Raffles Corner

RockyMaster believe it or not for the potato & spinach soup with toasted bread ($8.50) while finishing the last pages of Perfect Questions, Perfect Answers half a century after George Harrison and John Lennon. Tubby middle-aged Aussies escaped indoors only to find others out. Big-size, as they are called here. That’s pretty reasonable. Burgers are… Swiveling round for a check of the board outside confirmed: $12.90 it was. Fair bita dough spent for the calorie intake by these chappies. Thirteen bucks! Didna look like Raffles wallets, but you never can tell with the mining sector; graziers perhaps. Fatties every way you looked on this corner, expats in particular. Ghastly striped polos running the wrong way. (Wasn’t it vertical to hide lumpiness?) After their café and cake indoors the quartet stepping into the furnace was immediately uncomfortable, skittering away for the next airconned haven. Exceedingly difficult keeping the waist-line in check when the good things of life beckoned at every turn. Lumpy, lumpy, lumpy. Perhaps they were dreaming at point of purchase for that tight clobber, just booked gym membership and bought a bicycle. Fat chance in this heat. Gyms were airconned of course, but still. Rocky does soups for a month no doubt, freeze/microwave: cool top layer, minor scold middle and stone cold thereafter. Fanfare piece in the paper today reported innovation, cost-cutting and labour-hire saving initiative where half a dozen Indian restaurants had banded together to cook all their vegetables and other ingredients jointly at an industrial estate at Tuas. Giant mechanical mixers, grinders, whatever doing the job of 10-20-30 men. Great strides forward with technology. Luckily, as one would have hoped, KV was not among the group. Labourious slow cooking preferred there over a naked flame, wooden stirrers, spatulas and rolling pins for the dosai bon chance. One taut, trim and terrific dweeb and then twenty minutes later one more. Hold on—a third too, but in pink stripes running vertically. Undecided.  (No mockery or ill intended of the poor porky. Easy to understand. The author’s own footballing six-pack was a distant memory now from yesteryear. Thanks to the example of the Sufi Zainuddin, Ramadan, a smattering of Vedanta, Confucian and other philosophy, some little measure has been clawed back)

1.   Swami Prabhupada and his Krishna Consciousness Movement subsequently turned into the Hari Krishna movement; the book in the form of an exchange with Swami and the young seeker Bob Cohen, from the late sixties.