Blog: Magandeep SinghSpain is one mad country, in a good way of course. I may not understand many things about the Spanish - their love for killing animals, their refusal to effectuate the ban on smoking in public places, their belief that ham is fat-free and even curative, and their denial that Tempranillo can often exhibit an oxidised edge!
I am the first to admit that I know nothing about
Blog: Magandeep Singh
If you have been bored enough to follow my writings, then you might have marked that I show rare signs of any improvement
at all. Unrelated a comment as that may seem, I just thought I'd put it right there in the beginning. Pity has its fan following too.
But if writing lacks the fervour to move you, just on certain rare occasions, where such an excuse is the best permissible
Blog: Magandeep Singh
So here I am in the most metropolitan city in the world, where English has been relegated to an optional language and you can hear more tongues in a single bus ride than Christopher Columbus did on his entire trip. This is London and I am here with a purpose, for a change, that doesn't just involve shopping till my bank feels a minor dent in its holdings, and my accountant
Blog: Magandeep SinghThe problem with wine is not how it is made, or drunk, but how it is presented between the making and the drinking. The bigger problem, of course, is the fact that I always find so much wrong with the world of wine (or world in general) but please reader, for a minute, focus.
Let's face it. We will never know enough about wines. We prefer to leave that whole tasting and
Blog: Magandeep SinghThe thing with wine is that it has a capacity to bestow humility. I am not talking about drunken antics which make it to all our friends' wall of shame. I am talking about the sheer length and breadth of knowledge that this field accommodates. A lifetime is too short to learn of your ignorance in the field of wines.
I thought myself to be quite a maverick for already knowing
Blog: Magandeep Singh
There is more to Italy than pasta and Marlon Brando, and both are more American than anything else. I have often been to Vinitaly in the lovely town of Verona (think Romeo and Juliet) and each time I have come back a learned man. Mostly, they were kind enough to invite me; the learning however was mostly pieced together through my keen and supernatural powers of observation.
Blog: Magandeep Singh
The trouble with Indian cuisine is that it has the most possessive and over-zealous of people to protect it - us Indians. So opposed are we to any form of change or modification that anyone may try and induce in this style of cooking that it is rejected as substandard and compromised even before being given a fair duelling chance.
But then that is true of most countries.
Blog: Magandeep Singh
It was while having a shower that I realised that old writers had it easy. Nothing had been written, which left them with the entire fairway to prance about on. The simple probability of stringing a few random words together to end up with a sonnet was much higher then than it is today. The novelty of saying “I Love You” made it easy to get away with forgetting an
Blog: Magandeep Singh
Wine sparks off so many conversations. Little good comes of them, but many find them healthy. Much like a treadmill really: running without going anywhere and definitely unimaginative as a way to lose calories.
The problem is this: wine suffers from being itself. If it is a reserved and sombre drink then people complain that it is too fuddy-duddy. If it tries to be cool and
Blog: Magandeep Singh
I like crystal ball gazing. It is right up there next to voodoo dolls on my list of Xmas gifts. Don’t snigger; I can cast spells too...
2009 has been a jinxed year so far. Not because of itself but mostly because of all that preceded it. All that commotion and action in the hotels have shown us how much of a dog-eat-dog world we live in. And then the terrorist attacks worsened things. Markets were already low, and now Satyam has just made the equivalent of a substantial chunk of our defence budget disappear.
