mad as hell (and we're not going to take it anymore)

A girl died on Saturday. We don't know her name, so we call her Fearless One (Nirbhaya), Treasure (Amanat), Lightning (Damini) and Braveheart. She was only twenty-three when she was gang-raped, brutalized and murdered on a Delhi bus.

Delhi has long had a reputation for being unsafe for women (with a rape occurring every 18 hours, deservedly so) but this is not just about Delhi; women all over India have worked out their own strategies for dealing with harassment and molestation. My mother, Mumbai born and raised, has a trick of having an umbrella ready to smack anyone who tries to get handsy. Devika Bakshi lists some of the measures Indian women take to stay safe. Some of these are common-sense, "text me the cab’s licence plate number", for instance, but others - "wear leggings under a skirt" - are unfortunate examples of the restrictions women place on themselves to navigate a environment in which they are constantly under threat. Women are sick of hemming themselves in to stay safe, and their anger at the horrors inflicted on this girl has catalyzed protests against a government seen as ineffective, a police force that seems to blame the victim more often than not, and the society that produces such monsters.

The 2007 film Chak De India has a scene in which the Indian women's hockey team is at a restaurant when one of the girls is harassed by local louts. Rather than staying quiet and backing down - which would be the "safe" thing to do - the girls confront their harassers, leading to an all out brawl in which the girls prevail. I can never watch the scene without an absurd feeling of vindication and pride. Rationally, I know that there are better ways to solve a problem than violence, but viscerally and emotionally, the part of me that is sick of wondering what outfit is safe to wear, or calculating how late is too late to be out safely, is thrilled. Bas. Today, women are saying enough is enough; our society needs to change and us with it. I hope that happens.

Sweet Potato Muffins

Oh baking... I love that feeling when you throw stuff together and it tastes, somehow, good. Generally I'm the sort of person who follows recipes slavishly, but given that I had baked sweet potato bread twice with delicious results, I felt free to experiment a little bit and would up adapting that recipe to bake muffins. Now the recipe below looks insane, but that's just me blathering on. It's really simple and gets you 12 awesome muffins. What's not to like?

Ingredients

• 1 cup honey
• ½ cup vegetable oil
• 2 eggs
• 1¾ cups sifted all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 cooked and mashed sweet potato (comes to approximately  1¼ cups)
• 1 cup chopped pecans

 Directions

1. Grease your muffin tray! I always like to do this first, because otherwise I forget, and then I'm frantically greasing them at the last minute, with the batter and oven ready. 
2. First, cook the sweet potato. This will take longer than you expect, a good 30 minutes of boiling (you really don't want there to be any hard lumps of uncooked tuber left, so in this case, it's okay to overcook.) 
3. While your sweet potato is boiling, chop your pecans and set aside.
4. Combine your flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon and nutmeg in a bowl, mix it and set it aside. 
5. Combine the honey and oil. This shouldn't be too much of a problem, unless, like me, your honey has crystallized. In that case, if after much whisking your honey and oil hasn't combined, don't worry. We'll fix it in step 8. 
6. Your sweet potato should be done by now! Check to see if it's good and cooked by sticking a knife or skewer in it. If it goes in smooth, you're done! If not, stick it back in boiling water and check on it periodically. Once it's done, the skin will come off easily. Chop the sweet potato into large chunks and mash it. If you use a blender, you'll probably wind up adding a quarter cup of water, which is cool too.  Set your mashed or blended sweet potatoes off to a side.
7. This is a good time to pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees. A lot of baking recipes will tell you to pre-heat as the first step, but I'm a slow, slow cook and I inevitable wind up with my oven ready way before my batter is. You'll have a sense of how slow or fast your oven is, and of how slow or fast you are at assembling ingredients, so this step can go up or down the list depending on that. 
8. Add eggs to the honey-oil mixture and beat well. If you had a problem with the honey and oil not combining well, once you add the eggs and whisk, you should get a nice homogenous mixture. 
9. Combine the flour mixture (from step 4) with the egg-honey-oil mix. Rather than adding all the flour at once, add a bit, mix it in well, add some more until finally you've got a nice smooth batter. 
10. Add your mashed sweet potato and stir until the batter looks nice and even (no orange swirls!)
11. Add in the chopped pecans (step 3!) and stir. 
12. Using a ladle or a serving spoon, pour your batter into your greased standard 12-muffin tray. Try and even out the level of batter in each cup, otherwise some of your muffins are going to have more of a muffin top than others. 
13. Stick it in the oven for 25-30 minutes. (Use this time for clean-up.)
14. After 30 minutes, your muffins should be light brown and smell fantastic (I'm not kidding. With the cinnamon and nutmeg, your kitchen will smell like Christmas!) Take them out of the oven, and leave them to cool in the muffin tray. Once cool, you can use a butter knife to loosen the muffins from the cups and pop them out of the tray.
15. Enjoy!

Banana Bake Fest

Given that I (and the rest of my family) love bananas, we inevitably buy too many and then wind up with a bunch of really ripe, really sweet bananas. Usually, I make smoothies, but when I'm in a mood to munch, I bake banana bread. The recipe is really easy - it was the first thing I ever baked -and the end result is sweet, nutty, crunchy deliciousness.

Today I decided to try something different and made banana crumb muffins. This is my first try at baking muffins and they wound up going perfectly with my afternoon coffee. This is a quick and easy recipe, though I did make two changes: first, I used brown sugar throughout; second, I used half a cup of sugar in the muffin dough instead of three-quarters of a cup. You could probably reduce the sugar even further and still get a delicious muffin - the bananas themselves will be pretty sweet and the crunchy crumb topping is even sweeter.

Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

Now Playing: Frances Rose - Vampire

I have a long list of I-shoulds -  “I should take up handicrafts! I should devote myself to writing! I should learn to skate!” And every year as September rolls around, “This year, I should watch a movie at TIFF!” This year, I finally bit the bullet and bought tickets to a TIFF movie – specifically, Joss Whedon’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. I watched it at the Elgin Theatre (crappy cellphone photos below) along with a huge crowd. The internet informs me that the Elgin seats upto 3,559 people and the auditorium looked pretty full to me, not to mention the line to get in circled all the way around the block. Most of those 3,000+ people were clearly Joss Whedon fans, judging from the snippets of conversation one heard in line and the massive cheers during the movie.

Whedon filmed this movie right after he’d finished filming The Avengers;  he assembled a cast of actors, most of whom he’d worked it on previous Whedonverse projects, and shot this movie in twelve days, at his own California home. The movie is funny, engaging and - probably because all the action is set in and around one house - oddly intimate. I thoroughly enjoyed the film – gushed about it on twitter –and rushed home to write a glowing review. That was a week ago. I’d started writing, mind – I described the movie, the environs, etc – and then I was stuck.  I was shtum where I should have been gushing. Why? Writer’s Block? Possible, even probable; but why? And then it occurred to me: perhaps I couldn’t write a glowing review because I no longer felt the film deserved it.

I should mention that the first adaptation of Shakespeare I ever watched was Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. Now, I’d watched that movie in high school (a rather long time ago) mostly for Keanu Reeves who played Don John, but a lot of it stuck with me, in particular the iron in Emma Thompson’s voice as she says, “Kill Claudio.” It sent chills down my spine. When Amy Acker, who is otherwise fantastic as Beatrice, said it, the audience laughed. Now, this was an audience of Whedon-fen, clearly primed to laugh at anything, but still. No one would have laughed at, or with, Thompson in that moment. 

Whedon’s adaptation differs from Branagh’s firstly by being filmed in black-and-white, rather than colour and then by being set in modern-day California rather than Ye Olde Italy. In addition, Whedon adds a prologue: it begins in the aftermath of a sexual encounter. A man puts on his clothes, and looking back at a woman, leaves an apartment. No words are spoken. This works on two levels; first, it saves Whedon the trouble of writing a morning-after scene in Shakespearean prose; and secondly, it makes sense that Beatrice and Benedick, who ceaselessly engage in verbal combat, would resort to a silent cease-fire. Yet I can’t help but wonder if this really makes sense in the context of a play in which a character’s supposed lack of chastity is cause for her being jeered at and jilted. Besides, Benedic k and Beatrice are one of the prime examples of UNrequited sexual tension; once you find out they’ve been, er, requiting all over the place, the sexual tension becomes a little less tense.

I think though, the biggest problem with Much Ado About Nothing is the fact that in cinematic terms, it’s a meringue: fluffy, sweet and light and completely lacking in substance and any real sense of tension. I enjoyed the movie, but it left no strong impressions past funny and pleasant. Maybe it’s because Whedon made this film as a sort of cinematic palate-cleanser post The Avengers, but that film left more of an impression on me than this one, what with all the Sturm and Drang. (Yes, I preferred the comic book movie to the Shakespeare adaptation. Sue me.)

On balance, despite all the aforementioned caveats, I’d still recommend this movie; it makes a lovely introduction to Shakespeare, it’s well-directed and the acting is wonderful. (A quick aside – Nathan Fillion, aka my Imaginary Boyfriend No 5, was hilarious, and the crowd loved him. I couldn’t hear some of his lines for the cheering!) If you do watch the film, you’ll leave smiling – we did.

Amor Fati

Author's Note: The following story has real-life elements, but still, mostly fiction. Enjoy, and constructive criticism is always welcome!

“ELEANOR!”

The trouble with attending the wedding of an old classmate was that one ran into other old classmates, Eleanor Button mused. She’d already dodged several so far. Perhaps she could pretend she hadn’t heard and make her escape?

“ELEANOR! It is you, isn’t it?”

The voice sounded older – fifty-something, not twenty-something –and regrettably it was close enough that a graceful escape would be impossible. “This is what comes of dilly-dallying over dessert, Eleanor Button,” said an inner voice, which sounded disagreeably like her Auntie Florence. “And what were you doing at the dessert table, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be on a diet?”

Better the unknown voice than Auntie-Florence-In-Her-Head.

“ELEANOR!”

It – rather, she - was right behind her now. Eleanor turned, and was faced with –

“It’s Mrs Harefield! You were in my grade 12 English class, Eleanor… Don’t you remember me?”

How could anyone forget Old Harey? Swathed in multicoloured scarves, well-thumbed copy of War and Peace in her hand, Old Harey had established herself as the intellectual authority of Monsignor Ryan High School. She had taught English Literature and History, and considered herself an expert in the performing arts as well, which had led to many highly entertaining confrontations with the drama teacher, Mr Carton. Eleanor had been one of her favourite students.

“Of course, Mrs Harefield. How are you? Still teaching?”

“Oh wonderful, my dear… You know, I so enjoy working with young minds... They come to me as unformed masses of clay, and I give them definition!”

Eleanor supposed that any definition that happened to Old Harey’s pubescent charges was due to the uncomfortable process of growing up, but she kept that thought to herself.

“But of course you, Eleanor, were different! How you loved to read! If only your classmates had followed your example – but of course teenagers are teenagers, no matter how much you highlight a good path to follow, they insist on doing as they please!”

Eleanor barely suppressed a grimace. Old Harey had been assiduous in her highlighting of Eleanor’s good example.

“How many of you have done the reading? None? Eleanor, what about you? My dear, is that a twitch or a nod? God did not give us the gift of speech so that you could twitch, child. Now speak up, have you done the reading? Yes? Now why can’t the rest of you be like Eleanor?”

In hindsight, Eleanor knew she never really had a chance of being popular in high school. She’d always enjoyed being a geek too much to ever hide it. But there was still a small part of her that thought, “If only Harey would have shut up about what a paragon I was, perhaps more people would have liked me.” Given that this was the same part of her brain that thought tequila should be an integral part of a healthy diet, Eleanor tried her best to ignore the thought.

Old Harey was still speaking, “Nevertheless, so many of my former students are doing terribly well for themselves… Denver Choi appeared in an off-Broadway play last year, Jeremy O’Leary is doing something financial in New York, Sarah Black is a surgery resident…”

Eleanor was nonplussed. “But I haven’t seen any of them tonight?”

“Oh no, they’re not here… facebook, my dear! I mean, of course it’s deplorable, centuries of letter-writing tradition to be replaced with pokes and lols and what have you, but still, I can’t argue, it’s a remarkably effective way to keep in touch. Which reminds me, we must – what is the expression – friend each other as well! But my dear, I’m being stunningly rude. I haven’t asked about you at all! What are you doing?”

“Well, I temp mostly.”

Old Harey’s expression froze. “Temp? But – but, Eleanor, you went to Columbia!”

“I dropped out. I figured college was just a practice run for the bigger rat race, and I decided that’s not what I want to do with my life. So I temp here and there, and when I have enough money, I travel.”

Judging from Old Harey’s face, she’d have been less appalled if Eleanor had told her she made sculptures from elephant dung.

“My dear, you had so much potential…”

Eleanor didn’t quite know what to say to that, so she shrugged.

“Anyway, I’ll catch up with you later, child. Must circulate, you know!” Old Harey fled. Eleanor looked after her, looked down at her dyed satin wedding shoes and sighed.

Two months later, Eleanor had still not received a friend request from Old Harey. She could live with that.