Simple Saturday

Nice relaxing Saturday. According to Orkut my fortune is this : "You are next in line for promotion in your firm" . Till I wait for that promotion to arrive, I have some household chores to finish. Washing for one and some house-cleaning for sure. "House cleaning" is also a term used by me to pull a good friend's leg. So each time I mention it I can't help smiling.

Was called up on for EOTO today as an emergency backup volunteer. The weekend does not feel complete without a trip there , just has become like a habit for me. We have a good bunch of highly enthusiastic volunteers coming in now, so I can afford to take a back seat now. Somehow I am unable to do it.

I was getting a bit obsessed with reading, so it was good for me to go out and talk to some students. I tell you, teaching for 2 hours does take its toll on your voice !!

Nothing much planned for tomorrow apart from reading and a bit of cleaning up. Watching my usual dose of English Premier League action now. Nice match between Bolton and Arsenal in progress. I love Arsenal's style of football, though my favorite team is still Manchester United.

Back to blogger

BSNL has finally repaired my Broadband connection and I am back to 2 MBPS connectivity.

Enjoyed my Easter weekend in Calicut. There was a funny incident in the Church on Sunday. There was this obscure song that no one really knew. Our priest bravely started off at a real high pitch. Taking cue , half the congregation followed him. By the second line most folks were seriously struggling for breath :-). I could hear voices cracking all around me.Some folks realized the folly of high pitch early and dropped immediately to lower pitch, unfortunately most of them went to the other extreme and ended up with extremely low pitch. The choir gave up the ghost after the first line and remained silent. The end result was this weird sort of high-low pitch sound :-), with the Pastor just making wheee wheee type sounds on to the mike.

I must say just about the only person in the church who could sing that pitch happened to be my wife, who seemed to be hitting the notes with effortless ease. Needless to say, I stopped singing after the first word of the song:-)

Back to the grind here at work. I am in the classic researcher's dilemna now- The problems that you are supposed to work on does not seem to have any solution, however you seem to have a solution for everybody else's problems. Also , somebody else's problems always are much more interesting than your own !! :-)

Rain time at Calicut

I am at Calicut now for a 4 day Easter weekend. It has been raining like crazy here, I can't recall a March in which it rained so much. Lovely weather for sleeping, not great if you were planning to go out like me :-( My BSNL connection at Bangalore has been erratic, so I have been unable to hook up to blogger for couple of days. Either it runs at blazing speed, or it does not work at all. BSNL is yet to find an intermediate operating point :-) On the reading front, I have started on The Afghan after finishing The tipping point,which was ok, nothing great. As mentioned earlier, the writing style is a bit laborious. Which is curious, because one of the concepts mentioned in Tipping point is the "stickiness" of an idea. Very clearly inspite of knowing about it , Malcolm Gladwell is not able to apply the "stickiness"concept to his writing !! I been lying around, eating , sleeping and playing with my daughter. Nice to lead such a lazy life sometimes..

Update on reading

I Recently finished reading The Twisted by Jeffrey Deaver. Started reading it late Friday night, continued on Saturday morning and by noon I was done. Nice collection of really Twisted stories. Really wicked endings, none of them predictable. Only problem is all of them are murder stories, so it does get to you a bit after a while.

Now started on The Tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell. I had read Blink earlier. Blink had a very different way of looking at why certain things are the way they are. It also opened my eyes to how deep rooted some prejudices can be, without we ever realizing it . Although the data that he presents is very impressive, I don't think he is the best in terms of writing. Reading his work is a bit laborious. He tends to repeat the same thing several times and it does get a bit irritating after a while.

One more book in the pipeline is The Afghan by Frederick Forsyth. I doubt if he has written a better book than The day of the Jackal, but then I am not that well read in Forsyth.

Feels good to regain my reading speed, I thought I had completely lost it for a while !!

Happy birthday , Chechi

March 13th was my sisters birthday. She has always been my biggest supporter. As is the case with most siblings, she is the exact opposite of my personality. Always cheerful, laughing and extroverted. Needless to say, there are few people in this world that I care about more than her. She is also the culprit number-1 in spoiling my daughter :-)

You know what, I think having an elder sister is really the best thing in the world.

School admission

My daughter has cleared the "interview" for admission to L.K.G . We had expected this all along. She will have to wear a uniform to school. Would be so cute, right ? Already she has started pestering my parents about getting her the uniform , school does not start till June !! :-)


The key question that the principal asked was , "How much can you give ?" . I am referring to donations, of course. The smart reply that came to my mind was the JFK derived quote "Ask not what I can do for your school - ask what you can do for my daughter". Instead we responded with "How much do you expect ? ". The deal was struck for a relatively reasonable amount. All parties are happy now !!

I wonder if a day will come when good students can actually sell their marks also to the weaker ones ? :-)

Formula 1 Season start

I must confess I am a big F1 fan. Have been a fan ever since I saw the last race of 1997 season , when Michael Schumacher quite deliberately attempted to take Jacque Villeneuve out by turning into him. Quite clearly Schumacher would do anything to win. The controversy and uproar that followed this incident got me instantly hooked to F1. And I have been fascinated by Michael Schumacher ever since.

Although I am a big Schumi fan, there is really only one time in F1 when I literally jumped out of my seat after seeing an overtaking move. This was the one that Mika Hakkinen pulled on Schumi at the Spa in 2000. You can see a couple of different shots of this overtaking here and here

I am hoping that the Force India F1 team does well. Go India !! And Go Kimi !!

What next ? Puttu Kadala , of course !

Next cooking project just had to be an all time Mallu favorite dish . Puttu - Kadala. Puttu of course is a steamed rice cake and Kadala is the malayalam term for Black bengal gram. The final preparation is expected to look something like the photo shown. ( This is not a photo of my dish !! )

When the master chef is at work, nothing will look the way its supposed to look :)

Armed with a recipe ( I have learnt from my previous cake adventures that its always to swallow pride and ask someone knowledgeable for a recipe before you start) , I went about preparing this apparently simple dish.

First task is to take some rice powder mix it with water . You have to keep on adding water and mix it till the powder just begins to stick together while you press it in your palm. Well, that sounded easy enough. Obviously you have never heard of a positive feedback loop. It works this way :
Step-1 : Add water and mix,
Step-2 : You realize there is too much water
Step-3 : So add some more powder to compensate.
Step-4 : You realize there is too less water now
Step-5 : Go to step-1
Soon enough I am staring at pile of rice powder as high as everest.

Cooking of the puttu is not so tough, all you have to do is put this powder inside a steamer which looks somewhat like the picture shown and steam it for a couple of minutes.
For the first attempt, I did not steam it for enough time. I ended up getting powdered puttu instead of the ideal cylindrical shape. Second attempt was much better and I got closer to the desired shape. Remember that I had enough powder to keep on experimenting as long as I pleased !!

Undetterred, I moved on to the next item on the menu: Kadala curry. This did not pose me too many challenges. Kadala was cooked in pressure cooker for 25 minutes with Meat masala and little bit of haldi powder. After that I fried some chopped onions, added the cooked Kadala , added salt and chilli powder. Final step was to add coconut milk to it. I used an instant coconut milk powder mix from Maggi and it did produce a funny taste !! Maybe I should skip the coconut milk part from my next attemp.

Only one problem though. A slight overestimation of quantity of Kadala resulted in me ending up with enough curry to feed an army. Combined with the humongous quantities of rice powder , it has ensured that I need not cook anything else for a couple more days !! :-)

Taste wise it is not bad , defintely edible . Not bad for a first attempt , eh ?

Bake a cake: V4 - Further improvements

After the mind blowing success of version-3 , I have been contemplating some tweaks to the recipe . This is mainly due to some copyright issues that were raised by some overzealous cooks :-)

Finally baked the tweaked version of the recipe ( US patent application being filed ) . It came out better than V3, but being the baker that is what I will always say. Taking V4 it to office on Tuesday, one my intended "bakra" fasts on Monday. And in case you were wondering, yes our office has an in house medical center :-)

Met a friend after a long while today, nice to be back in touch with old friends. Especially to see their children, swap some stories, laugh at some of the incidents from the past. Feels really good.

Another thing I need to fix is my eating habits. Has become way too eccentric for my own liking. The only meal I recall having this weekend was on Saturday afternoon. In a way I am like a beggar you would find on the streets. He does not know where his next meal is coming from, neither do I :-( I have to say that the meal that I had on Saturday was top class !! Do check out the Woody's @ commercial street for some awesome south Indian vegetarian food.

Writing this has made me awfully hungry. Unfortunately the only edible item in the house is my V4 cake :-(

I am seeing several fruits, vegetables and other items staring at me with green whiskers & beards from inside my fridge. I need to clean it out badly. That is a project for tomorrow, I will try and sleep now. I am not sure if my protesting stomach will let me.

Weekend & reading

Really hectic weekend, it was final exam time for my students at EOTO. Both Saturday and Sunday went in that. Usually these are frustrating days for me, because I keep seeing them repeating the very same mistakes we try and teach them to avoid :-((

I am done with Like the flowing river. Brilliant book, this goes right near the top of some the best stuff that I have read. It is a collection of lot of thoughts, each story does make you think and reflect a little bit. Not too heavy to read, language is simple and smooth.

I found one particular passage particularly beautiful after my first pass through the book. This is an excerpt from a book by Okakura Kakuzo

We see the evil in others because we know the evil in ourselves
We never forgive those who wound us because we believe we would never be forgiven
We say the painful truth to others because we want to hide it from ourselves
We show our strength , so that no one can see our frailty
That is why , whenever you judge your brother, be aware that it is you who is in the dock

This is definitely a book to be re-read several times. I still maintain my earlier opinion on The Alchemist, I think it is a bit over-rated.

Reading @ full blast

Turned over 2 novels in a couple of days, that's fast even by my standards !! First one was The Appeal by John Grisham. The next one was False Impression by Jeffrey Archer. Both are decent reads, though both the authors have written far far better books.

The Appeal builds up nicely, the ending was disappointing for me. It looked like Grisham grew tired of writing and gave up towards the end.

False Impression I thought was a bit too obvious, nowhere near his old classics like Not a Penny More, Not a Penny less OR Shall we tell the President

Still , I am happy to be back to reading ways. Next on agenda is definitely Like the flowing River !!

Clarification on my blog

I almost landed in hot water last week when a friend read one of my blogs and thought it was my attempt to take a potshot at her!! The debated articles are on leading by example and possibly the article on musings of a volunteer

So here is the same disclaimer that I told her.

My blogs are not necessarily in chronological order. Some of the things that I write about have time delays of several months associated with them. I will write about some of the bad experiences that I come across in my life. However this are usually not based on a single event or person, it is usually an aggregate of lots of small events and experiences.

If a blog is targeted at a particular person ( I have done this only in a positive sense ) , usually there will be a direct clue so that the person would know I am referring to him / her. I have not and will not mention names of people without permission

So apologies if anyone else felt bad after reading my blog, I do not intend to target any individual in a negative sense using my blog. Blogging is just a way for me to clear my mind, so treat it as that.

School admission

Last weekend was the "interview" for my daughter's school admission. As per the notice board the timings for interview were 9-12 and 2-4 . We reached the school premises around 8.50 a.m, there was already a good crowd there. Later on we found out that some folks reached there as early as 5 am !!

Anyway we stood in the Queue for nearly 3 hours. The thoughtlessness of some folks did irritate me quite a bit. I can't believe the amount of people who were attempting to jump the line !!

We reached the principals office around 12.05 pm, just in the nick of time before they closed for lunch. The principal knew my wife as she also studied in the same school. She asked my daughter on question "What is your name ? ".

Innocent question, I must say. It produced an unexpected response from my daughter who burst into tears saying she wanted to go to her grandma's place. After some coaxing , she did spit out her name. And did so with so much anger that convinced me that she is taking after her father :-))

Results are out next week, so we will know for sure only by then. But I think she will get through.