“Hyderabad”, “Ambur”, “Vaniyampadi” “Mughal” “Donne” “Malabar” “Kolkata” – varieties of briyani to savour. Swiggy and Foodpanda flooded with Briyani shops. Every street has its own stalls too. Early morning briyani to late night briyani – you’d not find a place where you’d not see this signboard.
“Amma, tomorrow we have a sharing day. Send me two boxes of chicken briyani for my friends” Harshu looked at me with a broad smile. “Let me ask Appa if he can buy chicken at night and I’ll cook in the morning” I said as he entered our house. “Here is the chicken for tomorrow – no escape” he winked. Proactiveness to the core between my daughter and husband when it comes to briyani. After dinner we retired to bed having a hard time putting Pranav to sleep.
I set my alarm to 5:30 as usual and my mind alarm woke me at 4:45 today and I turned off my unused alarm. Splashing cold water on my face to keep me energetic for the day, I smiled at myself. Creeping like a cat, I moved out of the room not to disturb the sleeping kids. Started my favourite old playlist which is never boring to me and was cutting onions and tomatoes. With the cooker on the stove, started adding spices and feeling their strong smell. As the onions were getting fried, I thought about funny incidents with managers when we get fried.
Tomatoes were getting mashed like us during project delivery. Ginger and garlic blended well together like our friends at work. We could hardly separate them. Chillies seemed mean but brought in their uniqueness too. Turmeric and chicken added colours to their team. Mint was a fresher adding to the flavour with her richness. Chicken seemed to be the technical architect contributing to the major taste sparing his life. The laddle twisted, tossed, toasted and blended all of them – do I have to say what does that mean? 😉
As the oil separates out from the curry, it appeared ready for the DCUT. Oh, sorry – we’re agile and this is the first MVP giving a gut feeling of the delivery. With some tastes of the sprint review, I tried to retrospect and perform corrective actions. Add some spice – my mind processed a change request. Time to water them to induce defects – I smiled. Perfect amount of defects brings a balance and so would the water.
As the developers boil with testers defects, so did the curry raise up. The laddle seemed to toss it to boil them down. Stakeholders look different and away from the curry process – the rice I meant. Add them to the boiling curry and they fight, cuddle, argue, agree – for a cycle. I closed the pan to give them time to blend with heavy discussions.
Switching off the stove, I waited until the pressure goes down. You need to still wait patiently until the first go live! It’s all set and done for production and I transferred it to the hot pot. Waiting for the UAT – I called my daughter. “Spice is little more but I accept as it looks good” final customer sign off done 😄. That very moment when she closed her eyes, tasted it and made an expression, my tiredness of waking up early and putting in my efforts vanished in the blink of my eye. Just the tip of the iceberg on a project success while relentless efforts are underlying!
It was 6:30 and I finished my project on time. I smiled and continued my tasks to prepare for my day.
As I entered the auto, I remembered a shared post I saw yesterday. The post brought out lot of agony and depressive facts. It generically stated about the state of women these days, stress levels unable to balance family and work – especially with kids; emotions and so on.
I remembered the dialogue in Petta where Rajinikanth states “cook with love”.
Be it cooking or working – it’s just how you enjoy and perform. Passion and love turns any situation light. Crushed, stressed, tossed – definitely leads to a tasty briyani 😉 or atleast a learning to be a good cook!
While stress and passion are extremes, it’s we who need to strike a balance between what we want, what we desire and how do we see life. There is no briyani without a perfect blend; likewise there is no life without a blend of multiple emotions. We cannot always be the happiest going through smooth phases nor extremely sad thinking we’re the only ones suffering in the world.
Cook the briyani of life with love and emotions and taste them accepting all challenges. Live the briyani way!
“Ma’am your office arrived” – my auto driver broke my dreams 😊