If at first you don't succeed, .... make aval again!

In the elementary school years, we read many stories that explicitly drove towards guidelines for life.  (Yes, as my daughter used to find it annoying, I remember many of the lessons from elementary and high school years quite well, thank you.)  One of those was about Robert the Bruce.

Remember that story?

No?  Let me refresh your memory.  I bet it was one of those fables that was spun (you will see it is pun intended) to make him come across as larger than what he was.

The story is that Robert the Bruce was hiding in a cave after one of his military losses when he observed a spider spinning a web, but failing in its attempt to connect the two ends across and was slipping down.  The guy had no TV or internet and, therefore, found this way too entertaining.

It then struck him that the spider was remarkably persistent in trying again and again, and he was impressed by its perseverance.  So, of course, Robert the Bruce got motivated--if a spider can try again and again, then certainly he can.  He gets re-energized for the next battle and the rest, as they say, was history.  Well, Robert the Bruce is history, of course!

Like him, we, too, try and try again.

After all these years of cooking, perhaps I had expected a simple puli aval (புளி அவல்) to be, pardon the mixing of an alien food metaphor, a piece of cake.  And when it didn't feel fluffy on the tongue as I had imagined it would be, I was disappointed, naturally.

I then appealed to the highest authority.

No, not god--remember that I am atheist.

I asked my mother where I might have gone wrong.  After all, unlike Bruce, I was not stuck in a cave and had access to a telephone.

"It perhaps just needed a little bit more water, which you can add in the cooking process too, in case it hadn't soaked well enough."

Aha, that simple.

Then she said that I might prefer something else, even more than the puli aval.  Mother remembered that I have a fondness for dishes made with black pepper.  The recipe she suggested was way, way simple.  I am going to miss such feedback from her in a few years from now; such is life!

I blasted music and got to this project after a five-miler by the river.  Of course, I had to improvise.  "Maybe I will dice up carrots and quickly sautee it for both the taste and the looks."

And I did.

This urge to improvise, and never strictly follow a formula, needs to be psychoanalyzed, I would think.  Why not simply do it the way mother described it, right?  Why not simply do engineering, then go to an MBA program, marry a brahmin girl, and ...!!!  I suspect all these are inter-connected.

I couldn't wait to taste the food.

It aced the olfactory test with the highest of the grades.

Now the tongue.

It was awesome.

I sat down with a fresh brew of coffee, and opened up the latest issue of the New Yorker.

I am mighty glad that the elementary school curriculum included that story about Robert the Bruce and the spider in the cave.