I uploaded a bunch of photos to flickr. The quality isn't great, because I'm limited to 100mb/month, and I'm trying to get maximum photos at decent quality. They should be fine for screen-viewing, but in case any family members out there are looking for refrigerator material, I'll gladly honor any requests for full-size photos. Or if you're just interested in high-res shots of those crocs.
The photos are from Ranganathittu, a bird sanctuary near Mysore. We went there on Sunday. I'll write about it soon.
I've got another "hidden" post in the pipeline. I realize those aren't too frequent, so the e-mail distribution thing is sort of a hassle for the benefit gained. But if anybody out there wants more to read, drop me a line. You know my email, but if not, use the "Contact" button above. I know word of this blog is starting to spread, so I don't care how distant a Facebook friend you are, or how tertiarily you know my parents. Just drop me a line.
The Cubs failed, the US World Cup team failed, the Bears will soon fail, the Blackhawks are sluggish, and Illini football disappointed. You're all instructed to root for Illini basketball. I-L-L...
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Nutrition
If you’ve seen me in the past two years, you probably know that I’ve become a lot more health-conscious as of late. I lost a lot of weight, and have been working hard to keep it off. I haven’t joined a gym here yet, although I will soon, but I have had some encounters with the other side of healthy living: nutrition. Something Indians seem to know nothing about.
Sanju and her roommate, Tulsi, are both on the petite side of things, so they don’t eat much to begin with. They also seem to care less about what they eat than I did when I ate nothing but cheese pizza and got a kidney stone. Tulsi, for example, was pretty surprised when I started looking at a nutrition label and said she’d never really looked at one. Sanju, however, recently tried to convince me that Ghee, or clarified butter, is healthy. Ghee is butter that’s been distilled down to just the fat, removing the milk proteins and some of the unsaturated fat, the point where you’re eating something that’s 1/3 unsaturated fat, 2/3 saturated fat. Sanju claimed that this is the “good” fat. Some web sites agree with her, but they also recommend things like Ear Candling. Ghee winds up in a lot of food, and in large doses. You know how Chinese food is supposed to leave you hungry two hours later? Indian food leaves you full all day, because it’s loaded with saturated fat.
A lot of this is cultural. Sanju touts the skin benefits of ghee, as well as its ability to prevent ulcers. In a society where not a lot of fat is consumed, these are both very real benefits. Add to that the love of chilis here, and the ulcer prevention is quite real. But when you have plenty of access to fat, ghee is a terrible choice. Avocados, nuts, fish oil, and other Polyunsaturated fats will line your stomach without lining your arteries. When your goal is getting bang-for-your-buck, and when meat fat is scarce and lactose intolerant prevalent, ghee works well.
Anyone who saw Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution knows how backwards America’s nutritional standards can be. Not only is the potato classified as a vegetable, but it’s basically THE vegetable in school lunches, despite being almost purely empty calories (yes, my Irish friends, I know the skin has value, but nobody eats the skin). School standards mandate that children be allowed to drink chocolate milk that has as much sugar as pop, to make sure they get enough calcium. India is largely still at the stage where those goals are important-–how do we provide as many calories as cheaply as possible to these hungry kids? While the US has moved on to dealing with health in an affluent society, India is still in an era when ghee and white rice make a lot of sense. So I don’t fault India or Sanju or Tulsi for their love of ghee. Now, when they make fun of me for drinking skim milk, that’s another matter.
Sanju and her roommate, Tulsi, are both on the petite side of things, so they don’t eat much to begin with. They also seem to care less about what they eat than I did when I ate nothing but cheese pizza and got a kidney stone. Tulsi, for example, was pretty surprised when I started looking at a nutrition label and said she’d never really looked at one. Sanju, however, recently tried to convince me that Ghee, or clarified butter, is healthy. Ghee is butter that’s been distilled down to just the fat, removing the milk proteins and some of the unsaturated fat, the point where you’re eating something that’s 1/3 unsaturated fat, 2/3 saturated fat. Sanju claimed that this is the “good” fat. Some web sites agree with her, but they also recommend things like Ear Candling. Ghee winds up in a lot of food, and in large doses. You know how Chinese food is supposed to leave you hungry two hours later? Indian food leaves you full all day, because it’s loaded with saturated fat.
A lot of this is cultural. Sanju touts the skin benefits of ghee, as well as its ability to prevent ulcers. In a society where not a lot of fat is consumed, these are both very real benefits. Add to that the love of chilis here, and the ulcer prevention is quite real. But when you have plenty of access to fat, ghee is a terrible choice. Avocados, nuts, fish oil, and other Polyunsaturated fats will line your stomach without lining your arteries. When your goal is getting bang-for-your-buck, and when meat fat is scarce and lactose intolerant prevalent, ghee works well.
Anyone who saw Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution knows how backwards America’s nutritional standards can be. Not only is the potato classified as a vegetable, but it’s basically THE vegetable in school lunches, despite being almost purely empty calories (yes, my Irish friends, I know the skin has value, but nobody eats the skin). School standards mandate that children be allowed to drink chocolate milk that has as much sugar as pop, to make sure they get enough calcium. India is largely still at the stage where those goals are important-–how do we provide as many calories as cheaply as possible to these hungry kids? While the US has moved on to dealing with health in an affluent society, India is still in an era when ghee and white rice make a lot of sense. So I don’t fault India or Sanju or Tulsi for their love of ghee. Now, when they make fun of me for drinking skim milk, that’s another matter.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Facebook > Chase
I was sitting on this post for a few weeks, trying to come up with something else to say in it. I'm just publishing it as-is.
When I logged onto Facebook for the first time here, Facebook was understandably suspicious of why Charlie Kinzer was suddenly logging in from India. Its security measure, though, was ingenious. Rather than having me verify through an email, or sending me an SMS message like most places would do, they had me identify photos of my friends. It’d display 3 photos of a particular friend, and would give me a random list of friends from which to choose, including the right one. It did this for 4-5 friends, and it managed to pick only good friends of mine, as opposed to people I’d met once and with whom I’d never interacted on Facebook. It was a great verification system. I handled it with ease, but no one else could have done it. Even a close friend of mine probably could not have, since no particular friend would be able to identify my friends from college, law school, and high school. Only I could do that.
This was also something I could do quickly and easily. Compare this to the credit and debit cards that just shut down the moment I tried to use them here. Chase required me to call them, and not on a 24-hour line, either. I was only able to get Google Voice running on a decent connection, which I didn't really have at home. Chase still won't let me use the card from an Indian IP--only when I log into the U of I's server, thus allowing me to surf from an American IP address, did Chase let me book my ticket to Delhi. Ironic, because they now supposedly know that I'm in India. Shouldn't they be declining anything purchased in America? Anyway, this round definitely goes to Facebook, and not Chase.
When I logged onto Facebook for the first time here, Facebook was understandably suspicious of why Charlie Kinzer was suddenly logging in from India. Its security measure, though, was ingenious. Rather than having me verify through an email, or sending me an SMS message like most places would do, they had me identify photos of my friends. It’d display 3 photos of a particular friend, and would give me a random list of friends from which to choose, including the right one. It did this for 4-5 friends, and it managed to pick only good friends of mine, as opposed to people I’d met once and with whom I’d never interacted on Facebook. It was a great verification system. I handled it with ease, but no one else could have done it. Even a close friend of mine probably could not have, since no particular friend would be able to identify my friends from college, law school, and high school. Only I could do that.
This was also something I could do quickly and easily. Compare this to the credit and debit cards that just shut down the moment I tried to use them here. Chase required me to call them, and not on a 24-hour line, either. I was only able to get Google Voice running on a decent connection, which I didn't really have at home. Chase still won't let me use the card from an Indian IP--only when I log into the U of I's server, thus allowing me to surf from an American IP address, did Chase let me book my ticket to Delhi. Ironic, because they now supposedly know that I'm in India. Shouldn't they be declining anything purchased in America? Anyway, this round definitely goes to Facebook, and not Chase.
“Apparently I’m supposed to marry a banana tree first.”
In the wide range of Indian castes and mysticism, some people are born “Mangliks.” Mangliks are cursed to something like 27 years of bad luck, which I think is divided into 20 years of bad luck and 7 years of really bad luck. The “matrimonials” section of the classifieds, which is a great read, has several listings that specified “non-Manglik.” There was also a guy who was 60, but “looks 50!” and several ads that were overtly seeking a family “alliance” via marriage.
Mangliks have particular bad luck on the marriage front: a Manglik’s first spouse is doomed to die an early death. But there is supposedly a loophole in this curse: you marry an animal or some other semi-animate object first. That way you’re only killing a dog, or whatever. Makes perfect sense, right?
Sanju and I had talked about Mangliks before, but I met a guy at a party last night who’s a Manglik. He said he’s supposed to marry a banana tree before finding a bride. Apparently that’s what Aishwarya Rai did to break her curse. I guess whatever fates are concerned with Manglik punishment are fooled by this. Or bound by Indian bureaucracy to kill the banana tree and break the curse, even if they’re aware it’s a bogus out.
Mangliks have particular bad luck on the marriage front: a Manglik’s first spouse is doomed to die an early death. But there is supposedly a loophole in this curse: you marry an animal or some other semi-animate object first. That way you’re only killing a dog, or whatever. Makes perfect sense, right?
Sanju and I had talked about Mangliks before, but I met a guy at a party last night who’s a Manglik. He said he’s supposed to marry a banana tree before finding a bride. Apparently that’s what Aishwarya Rai did to break her curse. I guess whatever fates are concerned with Manglik punishment are fooled by this. Or bound by Indian bureaucracy to kill the banana tree and break the curse, even if they’re aware it’s a bogus out.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Blackouts Reported. Check Power Map.
India has some severe infrastructure problems. The first is electricity. We’re in a pretty nice neighborhood in a decent apartment complex, and the power still goes in and out here at least once a day. It’s out right now, even though the weather’s great. This usually only lasts 20 minutes or so, and has only once lasted more than an hour. At some point I’ll try to figure out why this happens. It could be an issue with power plants. It could be circuit breakers in the building. It could be the family of opossums living in the switching station. Some impacts of this: laptops are really popular, since battery backups for desktops don’t last very long. Nobody bothers setting the clock on the microwave or TV, since they reset daily. Everyone has a stash of candles ready. Here, they’re already spread around the apartment, waiting to be lit. Stores seem to continue to function during power outages, although I haven’t gone shopping during one yet (reminiscent of the time when the power was out at the Watseka Subway, and of the three employees, the only one who knew how to take out a calculator and find the taxes by hand was the mentally challenged guy). I’m sure I’ll find more interesting impacts of unreliable power supplies as this sojourn wears on.
The layout in this city is also a total disaster. London puts it to shame. I’ve always said every major city needs to burn to the ground at least once (London did this too early), and this place is in dire need of a reset button. Just look at it:
There’s no order to the streets. The streets aren’t physically labeled, either, making navigation impossible without resorting to [[Indian GPS]], since you can’t tell what street you’re on, even at major intersections. The buildings are numbered, but since most streets are so short, the numbering doesn’t do much, and it certainly isn’t as useful of a numbering system as used in the US. Rather, the numbers begin at 1 at one end of the street and continue to the other end. Navigation winds up being accomplished by neighborhood and landmarks. When I want to go home, I ask for “Koramangala, Sony World.” Apparently this Sony store at a busy intersection qualifies as a landmark, as every rickshaw driver so far has known exactly where it is.
In addition to the gridlessness, there are no real arterial streets. There are some highwayish stretches, but a trip across town involves weaving around many small streets. There are ring roads, Outer Ring Road, Inner Ring Road, and one other, but none of those are true highways, Rather, they’re just routes patched together from existing streets. My guess is that eminent domain isn’t very powerful here, and that it’s impossible to condemn enough property to construct a highway from scratch. So you just draw out a route and designate it as the highway, then you work on making all stretches of that route as fast as possible. If you look at this map of Outer Ring Road, you’ll see how it weaves all over the place:
At least Karnataka isn’t in $15B of debt. Nor, as far as I know, does it owe over $1B to any university system. So at least it has that on Illinois.
The layout in this city is also a total disaster. London puts it to shame. I’ve always said every major city needs to burn to the ground at least once (London did this too early), and this place is in dire need of a reset button. Just look at it:
There’s no order to the streets. The streets aren’t physically labeled, either, making navigation impossible without resorting to [[Indian GPS]], since you can’t tell what street you’re on, even at major intersections. The buildings are numbered, but since most streets are so short, the numbering doesn’t do much, and it certainly isn’t as useful of a numbering system as used in the US. Rather, the numbers begin at 1 at one end of the street and continue to the other end. Navigation winds up being accomplished by neighborhood and landmarks. When I want to go home, I ask for “Koramangala, Sony World.” Apparently this Sony store at a busy intersection qualifies as a landmark, as every rickshaw driver so far has known exactly where it is.
In addition to the gridlessness, there are no real arterial streets. There are some highwayish stretches, but a trip across town involves weaving around many small streets. There are ring roads, Outer Ring Road, Inner Ring Road, and one other, but none of those are true highways, Rather, they’re just routes patched together from existing streets. My guess is that eminent domain isn’t very powerful here, and that it’s impossible to condemn enough property to construct a highway from scratch. So you just draw out a route and designate it as the highway, then you work on making all stretches of that route as fast as possible. If you look at this map of Outer Ring Road, you’ll see how it weaves all over the place:
At least Karnataka isn’t in $15B of debt. Nor, as far as I know, does it owe over $1B to any university system. So at least it has that on Illinois.
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