Cutting onions is, for me, the toughest part of preparing a dish. As everyone knows, the preparation of all the Indian dishes invariably starts with the frying of onion as the base. To me, there were two problems with the picture of the aforementioned frying onions:

• I don’t know how to cut onions. That explains why I’ll never be a “phamous” cook. When the dishes call for thinly sliced onions, what they get from me is this mess of unevenly, and thickly, cut pieces. To produce even that, I take up half-an-hour. I have a friend named Sunil who can slice — and I mean paper thin, even slices — an onion in 15 seconds flat. I envy people like him.
• The second problem is of course the tears. Sometimes it became so bad that I used to give up. Total surrender. I tried washing onions, wearing glasses etc, but to no avail. Finally, I hit the perfect solution a couple weeks back — I bought a pair of tight-fitting goggles from the hardware store, the type one puts on while drilling wood or something. They have worked wonderfully. Except look-wise. Since the kids destroyed my chef’s hat sometime back, I usually put on a ski cap while cooking. With the addition of goggles, my chef avatar looks distinctly Alpine. Oh, well… A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, in any case.