Thoughts seldom spoken

The beauty of India is its diversity. As you may already know, India has 22 official languages, with linguistically divided states. (Hindi is not the only official language as some may misconstrue, but is spoken the most. Approximately, 43% are native Hindi speakers). A few states have commonalities in food, dressing, reasons of celebration (festivals) and such, but have their uniqueness.  So the stories behind the celebration differ from which part of India we come from. But we can find a commonality among all reasons of celebrations in the spiritual sense for each of the festivals.   In the case of Deepawali, the festival signifies the victory of good over evil – where the good and the evil are present in us. It also symbolizes light over darkness. Row of little lamps signify the small victories against darkness.  What is Deepawali:  Deepawali - deep - light(lit in a lamp) - awali - row. So Deepawali literally means row of lights or lamps. Colloquially it be...

During this covid time, there were many a days I used to stare blank on what to cook for that day. I open the fridge to see the vegetables and I cook impromptu what I feel like. Some days, I felt like whatever I think of, I already would have cooked it last week or so and it wasn't 'interesting'. I used to have a meal plan long back when my first daughter started going to school. But slowly drifted from that as I started learning more recipes and doing exploratory cooking.  Due to the fact that my kids were at home since March, the cooking varieties increased and we started baking, cooking much more than the usual level. When I started sharing what I was doing, a common remark from my close friends was 'You are cooking too much.' That kind of reminded me to the basics. Cooking was to provide healthy food. So I thought I needed to streamline my cooking to effective healthy meals rather than too many snacks or high fat/sugar diet. Sugar the bitter truth video also was...