Manu's Medley

Brinjal is known as "the King of vegetables", for its beautiful purple body with a crown and rich nutritional value. There are umpteen varieties of brinjal and is known by different names grown across  the world - eggplant, baingan, aubergine, garden egg etc. This versatile vegetable can be easily turned into a variety of mouth watering dishes. In many recipes, it is also used as a substitute to meat. When I come across people who don't eat this wonderful vegetable, I silently laugh inside knowing what they are missing.  Fortunately, everyone in our family loves brinjal in whatever form it is prepared - sambar, fry, nune vankaya, guthi vankaya, vankaya pachadi (chutney), katrika kootu, katrika karakuzhambu, aloo baingan, baingan bartha, baba ganoush (mediterranean eggplant dip), grilled eggplant, eggplant parmesan (similar to lasagna) and the list goes on..... Baingan ka bartha is a very popular Punjabi recipe. As a pre-preparation, we have to roast the brinjal on direct ...

No one is born fully equipped with all the necessary skills to handle motherhood and the surprises it brings along with it. A mother is born when a child is born. With every passing day, we learn and evolve as mothers. Every mother's journey is unique and mine is no less. In this post, I would like to share the 3 mistakes I made as a new mom, their consequences and how I addressed those. 1. Loosing sleep over milk supply We all know how nutritious and healthy mother's breast milk is. It is the purest form of food for  newborns. Though I intended to breast feed my child, there was a delay in the milk production due to c-section delivery. Adding to the bodily complications after the delivery (stitches, abdominal pain, vaginal bleeding), frequent nursing, stress of not able to generate sufficient milk for my child didn't allow me to sleep in peace.  Due to the stress, milk production got delayed further and had an adverse impact on my sugar levels and recovery. My (gestational...

The Henna Artist is first of the Jaipur Trilogy - The Henna Artist, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur and The Perfumist of Paris, written by Alka Joshi. Alka was born in India and moved to US along with her family when she was nine. She did her BA from Stanford University and had written advertising commercials and marketing copy. She enrolled herself in the MFA program in creative writing at California College of Arts at the age of 51. Later she went onto write her first fictional novel - The Henna Artist, which immediately became New York Times bestseller.  For this debut novel, Alka drew inspiration from her mother's life. Her mother had to discontinue her studies to get married at the age of 18. Both her parents got into wedlock, against their personal choice. Both had dreams and goals to achieve. Sooner they had children and her mother couldn't have the life that she wished. Alka is known to have mentioned, “I can’t change her life, but I can change it in fiction. I can create ...

As someone said "There’s nothing that makes you more insane than family, or more happy, or more exasperated, or more secure." True to this statement, no family is completely happy or 100% perfect. It is a mix of every emotion that binds everyone in the family together. At the end, family is family!!! The web series Happy Family Conditions Apply portrays the same. This Hindi language series is directed and produced by film-makers Jamnadas Majethia and Aatish Kapadia of the Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai fame; and the star cast includes seasoned actors like Raj Babbar, Ratna Pathak Shah, Atul Kulkarni, Ayesha Jhulka in key roles, supported by Raunaq Kamdar, Meenal Sahu, Sanah Kapur etc. This is one of the titles Amazon Prime India announced in April last year.  Unlike other series, Amazon released only the first 4 episodes of Happy Family on the 10th March 2023 and went on to air the remaining 6 episodes, 2 episodes on every Friday, with the last 2 released on 31st Mar. It is a family co...