Desi foods and air mileage

Vegetables like lean eggplant, curry leaf, bitter gourd, snake gourd, coconuts travel a distance of around 13,000+ miles to reach the dinner tables of Desis here in the US! And in the debate of globalization Vs. global warming, local foods can save a lot of fossil fuel while brining in significant revenue to Indian farmers. While we leave this debate to economists, can we naturalize some of the more local vegetables to Indian recipes?

Learning Differences

The Globalist is running a two part article (may require registration) on the schooling and learning differences in America Vs. China. It naturally made me answer the question, "So where does India stand?". Well, its in between but more towards China....and here is why based on some of the differences discussed in the article:

• Nationalized and Standardized tests: China uses them a lot. They think thats the only to ensure fairness and usually the exit from the dismal social fate in the country side. But standardized tests encourage the opinion that there is only one answer. India uses them a lot too. But the famous ones like IIT JEE do not grade the candidates based just on the final answers. They often credit the candidates with full marks when it is thought that the candidate had his/her thinking going right, but screwed up the calculation.
• Capacity for memorization: Chinese have a capacity that can be described shocking by western standards. Indians have a tremendous capacity as well. Much of the ancient Indian education system was based on strict oral teaching, where comprehension in the first listening and memory played all the role. British system just carried on the legacy. To this day, most state board students can pull along with a good deal of memorization. But national boards like CBSE and ICSE leave some room for creativity and individual voice.
• Tall nails get hammered: The article says that chinese society is massively conformist. While in India, its perfectly acceptable to voice out political opinions, however extreme they might be, its still conformist when it comes to yielding to older generations (and thats probably changing with new money).
• In-class participation: Not many state boards encourage this. But central boards and many prestiguous universities encourage some level of class room participation.
• and finally diligence: when it comes to diligence, Asians are all alike PERIOD.

I would love to see Indian education systems take a more center stance taking on some of the creative aspects of western systems and retaining indigenous diligence.

Rajkumar and his Fans

What happened to the admiration of the damn fans when Rajkumar was kidnapped? Why didnt they go swamp the jungles and free their iconic leader? Why is pelting and setting the buses on fire the only known form of exit to anger of fans in general? But why anger in the first place, when the actor dies of a heart attack? I fail to understand even the fringes of this insanity.

A solution to this can be a local group pretending to be an extremely devout fan chapter trying to do something constructive. I am pinning my hopes on competition amongst admirers that might bring out some constructivism.

Online Townhall

Online Townhall

Swades Special Disc

You know what would be a good special features disc with Swades' DVD pack?

A compilation of some real life expat contribution stories. Isnt that a absolutely terrific disc to buy? Taking this a little further, I think it would be a good idea to either start a forum that allows exchange of such expat contribution ideas OR link to such places which already do so. Yep! thats building a little eco-system around this inspiring movie. Some good legacy to leave behind, apart from the usual entry on imdb...

Innovative Protestors

Some Immigrant protesters found novel ways to make their point
Source:BBC News

What a Shame!

Top metropolitan areas of the world		Busiest metro systems in the world
Tokyo (Greater Tokyo Area) 35.2 million		Moscow Metro 3.2 billion
Mexico City (Greater Mexico City) 19 million		Tokyo Metro 2.7 billion
New York City, (New York metropotdtan area) 18.4 million		Seoul Subway 1.6 billion
Mumbai (Bombay), India 18.3 million		Mexico City Metro 1.3 billion
São Paulo, Brazil 18.3 million		New York City Subway 1.3 billion
Delhi, India 15.3 million		Paris Metro 1.2 billion
Kolkata (Calcutta), India 14.2 million		London Underground 976 million (2005)
Buenos Aires, Argentina 13.3 million		Osaka Municipal Subway 957 million
Jakarta, Indonesia 13.1 million		Hong Kong MTR 798 million
Shanghai, PRC 12.6 million		Saint Petersburg Metro 784 million

Source:
Wikipedia

What a shame! World's most populous countries India and China (excluding Hong Kong) don not have a metro system that rank among the ten. Imagine the cutback in pollution and fuel usage with better public transportation systems in these parts of the world!

Participatory Planning

A model of Shanghai in 2020 at the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall
Source: Business Week

What a wonderful way to engage public in city planning!

Lorenzo's Oil

This movie inspired by an incredible real life story opened with a Swahili warrior song:

"Life has meaning only in the struggle.
Triumph or defeat is in the hands of the gods.

So let us celebrate the struggle."

The Odones family has a child, Lorenzo, who is struggling from an extremely rare form that rapidly degenerates the brain and ultimately reduces the victim to a mass of flesh before he dies. The disease is poorly funded and thus has an abysmally few number of people working on its therapies. When the parents of the child try to find a doctor who can advise on their son's pathetic state, they find all the doctors to be equally groping in the dark. The Odones take the challenge upon themselves in trying to understand the basic bio-chemistry behind the fat-enzyme metabolism of the heartless-disease. And they succeed in finding a right mix of diet (a combination of a certain variant of Olive Oil and a certain other variant of Canola Oil) that controls the production of a certain saturated fat that leads to the degeneration of brain. The boy's parents have to fight a whole scientific establishment as well, in order to try out their self-discovered, controversial approach to the disease (A good illustration of cons of objectivity.)

The efforts boy's parents put in fighting the disease is breath-taking as well as extremely inspirational.

Set at around 2hr16min, this real life story is surely going to inspire you with its wonderful layman analogies on some miraculous bio-chemistry discoveries made by Lorenzo's parents.

Makes me want to sing the Swahili song again and again....

What about Legal Immigrants?

11 million illegal immigrants stand a chance to become citizens. While the 65.000 number limit on high-skilled, law abiding, tax paying H1-B guest workers remains unchanged. And thousands of students coming to this country for advanced degrees in Math and Science on an F-1 have to prove to the immigration official that he/she will return back to their home country after completion of their study. Is this whole immigration thing going beyond redemption?

The Second IF

I watched "Aithey" again. Unlike the usual stream of Telugu movies (for that matter Hindi as well) which have least concern for audience' intellect, this one respects you as an audience. It knows that humans multiprocess -- that they think while they watch. I was happy to see people who think thru things before they act, who "Stand-in for the values they believe in", and yet are extremely practical.

"Whats so special about that? Isnt it how people are supposed to act?" ?

Yeah, true. But thats not how Indian movies generally are. So there is every reason for me to feel happy that as an audience my intellect and integrity have been respected.

Buy everything...

If you are to buy everything advertized in an half-an-hour prime time slot on a channel like TBS, chances are that you'll end up with the following things:

• Three Cars ( 1 SUV, 1 Sedan and a sports car)
• Two deodarants
• Two Car insurance policies (One of them ought to be Geico)
• A bottle of Exotic beer and two light ones
  
• One Bottle of Vodka
• Eyelift / anti-ageing cream
• Make-up stuff + something that advertizes thicker lips / thicker lashes / larger hair volume
  
• Couple of ultra-fast internet connections
• Victoria Secret Lingerie + sometimes Male innerwear
• Tampon or its ilk
  
• A fast serving bank which advertizes convenience
• And some Microwavable food that compares itself to a nearest Bistro

A lot of them dont sound too good for the planet. Do they?

CNN gets cleaner interface

uh! CNN takes off the rolling ticker in the bottom and goes cleaner with the rest of stuff as well. I wonder if the already-clean-BBC would do something in response.

On Prophet's Cartoons

We can talk about a lot of things here: free speech, ends of free speech, fundamentalism, blasphemy, anti-semitism....

But I can think of only the following Sanskrit poem:

OM SAHANA VAVATU SAHANA BHUNAKTU
SAHA VIRYAM KARAWAVAHAI
TEJASVINAVADITAMASTU
MA VIDVISHAVAHAI

OM SHANTI SHANTI SHANTI OM


(Together may we be protected
Together may we be nourished
Together may we work with great energy
May our journey together be brilliant and effective
May there be no bad feelings between us
Peace, Peace, Peace)

Some mexican jobs.

Technology replaces some 'traditional' mexican jobs.

IE7 any better?

In comparison to firefox:

• Navigation toolbar is slicker. Stop, Refresh, and new tab have been made more contextual. (Clearly, a user experience team at work).
• New tab and Quick tabs work well. Not that firefox doesnt have these, but one needs to install a couple of extensions like foXpose to get this behavior.
• Search Providers? No simple way to add Wikipedia as a search provider.
  
• Thats the end of it. Bookmarks manager and Browser Settings just got carried over from 'pre-web' versions of earlier IEs. Isnt browser settings supposed to be a relatively geeky thing to go and fiddle with? Howcome IE7 hasn't got this part simplified?
• Find continues to suck. Does it take IE9 or something to fix such a simple thing?
  
• and on Firefox extensions...oh! there is just no point in getting started on that. Let's just say IE7 is lagging by a decade on that front.
  

Simplicity: Health Plans

Healthcare Industry desparately needs a 'Citi-Simplicity' version of a healthplan that doesnt ask elderly people to go thru the fine print to weigh in the pros and cons of different available plans in a decision matrix! Too many choices suck and thats an enormous business oppurtunity lurking in the fine print.

Its time for a daring company to come up with a plan that is bold and simple enough in terms of the strings attached. With increasing number of baby boomers, I think its also time to consider a DRAMATIC strip down of fine print and content on the websites. Keep It Simple and Superb.

Rang of Basanthi

Yeah, thats my poor French joke on Rang De Basanti. This is what went thru my mind as I was watching the movie:

• First you think, "okay this is an 'enemy' perspective at Bhagat Singh movie" (the general's dairies and all that)...
• then you think its about "an English girl making a movie with Indian cast",
• then you think "Oh! man its a 5 person version of Dil Chahta Hai",
• then you think "May be they do want to shoot a Bhagat Singh movie"
• then you think "Why Bhagat Singh for the nth time on Hindi Screen man?"
• then you think "Okay, this guy wants to deal with some issues of India too",
• then you think "Oh! NO Why does this guy want to talk about every issue India has?"
• then you think "The Bhagat Singh analogy is over stretching man"
• then you think "Thank God! Its atleast funny occasionally"
• then you think "They are going to get this Madhavan dude killed, man"
• then you think "Enough of Sepia man! Enough of the analogy crap! Dont start making a complete mess out of it"
• then you think "Oh! Well Congrats Mr. Mehra, you have officially stepped into the crap zone"
• then you think "Mr.Mehra has well passed the finish line in crap zone..entering bullshit zone"
• then you think "Now stop bullshitting me"
• then you think "There is something called Electricity to pull the AIR signal out of air"
• then you think "NDTV is doing a lot of product placement"
• then you think "You go on a plane and make a joke that you have a gun. You'll know how sane the commandos are"
• then you think "Enough of it man. This Amir dude gets shot and drags himself across India to reach the studio again"
• then you think "Ah! well, this Mehra wants somebody to wakeup. But why does he make a pretense of making a revenge story a national issue?"
• then you think "Ah! Now he makes a pretense of the movie being about MIGs"
• All in all, Dont try to summarize this movie too many times. You end up in the experience of watching a montage of short films with different themes but the same cast.

Can you play the magic flute?

How much of Mozart do you know? Take this little Quiz from BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4646778.stm

When am I going to do something about it?

When?