Emotional re-balance

Am not the most emotional person you would find. Recently, I have gone through some tough times in a emotional manner. It was more like an emotional roller-coaster ride. At first it affected me, then my brain took control and shut me down (like a power plant shutting down) emotionally.

About a month back, when almost all the trauma was over, I think my Left brain woke up the right brain and started the process of emotional re-balance. Now its almost over I guess and I am back to almost where I was 3 months back.

Typically, a person's brain shuts down emotionally when the external stimuli varies greatly making the emotions hit the top and bottom boundaries of the band in which they should fluctuate in STP environment. The time to shut down varies from brain to brain.

I dont know if "emotional re-balancing" is a principle or a widespread word from a classical psychology point of view, but I am using it just to explain the phenomenon.

If you use this table given below - with value on X axis varying between 0 to 3600 at an interval of 300 and value on Y-axis being Sin of these values (remember Trigonometry ???)..

X	0	300	600	900	1200	1500
Y	0	-0.99976	0.044182	0.997803	-0.08828	-0.9939

 

1800	2100	2400	2700	3000	3300	3600
0.132202	0.98806	-0.17587	-0.980	0.21919	0.97060	-0.26208

You get a graph if you trace Y-axis... something like this -

So, at 0 - the emotions displayed are also "ZERO". Once the brain starts re-activating right side brain, the emotions per situation varies as Sin of situation index always staying between +1 and -1 (cos thats what sin curve does). It keeps going from one extreme to another extreme for a few days - remember - this is not normal - normally it might be a linear curve for the less emotional people and may be an exponential one for more emotional people - but the variation is always directly proportional to situation index (that's the phrase I coined for this blog).

While emotional re-balancing is going, if I explain in LAYMAN's language - then the theorem goes like this - "the emotions of a person varies for a small change in situation index oscillating between positive and negative values" - which means that the predictability of emotional behaviour of a person for any external stimuli (situation index) becomes very low.

Emotional re-balancing is a process which the brain undertakes to bring back the person to a less logical state from an absolutely logical state.

Now consider, dampening of the curve shown above - which means that the oscillations become less and than become predictable again. The emotions start varying within a band.

Slowly, the brain also starts oscillating within a band. The brain keeps playing Ellsworth Toohey turning Howard Roarks of the world into Peter Keatings.

Dal-bafle and churme ke laddo

I love Dal-bafle. Whats that? Valid quesiton. Typically a lot of people in cosmo-westenised world have now heard about dal-bati which the marwaries have popularised. I thing the marwaries are more enterprising than the malwa-ries. Malwa-ries - are the natives of malwa - the place where I come from in MP.

Malwa is the land of cotton - black soil, warm temperature and warm people. Cotton trading started in Ujjain some 200 years back. Almost the same time when three GERMAN BROTHERS started trading cotton in mid western US and then moved to NY. More about them and the company they formed later. Anyways, so the idea is, that people of Malwa didnt get ahead much in trading.

However, the NOT-enterprising nature of malwa-ries is limited to cotton trading only. In terms of food, you cant even begin to compare Malwa people with anyone else in the world. We are ahead by miles. I have travelled around the country and some part of the world and I dont think any food cuisine comes even closer to the Malwa food richness and variety. (people from other regions, pls don’t take offense, take this as an emotional comment).

So, coming back to Dal bafle (pronounced as baaf-lay). How do you prepare it? Its a very long winding process. A mixture of 5 pulses is a good dal for this. Urad, Masoor, Toor, Moong and Chana dals. Mix them in equal quantity and prepare dal - the way you prepare with onion and garlic.

For bafle -

- Take mota aata (you should ideally not add any rawa if you dont have mota aata, the taste does not come out very well).
- Add salt + ghee (as mohun - binding agent)
- Then add water and knead it hard - make cakes (bafle) almost the size 4 cm by 4cm. Professional cooks make much bigger cakes. Almost 4-4-4 cm or 64-70 cu cm.
- Now boil water so that all the bafle can be put it in. Put haldi in the water. Once water starts boiling, add the bafle to the water and let them be in water till they start floating in water.
- Now, allow them to float for 2-3 mins, take them out and put them on a cotton cloth to dry. Rub and dry the bafle properly.
- While the bafle is still in water, get cowdung cakes (kande in Hindi) and ignite them. Once its ignited well, start putting the dried bafle on kande. Its important that the bafle are dry before being put on kande, otherwise it gets sticky
- Allow the bafle to bake properly, it will become all blackish because of ash from kande. Take the baked bafle and clean the ash completely.
- Break it in two or four pieces and put them in the pot of ghee so that the ghee starts soaking in.
- The Bafle are ready to be served once they are soaked in ghee.

For Churme ke laddo -

- Take mota aata, ghee, milk and water and knead it.
- While you are kneading it, make sure the cow-dung cakes (kande are ignited)
- Make the aata mixture from above and make round laddos out of it.
- Put them on kande and let it bake for some time.
- Keep turning to bake them from all sides. The laddo start cracking once baked.
- Once they are baked, take them out and clean the ash.
- Break the laddo into smaller pieces and finely ground them in a mixie till it becomes coarse powder.
- Now, add ghee and sugar and mix - make them in laddo.
- Churme ke laddo are ready to be served :-)

You cant eat dal bafle, laddo in buffet format. Sit down with a dona - pattal, thats plates made of dry leaves. Take bafle with dal, kadhi, aloo- gobhi ki subji with churme ke laddo, green chutney + pickle with a dash of lemon will add to the taste. Hmmm...

People have started adding dry fruits, mawa to dal bafle and also to ladoo. It depends it you want to do that. You can easily use oven to cook this at home instead of kande.

Note - Make sure not to drink any water post eating this for at least 2 hours otherwise the bafle (which are full of ghee) expand in stomach. Dont wear belt + wrinkle free cotton trousers - kurta- payajama is better :-). And NEVER and I mean NEVER have dal-bafle for dinner.

The current record for eating most dal bafle + laddo is two and half bafle and 12 laddo in one sitting in the year 1996. The record is in name of yours sincerely. Want to break it anyone...

Happy eating!!!