Profile of a Diva –Durga

Distant drumbeats announce the arrival of the Durga idol to the local pandal. Like every year this year too I felt that unmistakable elation at heart, the sense of freedom and celebration which I am sure is a common sentiment shared by millions. Apart from celebration the concept of this female Deity has always fascinated me. She is the primordial mother force, all pervading yet so practical, down to earth,so professonal and probably that's why so contemporary!

Born out of the collective anger and exasperation of gods she is a war goddess; a fierce, fighter against any force that dares to disrupt the cosmic equilibrium. She is an agenda onto herself, an avowed activist against terror, a one woman demolition squad against evil. She is one goddess who has been frozen in the frame of war amidst her family snap. In fact her construct is not complete without the context of evil. Take the Ashura out of the picture the very idea of Mahishasuramaradini would collapse.

She is a strange synthesis of the opposites. Born out of combined male energy she is a female force. In many sense Durga redefines the concept of power. She is not just a fusion of collective power. Gods wanted a power to destroy their enemy; she came out in the form of a power that gave birth through destruction. Power needs to be perpetuated and multiplied. It needs to be recycled, regenerated through the process of creation and not limited and marginalized by the catastrophe of destruction.

There was nothing miraculous about her operations as described in the Chandi.She used no magic,no mesmeric charm with which most of the divine powers are ordained.
She displayed hard work. She fought, She took the beating, she got tired, took refreshing drinks and engaged again in her mission with renewed vigor .She never looked for outside resources,but delved deep within herself and came up with new profiles of power. She not only demonstrated multitasking at its best but also displayed her ability to be a multi entity to rise to the magnitude of the task at hand.

She represented the purest form of governance. The problems she had set to solve were not created by alien forces. They have their origin in the mismanagement of power by the gods themselves. All ashuras were made powerful by some god gifted boon be it from Brahma ,Vishnu or Shiva .Wishes were granted right left and centre by gods with full knowledge that the recipients nursed bigger personal ambitions and there were strong chances of the boons being abused . They would come to their senses when their own boon was used against them. When things had gone out of control big time SOS were sent to Devi.

Devi had to be invoked. She would never appear uninvited.As a crisis manager she would only swing into action when collectively approached by the gods. Once called she would take complete charge, no questions asked, no fault finding commission being set up. She would tame power hungry brutes, terminate the tormentors and then would hand over control to the male gods again to run their show. Once her job was done she simply disappeared.

Even her social visits among the mortals are short and swift –once a year for a few days. She is powerful because she is the eternal provider and would never ask for anything. While other gods fight with each other for their share of offering from the mortals she would never even utter “perform my puja”. She would appear at the end of each battle with a blank cheque of boon to the gods-an unconditional commitment to save and serve.

As more and more Durgas are adorning the positions of power in big houses hitherto managed by their male counterparts Durga remains single most manifestation of a woman in action with full array of feminine roles- a mother, a leader, a manager and a home maker offering unique principles of managing power and taming the tormentors and practicing family codes in the dry corporate world.
Ya devi corporateshu netri rupen samsthita
Namastasmi namantasmai namanstasmai namonamaha.

What's Cooking?

Flip through any TV channel- local, national or international, you will unmistakably find a cookery show! Kitchen has come a long way from its primitive, sweaty, sooty, grimy, functional workplace to a stage of performing art. Nor is kitchen any longer the domain of mothers, maids and house mistresses .Kitchen space has become more democratic over the years. Everybody is welcome –young ,old ,male, female ,professional , amateurs, poets, police ,painters, actors ,players, lawyers, singers you name them they have performed in this Broadway of baking and cooking.

All these shows irrespective of their being in local, national or international channels are fairly popular and enjoy respectable TRPs. Kitchens cut across clutter, kitchens connect. Busiest of the housewives, working women, dutiful husbands, accomplished bachelors, bespectacled dadajis and bemused daadis all watch cookery shows with interest. If your product /brand have remotest connection with kitchen put your ads in the cookery show and be assured of a sizeable viewership.

Only a couple of decades back kitchen was out of bounds for everybody else except mothers and home makers. Male members’ duty would end with bringing ingredients at the kitchen door. Nor were they interested to know what was happening inside; they were more interested in what was coming out of it rather than what going on inside it.
Things change, stories evolve, plots take new turns and cookery and kitchen were no exception to this law of evolution. As the joint family structure crumbled, women started taking bolder strides into the male world, managing home and office the old elaborate traditional recipes looked desperately out of sync. So were the proponents of them-mothers, dadimas and mother-in-laws. Brands and gadgets jumped in to fill the gap; media took up the role of the new cooking coach and elevated cooking from a daily chore to an exciting serial.
Cookery shows, as represented through camera eye create a sweat less spectacle of feast for the eyes. Under the cool light and cooler air-conditioned ambience of the studio fire burns without smoke, thanks to efficient chimneys, ferocity of frying have been tamed by the shining, silent ovens. The crude and laborious parts of cooking like cutting and cleaning are carefully photo shopped from the frame. Shots of fresh Vegetables dissolve into pre- peeled, chopped, sized and washed pieces in clean glass bowls and Teflon coated pans. Even the ordinary cooking medium like oil sugar and spices are introduced like the cast of a drama with close up spotlight shots. Cookery show is an attempt to spice up the ordinary, glamorizing the grind.

There is an element of discovery and surprise in these shows; the shows bring to limelight the unsung culinary skill of the ordinary or that of the people who are successful or famous in fields other than cooking .As a show it is a complete dish by itself. It neither demands continuity from the archive of our memory space as to what has happened before nor does it leave anything in the “to be continued” format .It is free of the past legacy and future expectations. It narrates, educates, demonstrates and finally rewards the viewer in flat 20 minutes. There is a cogent transaction of skills between the performer and the spectators; recipe empowers the recipients.
No wonder the reality shows based on cooking have grown in popularity across the world. The most popular one - The Master Chef has broken ratings records in two of the world’s biggest markets. It has been successfully running in UK since 1990 and the Australian version became third most watched Australian TV program since 2001. Master Chef is not just a TV show, it has become a cultural phenomena. The soon to come Indian version is even more dramatic because it goes a step further. The show will offer to set the winner for life. The grand prize will be a restaurant in winner’s name. Which the winner will run and make an occupation out of his talent and thus change his/her life forever.
Cookery shows have already made waves in the bigger screen. A Meryl Streep and Amy Adams starrer Julie &Julia went on to receive 27 awards and nominations in different film festivals including nomination for Academy Awards. The screen play was based on two true stories ; My Life in France, Julia Child's autobiography and a memoir by Julie Powell documenting online her daily experiences of cooking each of the 524 recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
A culinary legend (Julia Child) provides a frustrated office worker (Julie Powell) with a new recipe for life in Julie and Julia. That’s where probably lies the power of cookery shows. It not only tells you how to make you food taste better it also says, that if you have the passion for cooking you can add a new flavor to your life and to the world around. And that’s a recipe worth talking about!