I am starting out with the explicit intention of putting up a serious update today, and by serious I do not mean the "serious" damage that da Momma and the daughterly duo promise to do to their food, before they nibble a little at the food and begin congratulating each other on a job well done; I mean SERIOUS serious. Having been out of action, and hence out of practice for about a week less than a month, I am faced with the enviable dilemma of too many topics to blog about, and I intend on making the most of this dilemma.

Jalali Baba has been in Karachi for some three weeks now, which means I can actually blog about that gentleman he had met recently, one who had stated, drawing on his excellence in a pertinent area of expertise, that Jalali Baba was borderline psychotic, and something else equally disconcerting. I can blog about this gentleman, and support his deduction with observations and experiences of my own - in addition to those I have already blogged about, and not get an abusive call, or a not-such-a-surprise visit from Jalali Baba. Yes sir, that would make for an excellent and risk free update.

Or I could blog about Coori and the detergent episode, which is something I have been promising to blog about for ages. Oh, and for a couple of people who have at different times implied that Coori and Jalali Baba are one and the same person, I would like to make this very public clarification that the two are poles apart. It is just my luck that I am stuck with psychotic people for friends.

For instance, Coori would not know the first thing about Yousufi, unless of course you told him that Yousufi is actually a pathan of Yousufzai clan, at which time he could delve into the trove of historical facts about pathans that he carries in his grey matter and surface with a few interesting ones to share with the ignorant non pathan mortals. Jalali Baba on the other hand could easily be mistaken for a scholar when it comes to Yousufi. That alone sets the two apart.

That and the fact that Jalali Baba has enviable command over Urdu, which is more than can be said about Coori. Coori on the other hand speaks impeccable Pushto. Of course one might be forgiven for doubting the technical accuracy of the terms "enviable command" as well as "impeccable" , since the two are relative to your humble servant's understanding of the two languages, which can, at best, be described as moderate and negligible respectively for Urdu and Pushto. By negligible, I mean I know the meaning of sange, jodey, Khudae pamaan, ywa, dwa, dre and rasha. Though I must admit I am not completely sure if 'Rasha' means come or go. Under such circumstances, if one were to accuse me of exaggerating my understanding of Pushto, a language whose evolution can be traced back a few millennia and which is the pride of a proud and brave people, I would not exactly sue one for libel or slander.

Sure, Coori and Jalali Baba have their similarities. There must be some commonalities between people who befriend a bore, and I insist on this spelling, and continue to count the imbecile amongst their friends even after they know him as well as they do. They are not the same person though. Let us not forget also that we are looking at the two through the myopic viewpoint of one person, who is probably incapable to recognize and admire the other features that are peculiar to each of them and which set the two apart.

Actually that sounds like an idea. Why don't we try and figure out the other differences in these two dynamic personalities today? Where does one start from...? Appearance? Makes sense. They do look different, as must most people who are not one and the same person. They both have had something to do with beards, as I have explained in my earlier posts. Jalali Baba's beard, when he has one, is more a testimony to his lethargy than a concious religious choice, or a fashion statement. At some point it was also a fashion statement, a statement of bad fashion that is - we are talking about times when having a large beard, with "tao-able" moustache was considored fashionable. Tragic as it might seem the fashion had originated in the jungles of interior Sindh and interior Punjab, where docaits often supported such beards. The point in either case, the case of the fashion freaks and the case of the jungle freaks, was presenting a belligerant image. In Jalali Baba's case, it went well with his image of no-nonsense, demented, and cruel brilliant professor, an image that was the key to discipline in his class rooms.

Coori's beard was a matter of religious choice. He loved his beard dearly, and swore by it. It looked good on him too, but we did not know that until much later when we received his pictures without it from Canada. For as long as I saw him in person, I saw him with the beard. I am not sure if he grew one again, I saw him last some six years ago, and even if he did grow one, I doubt if it would have looked as lovely as it used to then. The 'maiden' beard, a prerogative of only those people whose faces have never known the touch of blade or aftershave, has a nobility about it that does not come easy to the beard that grows in tilled land. It is much like comparing the majestic beauty of the woods with the more controlled look of a field. Coori's beard was also a more permanent feature of his personality, unlike in the case of Jalali Baba where it comes and goes, at times leaving a silly, over-sized moustache behind.

Another point of difference is their interest, or lack thereof, in sports. Jalali Baba cannot be bothered with cricket, while Coori cannot be bothered with people who cannot be bothered with cricket. Jalali Baba is an IT professional, which he insists is an accusation because he calls himself a networking professional. As far as a non-techy, computer-wary person like me is concerned they are all IT people. Besides, if you cannot call Jalali Baba an information technology person who can you call an information technology person? I mean, the man is nothing but full of a little information about so many things, and the perfection with which he uses that little information about everything to disparage, denigrate, belittle, malign, and generally discredit me is nothing short of technology.

Coori, on the other hand, is an MBA, with majors in Marketing, Finance, Management, and whatever else they allowed him to major in. The one thing I am sure he did not major in was MIS. He shares my dread of, and hence the disdain for all pc-induced and Bill Gates-inspired specializations.

Coori was an accomplished cook eight years ago. He made tomato salan. Jalali Baba had his first cooking ordeal less than a week before he departed for Pakistan last month. The historic incident owed its occurrence to the fact that his wife and kids had left for Pakistan a couple of weeks ahead of him, and Bhabi had left him a few recipes to help him get oriented in the culinary domain. Since he was going to be cooking for just himself, she had left recipes for small portions that would last him a day or so, so that he did not just cook a cauldron of something and make himself sick eating stale food day after day.

Someone whose favorite movies invariably include a military angle, and someone who has always conducted himself as a psuedo commando, can be relied upon to do that kind of thing. He subscribes to the ridiculous school of militarist (read drill-masterist) masculinity where exercising caution in matters of physical well-being is often brushed aside as feminine, or worse still, civilian luxury. The only way to toughening oneself is through rigorous self-torture, and through subjecting oneself to the harshest conditions.

She need not have bothered though. Jalali Baba did not need food for the first three days. He had his first box of Pringles, and a dozen cartons of Marlboro to convert into ash. He had no time to eat. In her blissful absence, he could go about smoking to his heart's content and consternation in every nook and corner of the house. I have visions of him smoking freely in the kitchen, in the bathrooms, sitting at the dining table, in the sofas, in the closet, under the table, behind the lamp, in front of the lamp, standing at the dining table, on the sofas, in the closet as well as on the closet, on the table, behind the lamp, in front of the lamp, lying on the bed, under the bed, beside the bed, behind the bed, in front of the bed, and while hanging from the ceiling fans or out of the balcony.

I have these visions because I know he smokes as many cigarettes as he can before the Ramadan fast since he will not be smoking through the day. Knowing him he probably feels the need to smoke in all the places and in all the postures mentioned above because he knows he will not be able to smoke inside the house, and if Bhabi can help it, outside the house, once she is back. It was probably one of his secret fantasies to be able to smoke in the various parts of his home.

Anyhow, once he had made up for his domestic nicotine deficiency, and in the process made himself sick, he could not make use of those recipes for the next few days precisely because he was sick. He has a bad throat fortnightly, and each time he goes to his doctor the doctor tells him to quit smoking. He had a very bad throat and a very bad stomach this time. When I confronted him about the bad throat and clarified to him that the doctor's repeated advice implied that his smoking ways were to blame for his recurring throat infection, he brushed me aside saying the doctor just found in his infections an excuse to pursue his own sinister anti-smoking agenda. He said it in such a pitiable tone that for a while I sympathized with him and wanted to sue the doctor for malpractice.

AA, being a doctor, got to speak to him and suggested that bananas might help with his stomach problems. Jalali Baba called a few hours later to complain that he was going bananas with bananas. Apparently he had taken the doctor's advice on the stomach matter, and brought himself a dozen or so bananas. He ate a couple, and then ate the rest, because otherwise they would have gone bad, and in case he had eaten something else his stomach would have got worse. AA had to tell him to get off the bananas.

He did a similar thing with cooking when he got down to it finally. The incident is best narrated the way it unfolded in front of us. On a Friday afternoon, we got a call from Jalali Baba saying he had started experimenting with the recipes bhabi had left him, but was not sure all was going great. Wifey and I set out to help him, and asked him what the problem seemed to be. Apparently, he had had the meat and the water on the stove for quite sometime but the water was showing no sign of drying up in accordance with the prediction of the recipe. After a few straightforward questions, it was determined that there was too much water in the cooking pot. He would have no part of that deduction.

Instead he maintained that his measurements were mathematical and accurate. However, since we know him too well now, we pretty much suspected that the problem had to be with the mathematical calculations, so we asked him to elaborate on the matter. Turns out Bhabi had left him a recipe for four pieces of meat, but since he was going to be traveling to Pakistan in the next couple of days, he figured he could not leave any meat in the refrigerator, so he decided to cook all of it, which was numerically much more than just four pieces. As you might have guessed by now, he ended up increasing the amount of water in proportion to the increase in number of pieces. What he got as a result was a pot full of water that would take forever to evaporate. We helped him rectify the situation.

I called him an hour later to inquire what his first self-prepared lunch had been like, and was surprised when he told me he had still not had any lunch. Here is what had happened: after he had brought the water down to a more reasonable level, he had left it to cook, and gone to read a book. Half an hour later, when he had gone back to check on it, he had found the water to be almost at the same level as before. Now one has heard of stubborn beef, mutton or beans that refuse to yield to cooking attempts, but water???

He had been able to figure this one out by himself though. He had run out of gas, and that too some time soon after he had taken the water out of the pot, where soon after may be used interchangeably with immediately. He was, at the time, waiting for the gas cylinder people to arrive. I implored him to order take out, but he refused to budge and said he would eat what he had put in so much effort in. Eventually he did eat it, and as was to be expected discovered that he could actually cook better than most people who had ever cooked anything. It was Owlie, I think, who had remarked that somehow when men cook for the first time they impress themselves more than anyone else they have impressed, if at all, with their cooking.

Jalali Baba comes from Karachi, his parents came from East Pakistan after it became Bangladesh, and their parents had migrated from Bihar, India when Pakistan was created. Coori and his ancestors are rooted in Mardan, unless I am making a mistake here and it was actually Lala's family which was rooted in Mardan and Coori's had come from Persia or Afghanistan.

The similarity of course is that Jalali Baba loves Pakistan and everything Pakistani dearly because two of his previous generations have braved horrors of war and migration just so they can be in a country of their own and call themselves Pakistanis. Coori loves Pakistan and all things Pakistani dearly because it is the country he and his ancestors have always known as their own. I love them both dearly.