The Legend of Curds with Sugar

In South India, it is common practice to finish a meal with curds (plain yogurt) or buttermilk. The way it is done is to mix rice with curds which gives "curd rice" and then add a touch of salt for light seasoning.

There is also a variation to this simple dish. Instead of mixing curds with rice, we can just take curds in a bowl and add sugar. That's it! Now, it is very important to ensure that we use the right ingredients. The main ingredient is curds and it should be curdy, and not watery like butter milk. Also, cane sugar is better than one of those sweetener substitutes.

There has been some controversy as to who actually came up with this idea of having curds with sugar. Some have claimed that they have had this dish in the MTRs and Kamat Hotels of the world since time immemorial. While that may be true, I would like to make this claim that I independently came up with this recipe when I was a kid.

I distinctly remember that when I was 6-7 years of age, I noticed others in the family having this dish of curds+rice. Now, I disliked salty taste back then, so I substituted salt with sugar. I liked it, but after a few days, I realized that the reason I liked this dish was not because of the rice, but actually curds and sugar. That moment was when this legendary curds+sugar dish was born. Even now (some 25 years after this dish was invented), it is quite customary in my family circles (immediate as well as extended) to offer me this special dish after I finish a meal.

I don't like controversy myself, and I can't possibly defend my claim against those made by the pezzonovante of the culinary world, but I just wanted to get the truth out there.

Technology Tipping Point

They used to say, "What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow", as a nod to West Bengal's standing as India's intellectual capital in the 20th century. Silicon Valley can claim that "What technology it uses today, the world uses tomorrow".

In 2003, I used to work in Gandiva, a start up, where I had to use HTML, Http in the context of web-applications. Now there was this one issue that we were particularly frustrated with. A small change/update anywhere in a dynamically generated web page meant that you had to regenerate the whole page with all of the page-data which was sub-optimal. Little did I know that there was already a solution in the form of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) wherein web applications can send data to, and retrieve data from, a server asynchronously without interfering with the display and behavior of the rest of the page.

Back then, I used to use Yahoo messenger quite a bit to keep in touch with friends and family. Sometimes, I had this habit of putting up status messages (as did others) and would receive the odd IM from someone I know on how they felt about it. Fast forward a couple of years, and Twitter takes this to the next level as one of the first micro-blogging site.

In 2004-2005, as I bought my first laptop in my grad days, some of us friends had this observation that we rarely seem to use any software other than a browser and a ssh client. We now see that cloud computing, net-books have become the hottest buzz words.

Now, in 2011, I have begun to notice a drastic change in the type of messages I receive in my email account. A majority of the emails I receive these days are from social networking sites such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn updating me with messages from friends and family. These sites have become the de-facto place for all my social interactions and messaging needs. This makes me think that in a few years, we might see an end to email as it is used now and will completely embrace social-networking services. The only issue is that these sites are heavily siloed and don't inter-operate well.