objectivity of what I say below it is sort of therapeutic for me to vent in this manner. I will post further updates to this till the court takes up an appeal against this law on October 22. I hope we can return back to some sanity after that because the hardships we face right now are extreme.

Now that my fair city has already banned smoking in public last year they have decided to ban Plastic bags of all sizes, shapes, colours and thickness as well. Briliant! Now we can use paper bags, paper is made of what? Guess Guess——>Trees! Morons!!! No wait a second Fucking Morons!

Today I went shopping and I came home scaterring half the things I purchased, running after delinquent onions that just did not want to stop rolling away from the torn paper bags. If they have not provided us with any alternatives how are we supposed to shop! Use Calabashes or the Administrators head as a shopping receptacle? Do these people who run this supposedly elitist city ever go shopping or do they send their errand boys for that? Have they ever heard of impulsive shopping? When you are somewhere shopping for lets say a pack of milk and you decide to buy a dozen eggs as well? Well how are you supposed to carry them home? Yeah bring your own bag, but how? You cant carry bags with you 24 hours a day? Even if you do carry a bag I buy enough groceries every week to fill several huge plastic bags, how will they fit in one cloth bag? MORONS!!

Packaging in India sucks already. They sell oil in plastic pouches for heaven’s sake! They leak and they are nasty. How is banning plastic bags going to save the bloody environment and even if it does who cares!! Breathing is bad enough for the environment, should we just all die now? IDIOTS!! What world do these people really live in?

Oh and in case you go shopping for clothes or books and end up shopping that weighs kilos, you are in deep trouble. Every shopkeeper I talked with today was complaining, the chemist was worried about the ladies who buy their menstrual goodies and like them in nice black plastic bags. Oh by the way how are you supposed to carry meat eh? Paper bags hardly make good receptacles for that and there is no such thing as packaged meat in India. CRAZY FUCKING IDIOTS!!

Am I angry? Yes sure I am!! This is what I mean by government getting carried away and people allowing these crazy bans. There is no stopping it now, may be they should ban blogs they do not like now. Oh what am I saying. They can already do it!!

There are other issues to consider since Panchkula and Mohali our sister cities have not been crazy enough, their plastic bags can still pollute Chandigarh. Ugh! What if someone buys their groceries in Mohali and lives in Chandigarh? There are parts of our city that are nearer to Mohali markets than Chandigarh ones! ANOTHER REASON THAT TELLS YOU THAT WE HAVE MORONS FOR GOVERNMENT!! Oh and if this publicity stunt does go through consider the costs, the so called environment friendly carry bags that they are advising shop keepers to use sell for around 7 rupees each. Someone who makes 50 rupees a day will find that so useful! MORONS!!! MORONS!!! MORONS!!!

Now we already had strict enough laws to deal with plastic bags in the first place. They cite Himachal. Well due respect to Himachal but Himachal is no Chandigarh. The standard of life is very different between the two places, did they consider that? I AM SURE NOT. I hope someone in the government here does read this and thinks it over. If he or she does not just go for a weeks or months shopping and try doing it with paper and jute bags. GOOD LUCK!! I am beginning to think Draconian laws are something that are just confined to history books. Welcome to Chandigarh!! Cover your head with a brown paper bag!

My first ever havan

My neighbours have finally moved in to the house that they have constructed next to mine. This means all banging and horrible construction noises they have been making for the past 2 years are finally over. It is actually strange that I now miss all the noise and activity. Last evening my neighbour came to invite me for a Havan and brunch. Now I have never been to a Havan before or actually any Hindu pooja (prayer) ceremony so I decided that it would be a good first experience.

I noticed that they sit around a fire pit and put things in to the fire while the pandit chants mantras. It is very smokey and after it was over they offered prasad of Motichoor Ladoo and a Pear. They also gave some halva afterwards. It was all very nice. After the prasad I met some people who live around here and I had never met before. It was all very gezellig.

The brunch had a North Indian vegetarian meal which was nice. Although I had eaten a full breakfast and I could not eat much. I really liked the Karela and the Dahi Vada that they served. While leaving my neighbours have given me a box of traditional Indian sweets which include more Motichoor Ladoos and Pinni. I liked the Pinni. Overall it was a lot of fun and it was quite a unique “house warming” experience for me.

Ever tried owning a white laptop in India? Its a pain. Now I am not really a clean freak and I can make a mess out of my computer before I decide to clean it up but every now and then I decide to give it a nice clean. I have tried various things when it comes to cleaning my laptop but the one thing that I have decided that works for me is, get ready for it…..

A Pencil Eraser

Yep! The kind that engineering drawing students use, not made of rubber but plastic. It gets even the worst grease and hand oil stains out of the computer. Although I would not recommend that anyone who is reading this try it on their laptop but it works fine for my Apple Macbook. I usually just clean the keyboard first with a moist cloth and dry it with another soft cloth. Then I get going at it with my pencil eraser and Voila! Macbook owners often complain about discolouring of the panel besides the touchpad and in 2006 when I had purchased this computer I had Apple actually change the whole panel once. I have since discovered that it can be quite efficently cleaned this way. I do not think though that people who use coloured computers especially silver or black coloured ones should give this a try. I have heard recently that Apple has redesigned the Macbook and they will be launching them soon, the plastic body is on its way out. I am thinking that is basically a good move.

Not bad at all for a leftover dish

I was inspired by Hedonists post about Easy South Indian Food so I decided to make some Lemon rice according to the recipe that she had provided. Now this was quite an adventure for me because I normally never ever cook South Indian food at home. There are many reasons for this, one is simply because it is one of the cheaper meals that you can eat in Chandigarh. Another is that my past experiences have never been that good. I made some modifications to her recipe mainly because I had no peanuts and I substituted almonds which was not that bad at all. I think it would have come out equally nice without any nuts as well.

Just to be sure that I had done it right I had a chance to taste the same dish in a South Indian restaurant when I went out to dinner with a friend. It was quite the same except I had gone a bit easy on the mustard seeds. Since I have a curry leaf plant growing right in my verandah I had tossed in some of those as well. I am going to highly recommend her recipe to everyone its worth a good try. I am posting a picture of the resulting dish here.