It’s the culinary equivalent of Monsoon Wedding, where immigrants to foreign shores create a cuisine that adjust flavours of the motherland to new passport reality.
Nonya: Blend of Chinese ingredients and Malayan spices that met when Chinese migrants married Malays in Singapore. Best dishes? Otak Otak, fish curry and Itek Tim duck soup. A delectable ode: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.
Tex Mex: A cheap cooking cliché, #conceived when the Texans met Mexicans. Birthed by Hispanic ‘Chilli Queens’ hawking beans and nachos instead of home food, pork in adobo.
Balti: The faddiest concoction of them all, the sweet-hot curries slopped out to lager louts in Birmingham. Imagined origin? A bucket in PoK’s Baltistan. Eaten by mugfuls.
Culture VultureYesterday The Beatles
What No other pop song has been recorded by so many people, from Elvis Presley to Ray Charles.
Try Singing it as "Scrambled egg; how I love to eat a scrambled egg", the original dummy lyrics Paul McCartney thought up for the tune.
Today McCartney has changed the song’s credit from Lennon/McCartney to McCartney/ Lennon against the wishes of Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono.
So you thought you knew all about
Batman
Batman Begins is due in theatres. How much do you know about the caped crusader? Spot the lie in these dark knight facts.
A. After studying at Cambridge, Sorbonne, Bruce Wayne joined the FBI, but quit after six weeks to find better ways to fight crime.
B. Among the actors who have played Batman are Michael Keaton, George Clooney and Kevin Costner.
C. The only time Batman was defeated was by supervillain Bane, who broke his back and left him a cripple.
D. Batman has had four Robins as sidekicks till now: Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Timothy Drake and a girl called Carrie Kelly.
Answer B. Kevin Costner has not played Batman.
what is
Glissando
A musical cousin of the crescendo. The least-known but most-seen visual in the movies that has the distraught characters thumping out their feelings on a piano in rapid series of notes. Or when sawing on their violin. The sound on the ear? The musical equivalent of slipping on a banana peel.
