Baignon ka Bhurta

Total Time: 30 minutes / Serves: 3 to 4 people

Ingredients
1 large eggplant
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 finely chopped onion
1 1/2 teaspoons ginger, grated
1 teaspoon garlic, grated
1 teaspoon finely chopped green chillies,
1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder (haldi)
1/2 teaspoon garam masala
1 tablespoon ghee
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt to taste

Garnish
2 tablespoons chopped coriander

How to Cook?

1. Grease the brinjal (eggplant) with olive oil, make small slits all over the surface and cook over an open flame till it is soft. You can microwave like I did for 10 minutes (dont just burn the hell out of it)

2. Cool and peel the skin. Mash the pulp thoroughly and keep aside.

3. Heat ghee and add the cumin seeds. When they crackle add the onions and sauté for a few minutes.

4. Add the ginger, garlic and green chillies and fry again for a few seconds.

5. Add turmeric powder and cook till the oil separates from the masala.

6. Add the mashed brinjal, garam masala and salt and mix well.

7. Serve hot garnished with the coriander.

How to serve?

Serve with Roti or hot rice and garnish with chopped coriander

Mike Cohn - Agile-Scrum Consulting

Trends and point of views

I have been amazed at the trends emerging over the last few months in different social and business domains. I'm listing out few here..any comments and suggestions will be highly appreciated

1. Oprah trying to gain more news bytes than she already has by exploiting Rihanna's current emotional state

2. Easiness of publishing your writing on Kindle -- the Amazon DTP platform has made publishing a child's play. What will happen to conventional publishing?

3. Google Voice release. Unified voice communication management.

4. People being thoroughly pissed with larger than life personalities duping them (think Madoff)

5. Sudden flood of manage-your-finances types books, blogs, articles etc.

Starbucks Milk Stealers

Yes, US is deep into recession and NY is probably the most worst hit metropolis (as per Time magazine, NYC is leading the job cuts number compared to other US metropolises). And the event that I witnessed kind of reminded me how tough the conditions are out there this winter.

I'm at lunch with my colleague in the concourse of the Rockefeller center. An Asian woman in late 50s walks into the Starbucks near our table and quickly pours whole milk from one of the many canisters into a mini Poland Spring bottle and makes her way out using the escalator. I was stunned at the audacity of the event happening in mid-day Manhattan and in a prime location. It reminded me of the sudden increase in bank robberies and subway snatchings in Manhattan. Five minutes have not passed by...this time its another lady (may be east european)with a small roll-on bag at her tow and she empties out the milk from the other canister into a Gatorade bottle and disappears into the usual lunch crowd.

Worse times awaits us in the near future. Comments?

Time to write, et all

Of late, writing has been pretty erratic--life in general has been pretty busy and erratic sometime too. Well that's expected if you live in greater NY area and work in the big apple.

Anyways, the overnight snowfall dumped about 3-4 inches of thick yet loose snow all over central Jersey. So I wake up to find the stairs to the parking lot covered in deep snow with no foot prints yet (and no shovel). After a couple of minutes of precarious balancing to avoid the shoes from getting wet (as much as possible), I had to spend another 5 minutes cleaning up the dense layer of snow from the car (now obviously the shoes get wet-duhh).

Mine was the 6th car on the road which usually has about 60 on a normal day and the speed at which everyone is driving is less than 10mph. The breaks are still not holding good at the lights and creating this grrrrkkkhhh sound to let you know that the tires are thoroughly soaked in snow and ice-dirt. Thanks to the AWD though, I managed to safely reach the train station (One amazing thing about NJ transit train service; it runs late in summer however run almost on schedule during such wintry days) ---way to work. Lets see what snowy mix is waiting there :)

True Indian Innovation

Mobile Commerce - Indian innovation

This is the perfect example that India slowly but surely is becoming the innovation hub in Asia. The pace of change and adoption of new technology are definitely slower than other comparable economies but the potential (1 billion people and more!) is enormous.

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Gut feeling vs Lean judgement

The Malcolm Gladwell bestseller "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" advocates the use of gut feeling or gut check as a critical factor in human decision making; Do I want that burger? Do I believe what I see as discount on that price tag? Is that car the right one for me? Every decision making is suddenly impulsive and cognitive psychologists are having a field day describing human behavior based on such heuristics..suddenly gut reaction have become the next big thing for decision making. CEOs to soccer mom - everyone is apparently doing gut check.

In this effort to do gut check for everything, we keep on forgetting about inherent traits as cognitive biases (where our judgment is based on stuff we know and want to believe against stuff that we do not know or do not want to know)..sample this ..bias to mimimize personal ego loss in a conflict can direct decision making to be something that is suitable to the personal ego and not for resolution of the conflict (think initial conflicts between board and union members of Walmart where each group was motivated to avoid big loss and didn't concentrate on mutual gain).

It is suggested by experts to follow the lean principles of decision making

(a) don't decide and execute till the last reasonable time for decision making

(b) verify all bits of information (may be rationalization sometimes is better)-- e.g. unicorns do not exist even if you see them after being drunk and

(c) question your decision (ask the other group who disagrees to your decision making)

Last but foremost is definitely trust your gut but don't leave a chance to question and verify it.

Made In India-1 More Time

photo courtesy:AM_iphone

Better Place

Project Better Place. It seems that Israel got it right this time (and this is not about the Gaza strip)! This company will make Israel completely gasoline independant in next 10-12 years. And how will they do it? electric cars...why cannot the US congress have a look into this company?

Start with may be small cities as pilot projects and then move key cities completely of the gasoline map...can you think of NYC with a near zero carbon footprint? Instead of offshore drilling with trillions of borrowed dollars and polluting the environment, why don't spend some money on pilot projects and make this happen?
Why doesn't Obama or McCain speak about this?
Click on the following links for more details

http://www.projectbetterplace.com/

http://shaiagassi.typepad.com/the_long_tailpipe/2008/06/the-better-stor.html