Of Black Eyed Peas, Insects & @OGX

I often say "slow and steady wins the race", and today was no exception as far as being slow is concerned. I survived the first 4 hours after waking up by drinking Milo - was too lazy to cook, and there was nothing else to eat. I have been having cravings to have lobia [Black Eyed Peas] with roti [called Chapati in Singapore and South India]. So after much procrastination I ventured into 'cooking project Sunday'. Usually I like to cook as much as I can on weekends so that I spend time eating rather than cooking on weekdays.

Lobia takes 4 hours to make. Roti involves hard work. [You knead the dough, clean the marble surface, use a rolling pin to flatten the dough, make sure it doesn't stick and get spoilt, then cook it on a tawa. Cooking on metal plates rather than burners is a challenge in itself.] An added challenge in making lobia today was the fact that the black eyed peas my mother had sent me from Pakistan more than two months ago had become infested with insects. Tiny and brown, pea-sucking, thin and long insects. I practically checked each grain testing if it was hollow, or had a hole - and many times I came across holes through which I could actually see these insects lodged inside the lobia-grain/pea. I stood there for an hour choosing and selecting which peas to throw out while they were soaked in water. Some insects would float on to the top, others [more healthy ones] would just sink down and get lost amid the pea-grains. It was a frustrating job, but on the plus side my aim for throwing stuff in the waste-bin has improved three-fold. At the end of the entire excercise I just shut out the 'doubts' section of my brain, and told myself the extra protein from the insects would only do me good - I need to gain weight! Also, lobia needs to cook in boiling water anyway, so 100 degrees Centigrade would be enough to kill the germs.

The meal I had afterwards was my treat for the day, since the mind-numbing session with Mayas regarding @OGX [AIESEC Outgoing Exchange] SNRD [Student Nominee Recruitment Drive] drained all the energy I had to do anything else. I've signed up as the Organising Committee President [OCP] for SNRD in NUS and let me be honest here, it's a lot of work and responsibility. But I'm lucky I have great team-members, and I hope that makes my job easier. There are three teams, one each from NUS, NTU and SMU, and they're all headed by Mayas [extreme left in the picture below]. We're all going to help AIESEC attract people from our universities to go on internships anywhere in the world! So we need to work on a very specific timeline; getting our research done, segmenting the internships available and identifying our target students. And then of course there would be marketing and advertising for our talks that require us to get hold of good speakers, book venues etc.


Sitting there talking about what we'd be doing over the next 3-4 months really freaked me out because I had to think about my finals which are just a month away now. I didn't even know what dates they were. So I cheated during the meeting and got my finals' datesheet together. Turns out, as it does in such circumstances, that it's the worst type of datesheet ever! I don't have two exams on the same day, thank goodness no! But this is pretty bad too: I have my first one on Tuesday 28th Nov', next one on Wednesday, then Thursday, Friday and the last one on Saturday. Five days in a row! I can bet Nescafe and Redbull, BOTH will report hiking share values once the week is through! I need to get my act together... Don't want to lose this race. Slow but steady always wins! It has to.