The Great Indian Debate: Lassi or Ladoo?

DNA reports that some IIT-KGP students are petitioning their alumnus and Senior VP at Google +Sundar Pichai that Google should choose Lassi as the name for the Android version to come after KitKat (which follows Jelly Bean, ICe Cream Sandwich, Honeycomb, etc., all the way down to Cupcake). Someone else suggested Ladoo, presumably because he is a big-time fan of Chhota Bheem.

"[But] Lassi or Ladoo is a definite no-no," according to a "market research professional" quoted by DNA.

The MRP may not have given his reasons, but I will give mine: Lassi and Ladoo are just too damned generic (like Cupcake and Donut). KitKat certainly appears to be a bad mis-step, and I suspect Googlers might want to correct for it by looking for something with character, class, and charm. And a lot of oomph.

My inner Banarasi has just the right thing for them:

Lavang Latha!

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I'm visiting my alma mater in November for this mega event. The last time I visited some 15 years ago, I recall returning with a bag of these luscious little packages filled with sin and bliss.

Sendhil Mullainathan on Mental Bandwidth

The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less:

Imagine that you are attending a late-afternoon meeting. Someone brings in a plate of cookies and places them on the other side of the conference table. Ten minutes later you realize you’ve processed only half of what has been said.

Why? Only half of your mind was in the meeting. The other half was with the cookies: “Should I have one? I worked out yesterday. I deserve it. No, I should be good.”

That cookie threatened to strain your waistline. It succeeded in straining your mind. [...]

Many diets also require constant calculations to determine calorie counts. All this clogs up the brain. Psychologists measure the impact of this clogging on various tasks: logical and spatial reasoning, self-control, problem solving, and absorption and retention of new information. Together these tasks measure “bandwidth,” the resource that underlies all higher-order mental activity. Inevitably, dieters do worse than nondieters on all these tasks; they have less bandwidth.

Links

1. WiseGeek: What does 200 Calories look like? Pictures of 200 Calories of Various Foods.

2. Robert Cottrell (the editor of The Browser: Writing Worth Reading) in FT: Net Wisdom.

   My first contention: this is a great time to be a reader. The amount of good writing freely available online far exceeds what even the most dedicated consumer might have hoped to encounter a generation ago within the limits of printed media.

   I don’t pretend that everything online is great writing. Let me go further: only 1 per cent is of value to the intelligent general reader ... Another 4 per cent of the internet counts as entertaining rubbish. The remaining 95 per cent has no redeeming features. But even the 1 per cent of writing by and for the elite is an embarrassment of riches, a horn of plenty, a garden of delights.

   The essay covers a wide variety of topics -- including what is so great about blogs by academics writing about their fields of expertise.

3. Makarand Sahasrabuddhe's answer in Quora to: India: Is reservation the best method of affirmative action in India?

An Indian restaurant in London, reviewed by a Yelp user ...

... and narrated by an actor. [Read more about this meme at Total Hilarity: Actors Reading Ridiculous Yelp Reviews].

Potato Chips, Class and the Language of Food

A good one from Improbable Research: A research paper that analyzes the blurb on packages of potato chips:

“Authenticity in America: Class Distinctions in Potato Chip Advertising,” Joshua Freedman and Dan Jurafsky [pictured here], Gastronomica, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 46-54. The authors explain:

“Our study uses the language of food to examine the representation of socioeconomic class identity in contemporary America by comparing the advertising language on expensive bags of potato chips with that on inexpensive chips. We find that the language on expensive chip bags indeed emphasizes factors that are more representative of higher socioeconomic status, such as more complex language and more claims about health. We also find support for Pierre Bourdieu’s hypothesis that taste is fundamentally negative: descriptions on expensive chips, unlike on inexpensive chips, are full of comparison (“less fat,” “finest potatoes”) and negation (“not,” “never”’), suggesting a goal of distancing the upper classes from the tastes of lower socioeconomic classes. Finally, our results expand the relationship between authenticity and socioeconomic status. Previous scholars suggest that the desire for authenticity is solely linked with upper-class identity; we find, however, two distinct modes of authenticity. For the upper classes, authentic food is natural: not processed or artificial. For the working class, by contrast, authentic food is traditional: rooted in family recipes and located in the American landscape. Thus, the authentic experience is linguistically relevant for both classes—an example of the rich meanings hidden in the language of food.”

Links ...

With all that stuff about Kakodkar Committee Report, it has been a while since I did one of these. There's a lot to link to, but this will have to do for now:

1. Winners of the Worst PPT Slide Contest

2. A great infographic on Arab Spring [h/t: Chris Blattman]

3. If you use Google, here's some advice from the company on ensuring your information is safe online.

4. The Bilingual Advantage. Claudia Dreifus of NYTimes interviews Ellen Bialystok, a professor of psychology at York University, Toronto [On strong recommendation from Mark Liberman of Language Log].

5. Gary Taubes in NYTimes: Is Sugar Toxic? Scary story about the true badness of sugar (more specifically, fructose, which forms a big part of sugar, and sugary drinks). Caution: will change your behaviour -- just as it did mine -- in the presence of sweet stuff.

Links ...

1. Let's kick this off with two punchy cartoons from LeftyCartoons.com: A brief history of corporate whining and Bitch if you do, Broke if you don't. The latter reminded me of this gem from xkcd.

2. Sankarshan Thakur in The Telegraph: The Prime Minister's Office wakes up to 100-day deadline.

3. Victor Mair at Language Log: Food choices in Indian airlines.

4. Stanley Kaplan, the guy who made a fortune by training students to do well in SAT and other such exams, died last week at 90. Here's the NYTimes obituary.

   Far more interesting is Malcolm Gladwell's 2001 profile of the man, his method, and his enduring influence on the testing industry.: Examined Life: What Stanley H. Kaplan taught us about the SAT.

5. While on coaching industry, here's a NYTimes story about a South Korean cram school that went online to reach the masses and became one of the hottest tech companies in Korea: Tech Company Helps South Korean Students Ace Entrance Tests.

Links: Bad sex award and menu vaastu

Bad Sex in Fiction Award has been announced for 2008. Take a look. [Link via Amit Varma]

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The art of Menu Design [via the Nudges blog]:

The first step is the design. Rapp recommends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very important. "This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get wrong," he explains. "If all the prices are aligned on the right, then I can look down the list and order the cheapest thing." It's better to have the digits and dollar signs discreetly tagged on at the end of each food description. That way, the customer's appetite for honey-glazed pork will be whetted before he sees its cost.

Also important is placement. On the basis of his own research and existing studies of how people read, Rapp says the most valuable real estate on a two-panel menu (one that opens like a magazine) is the upper-right-hand corner. That area, he says, should be reserved for more profitable dishes since it is the best place to catch--and retain--the reader's gaze.

An obligatory post about what I had for lunch today

A simple -- and simply fabulous -- meal at the Iyer Mess. After more than a year.

While the drumstick sambhar was great, the pachchadi and the poriyal were okay; but the rasam -- the Rasam! -- was truly sublime.

That near-religious experience cost me just 22 rupees.

Politics of food and Dalit identity

Vikram Doctor has a fascinating essay in today's Economic Times; it covers a few other things before settling down to discuss a key part of the politics of food: meat eating. Some excerpts from this part of Doctor's essay:

Sidebar

Doctor's essay refers to the Out-Caste blog; the quote is from a post titled "Why Is Modern India Vegetarian?"

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Dalit food issues also seem to be getting involved with the politics of meat eating in India. One example was when 10 Dalit students were rusticated from Hyderabad Central University in 2002. One of their grievances apparently was that they were treated differently in the college mess because they ate meat, which lead some activists to wonder if the push for vegetarianism had a less palatable aspect.

The Out-Caste blog noted that official determinants of dietary adequacy and the Public Distribution System that existed to ensure it was met only supplied “rice and wheat at cheap rates, but no meat, egg or nuts, or any non-vegetarian food at all. So in a country where vegetarians are a definite minority, we now plan our daily meals based on a notion of a Brahminical notion of an ‘easily available, balanced diet’, and the cultural production of modern India as vegetarian.”

The implication was that rich upper-castes could survive on such a diet since they could afford the different vegetables and milk supplements needed for proper nutrition, but the lower-castes would have to survived on just the cereals, denied the meat that could have been an easy source of nutrition for them.

[...]

What is clear though is that the Dalit identity today increasingly sees meat as an established, if not essential part of it. In his excellently provocative collection of essays Dalit Diary:1999-2003, Reflections on Apartheid in India, Chandra Bhan Prasad ends with a description of a ‘Dalit food festival’ he organises in his home.

The very idea, he admits, seemed bizarre at first, but as he started planning the menu, the better it seemed: “tender pork cooked only with water, salt and black pepper; chicken cooked only in beer; and mutton cooked only in rum... Vegetarian food was also to be cooked, but again in dalit style.” It was a highly subversive success, he says, and I only wish he had written some of the recipes too in his piece. Making food might be the best way to celebrate Ambedkar Jayanti on Monday, the festival for a man who knew all too well what not having food meant.

Links ...

Elizabeth Weil has a longish piece about "teaching boys and girls separately." The alleged benefits of single sex schools have been questioned, and so have the credentials of the "researchers" who have been pushing this initiative. See this post for a critique [link via Brad DeLong].

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Women's colleges in the US, on the other hand, come out on top in a different study: "Graduates of women’s colleges are significantly more likely than women who graduated from other liberal arts colleges or from public flagships to have graduate degrees." This advantage extends to several other parameters as well.

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Have you heard about "embodied cognition"? I hadn't until I came across a couple of articles recently in Boston Globe and the Scientific American blog. The central idea is that our bodies also play a key role in shaping our thinking processes:

Our thoughts are constrained and influenced by the details of our flesh. How you move your arm or leg actually shapes the way you perceive, think and remember.

What is really interesting is the kind of evidence (from cleverly designed experiments) that researchers have managed to unearth to support this view. Neat stuff!

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Sometime ago, a NYTimes story on the origin of General Tso's Chicken (an enormously popular dish in Chinese restaurants in the US) prompted me to look for similar stories about the origin of Gobi Manchurian (an enormously popular dish in Chinese restaurants in India). We now have a worthy follow-up: the origin of fortune cookies!

Bangalore links

There's a new web initiative with a focus on Bengalooru: Citizen Matters, with a neat tag line: "Speak up. It's your city." The site is still in alpha (but it has already been mentioned in Chugs' blog), so it still has some ways to go -- for example, it does not offer a web feed. Let's wait and see how it develops.

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After this post on restaurants near IISc, I went looking for websites that specialize in this topic. I came across Burrp!. Here's its list of Malleswaram restaurants. Being a Web 2.0 site, it offers networking possibilities for its users, whose profile page lists their restaurant reviews. For example, take a look at the profile of Meenakshi, who blogs at Bangalore Belly.

Then, there's Hungry Bangalore that offers with basic info on eateries (I couldn't find any reviews, though). Their "locate restaurant" feature is nice: here's the Hallimane page -- click on "Locate Hallimane" for a Google Maps pop-up!

Hungry, kya?

Tejaswi lists some of the classic eateries in South Bangalore, with a promise to cover other parts soon. In Malleswaram (in the northern part that includes IISc), my favorite is the Janata Cafe on the 8th Cross Street. The Iyer mess is also fabulous.

The last couple of years has seen the opening of some pretty nice places in Malleswaram. Food Camp from the legendary Asha Sweets group (10th Cross and First Main) and Adiga's (15th Cross and Sampige Road) come to mind immediately.

My own favorite in our Institute's neighbourhood is Megh Sagar (at the Bashyam Circle, Sadashiva Nagar). Several new outlets have come up near this place: Daily Bread (for fancy sandwiches and cakes) and Namdharis (for wonderful salads) are great. They also sell all kinds of imported goodies; a liter of Evian, for example, costs just Rs. 125!

Over on the other side of the Institute, there has been a veritable explosion of shops and restaurants on New BEL Road near the Ramaiah Hospital. The Neel restaurant on the 80-feet Road is our favorite for taking our guests out to -- when someone else is footing the bill!

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I would love to check out the South-Bangalore places listed by Tejaswi, but for the dreadful traffic ...

Breathing problems? Try eating right foods.

"Teens with the lowest intake of fruit, vitamins C and E, and omega-3 fatty acids had lower lung function and higher reports of respiratory symptoms such as cough and wheeze," says study author Jane Burns, an epidemiologist at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

[Burns and her colleagues] discovered that teens who consumed less than 25 percent of one serving of fruit each day were more likely to have less efficient lung function than their compeers.

Burns and her colleagues speculate that fruit plays a role because it is rich in vitamin C—also associated with healthy lungs — as well as in flavonoids, antioxidants that hamper the production of free radicals.

From this Scientific American report.

Supreme Court's war on street food

Vir Sanghvi is angry. In his latest column, he argues strongly against the Supreme Court's recent ban on the "cooking of food items on Delhi pavements." Here's his sixth line of attack on the ban:

Six: And finally for the so-called hygiene argument. I am angry enough now to be blunt.

Of all the arguments advanced to justify the ban, this is easily the stupidest.

Only a fool believes that it is hygienic to ban the means by which street food is heated in front of you to temperatures at which no bacteria can survive. Anybody who eats on the streets knows the basic rule: be careful of food that has not been freshly cooked; try and ensure that the vendor heats it before your eyes.

The stupidity of this ban lies in the failure of those who propound it to grasp this basic fact. Years ago, when I was editor of Bombay magazine, we conducted a survey of street food and hygiene. Our lab told us that the chutney used for bhel puri was often too full of bacteria for human consumption (though this is an arbitrary distinction because most Indians have acquired the ability to survive high levels of bacteria), but the report made it clear that anything that was heated to high temperatures was much safer because most of the bacteria had been destroyed in the cooking process.

And yet, the Delhi ban turns this basic truth on its head. A roadside vendor can still sell you a samosa or a kachori. You have no way of knowing where the kachori was made or what went into the samosa. For all you know, the samosa could have been made near a dung heap four days ago — long enough for it to be contaminated by bacteria. Because the vendor will no longer be allowed to reheat it or crush it on his hot tawa, the bacteria will flourish and multiply.

And the Municipal Corporation will encourage this bacterial multiplication — all in the name of hygiene.

Resources on vegan diets

In an earlier post linking to an article on veganism's alleged dangers to pregnant women and infants, I said, "I presume vegans will come forward to justify their choice not just for themselves, but also for their children." In response, commenter Jeff points us to two   articles about the adequacy of vegan diets for everyone including pregnant women and infants.

I personally would have preferred a more pointed rebuttal of Nina Planck's artcle (she has some additional info on her website). A little bit of search on Tailrank sent me off to several blog posts: Fat-free vegan kitchen (see the update at the end), iPalimpsest, Isachandra. Dr. John McDougall has a (almost point-by-point) response to Planck's column.

Veganism: Bad for toddlers?

As someone who's not particularly sympathetic to the vegan cause, I tend to agree with the things Nina Planck says in her NYTimes column today. But I am not very well informed about the scientific details here, so I presume vegans will come forward to justify their choice not just for themselves, but also for their children. If you know of any rebuttals, please let me know, so that I can link to them too. Here are two key paragraphs from Planck's column:

I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.

Indigenous cuisines offer clues about what humans, naturally omnivorous, need to survive, reproduce and grow: traditional vegetarian diets, as in India, invariably include dairy and eggs for complete protein, essential fats and vitamins. There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long run.

Who invented Gobi Manchurian?

Whenever our gang in Pittsburgh went out to Chinese restaurants, the one dish that would always be ordered was General Tso's chicken (with variations on the spelling of "Tso"). Today's NYTimes magazine has a story by Fuchsia Dunlop tracing the origin of this dish. Why?

General Tso’s (or Zuo’s) chicken is the most famous Hunanese dish in the world. A delectable concoction of lightly battered chicken in a chili-laced sweet-sour sauce, it appears on restaurant menus across the globe, but especially in the Eastern United States, where it seems to have become the epitome of Hunanese cuisine. Despite its international reputation, however, the dish is virtually unknown in the Chinese province of Hunan itself. ...

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This prompted me to look for info on the origin of 'Gobi Manchurian' (Gobi = Cauliflower), the dish that has invaded every restaurant menu in Bengalooru (and probably elsewhere in India as well). It is probably an Indian invention. A Business India story (cited here) seems to agree. Heck, it even figures in this site for 'traditional Tamil recipes'!

This American says it could well have been General Tso's cauliflower. In the comments section of this post, Lulu says Vir Sanghvi has written a hilarious account of the origin of this dish. Some more time on Google landed me on Rashmi Bansal's post on Gobi Manchurian served in Udipi restaurants.

Oh well ... For what it's worth, the best Gobi Manchurian in Bengalooru is served at Ginza, the Chinese place on Church Street right next to K.C. Das which at the corner of Church Street and St. Marks Road. [Ginza, I believe, is a part of the Chung Wah group of Chinese restaurants, but I'm not sure how great it is at the other places.]

The Christian Science Monitor on Rasam

A nice essay on rasam with an appropriate title: It's delicious no matter what you call it. The essay is by Vijaysree Venkatraman, whose nom de blog is Tilo.

Link via Gilli.