Words from Rilke

Anyone who has read and appreciated Rilke's writings may agree with me that they have a soothing effect on angst. Sometimes they solve long standing personal puzzles. As far back as I can remember, this is one my favorite passages from his works. Originally I heard his name in a movie Kissing Jessica Stein. The portion highlighted below was quoted in the movie. I looked for the author's name and randomly searched websites till I found this complete passage. Thereafter I picked up a number of books, my favorite one being Letters To A Young Poet.

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Fear of the Inexplicable - Rainer Maria Rilke
But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.
But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence ofthe individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeonsand not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.
We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

More than food...

If you have started reading the blog from the bottom, you are probably thinking that I must be an obsessed foodie. Well that I am but that's not all that I am. Between meals, I try to while away time at an Investment Bank. I wont go into further or it is possible that a perfectly civil dialogue may turn into a rant.

However, it is worthwhile sharing the origin of my blognick. Why "bent" and why the focus on banker rather than a food related blognick? Well, for one, not all future posts will be food related. I needed an easy topic to break ice without sounding utterly self absorbed.

Banking (or to be more precise a job in a structuring group) over the last few years has bent my mind in many ways. Bent under the burden, bent over backwards to get to the destination, banker with a bent of mind, banker who thinks along the bent path, better bent into submission would all be appropriate puns. My job doesnt define me but it has bent my personality in positive and negative ways (point of introspection how we start deviating from our grandeur dreams of professional achievements shortly after we jump from the school into work pool - has that happened to you?).

Let me end this post by sharing the most important advice that someone offered me
"Take it easy. It's not your daddy's company".

This is another mantra that I have been trying to chant since I heard:
"What can the company do for you? Are you making it happen?".

My own take is that the key to longevity in this business is keep yourself mentally replenished and not get spent. Growing a tortoise-like shell comes in handy as well.

Have you always been vegetarian?

At a party a few years ago, a woman asked me if I had been vegetarian all my life and I responded yes. She was visibly shocked but shocked me as well with her next question. "You seem to have such lovely soft skin and you are telling me you do not eat any fish or seafood? May I touch your skin?" As embarassed as I was, I said "Sure", thinking to myself does this woman really live in New York in the day and age of food choice excess? Quite pleased with the results that human skin does not grow scales or thorns or what ever else the lady expected, she wasn't quite the newly converted vegetarian but slightly more educated.

It is one of the most common questions I have been asked ever since I moved to the US and especially in my work environment. "Why are you vegetarian?" or "Have you always been vegetarian?" No one asks me why am I Hindu or why do I wear glasses or some other mundane facet of my life that sets me apart. However the ability to resist mountains of meat swimming piled near my restricted valley of greens on the table does not fail to get a laugh or two.

Recently my standard answer is that I don't eat anything that had a mother or a pair of eyes (the idea is to try and retain the microbacteria in food and eggs out of the filer). It is debatable whether potato fails my filter because it has eyes - that is why the emphasis on "pair".

As an Indian who grew up in a vegetarian family, there was no reason to break the family tradition and and go looking for the mountains of meat from my green valley. When I moved to Boston, thankfully being a town populated by students from all over the world, finding vegetarian food was never a problem. It was during my years at school when thanks to one of my best friends, I discovered the dormant cook in me. Those evenings of cooking potpourri, bonhomie, random conversations in the common kitchen of my dorm with assorted residents are my brightest memories from school years in the US.

Once I started cooking, I expanded my array of cooking ingredients manifold but there was even less reason to visit aninal kingdom for my ingredients list.

Over the last few years, it would be fair to say that I have changed in many ways, some superficial and some fundamental. Being vegetarian is the one thing that hasn't changed and it is almost like an anchor to my personality. I have no motivation to change now. I cherish this strand of continuity between life in India and life in the US.

So there, I have answered the question I am asked most frequently. Watch out this space for some of my favorite recipes, NY restaurants. If my voice could reach Zagat, I would shout aloud for a vegetarian's Zagat but till then....