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David Pescovitz of boingboing is wondering if the lady in the painting is about to hammer the gentleman’s head. He saw this painting hanging on the wall of an Indian restaurant in Palo Alto, CA, US.

What do you think?

Is this a famous painting? Isn’t it strange for a restaurant?

 

Mutiny weekly wrap-up: March 26–31

Another lovely week went away with mutiny picking on hits and getting more hits and then picking a little more.

Chacko wondered what happened to CNN IBN’S website earlier this week. He usually is very very inquisitive, isnt it? Later in the week he goes all crazy, he wants a CSI team for Jamaica led by two Malayalees. Chacko punks.

Angelspace digs a beautiful ad that pleads, “Don’t burn the planet away“. Later this week she’s got a beautiful caricature about the Indian cricket performance.

Guru comes up with another interesting story about how classical music and modern gadgetry are shaping up. Later in the week he provides a bit of history of Indian constitution.

Polite takes a look at the recent UN Slam on India on Dalit Violence. He believes this was coming.

Jo covers the online grievance Forum and how a folk got himself heard and got the BSNL show caused. Later in the week he debates if Mohan Lal is at fault for selling liquor.

Out fastrack expert Maltesh writes about the much talked about F1 track on Rajpath.

HinduMommy comes up with her popular top something things, this time its top 21 things Indians say when they return to India from US. Damn good it is.

GentleDude revisits the Babri Saga. Its a very personal description. Good work Dude.

Towards the end of the week, Jo comes up with his thoughts on conversion and religion.

Polite Indian covers the news of the week - SC stay in OBC.

Guru at the end of the week tells us about how some time back, employment with Govt of India was an honor.

Ujj ends the week with this chotu post on the Globalized Vadapao. The man can eat.

 

Globalized Vada Pao

This is a very chotu <tiny> post.

Did you know Vada Pao (yes that on_the_go Mumbaikar snack) is a brilliant example of Globalization in India?

Vada pao’s pao came from Afghanistan, the Potato first came from Spain, the Gram dals came from Mexico and the Ginger came from China.

Now thats truely a global dish.

Photo courtesy Chriss Brunn

 

Market down. What should you do?

When market goes up everything goes up irrespective of their valuations and fundamentals. Investors chase every new IPO that comes to the market and they chase with expectations that it will go up multifold in short term. No body talks of fundamentals or valuations when markets inch up everyday. Indian markets were on mad run for very long time.
Most of the time only positive stories emerge and no one cares about negative sentiment at all.

You will not be called smart, if you make money when the market goes up. You will also be not called looser, if the market goes down. However, you are definetly smarter, if you make money when most of them out their loose money. I am not pointing or advising shorting the stocks here.

Investing is an art and every investor should have his own investing style. Please don’t go and pick up every stock that is going up or don’t pay attention to message boards where people pump up the stocks and also, don’t pay attention to Technical analysts in a downtrend market.

I would advise these steps to safe guard yourself from losses.
1) Pick up a sector or two and learn about it thoroughly. Look at it from national and international point of view.
2) Pay attention to Fundamental analysts and then Technical analysts. Technical analysis by itself is very dangerous, if you ignore fundamentals of the company.
3) Before you zero in on a company, look at the management which is running the show. See, if they have good track record in giving good returns to their shareholders in the past.
4) Don’t have lofty expectations on the stocks you invest in. Be reasonable and expect only reasonable returns (15%).
5) Monitor closely where the government is spending most of its tax money. Invest in those companies who will get these government orders.
6) Avoid companies with unreasonable PE’s.

When markets go down all stocks go down including good stocks. This is an oppurtunity for value picks.
I strongly recommend companies who do business in India and generate their revenues from Indian consumers. Why?
Indian currency is going to appreciate in coming years which increases the purchasing power of Indians. Foreign currencies mainly US dollar will be on a downward trend and Indian companies which are heavily dependent on Dollar revenue will be loosing their earnings due to currency rate fluctuations. Companies like Infosys, Wipro, TCS etc will be loosers, becuase their earnings are dollar denominated and are also facing pressure on their margins due to heavy competition from US companies and also Indian companies.

I recommand Hotel stocks, Paper companies (like bilt), Infrastructure companies, cement companies etc.
Avoid Sugar companies for few more quarters. The only scope for short term increase in their valuations may come from Ethanol story or if the sugarcrane crop in Brazil suffers due to unfavorable weather conditions or if the crude oil per barrel jumps to $100 in 2008. Invest in companies who offer Insurance services and also in companies like Apollo hospitals.

Note: I have invested in Hotel sector and planning to take more exposure in this sector due upcomming commonwealth games in 2010 and increased tourism prospects in India. Also with real estate value increasing, there is a huge entry barrier for new companies.

 

Truly Innovative

Global warming, environment, pollution ant many other causes have forced us to think in a bio-way. Today, a lot of things are coming to the market that are bio-degradable or eco-friendly, or environment-friendly or whatever.
Pictures speak a lot more than words; this is what I found as I was walking down a street in my city. Thankfully I had my digi along.

This one’s surely keeping the environmentalists happy.

 

India to hurry up and lower import duties on alcohol products

First it was the EU and now its the United States which has complained to the World Trade Organisation against India because of the high duties it levies on alcohol products. The US Trade representative has been quoted in a Rediff report:

“We have raised this issue with the Government of India on several occasions over a number of years. We hope the matter can be successfully resolved in WTO consultations,” the US Trade Representative Susan C Schwab said in a statement.

India imposes import duties which are as high as 550 percent on spirits and 264 percent on wines. It is actually the additional taxes imposed by the states which makes this such a high figure. Such taxes are against ‘WTO provisions’ and the US has decided to litigate because India has not reduced the duties on alcohol products in its recent budget inspite of lowering duties on other imports.

Our government is now insisting that it has already planned to cut the centrally imposed customs duty on imported wines and spirits and regulate taxation at state level and that it will be done in a couple of months.

But why has the government sat on it so far? If India doesn’t resolve this dispute quickly, and the WTO rules against India, “the EU could impose retaliatory tariffs on imports.” I wonder why we need to have the gun pointed at our heads before we decide on these matters? It is obvious even to laymen like me that it is the domestic alcohol industry which has been putting pressure on the government to keep the rates high all these years. And some people in the government are making money for sure.

It also seems most unfair that the government has chosen to pander to the alcohol industry while other industries are bearing the brunt of foreign competition.

And from the consumer’s point of view I think it will be wonderful to have world class wines available at affordable prices. One thing you have to grant them over there. They make the most wonderful wines.

 

Bhut Jolokia - World’s Hottest Chilli

8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide might be unfamiliar to you as a chemical compound, but when reincarnated in the form of a chilli, it is guranteed to give you ‘that burning sensation’. The degree of ‘hotness’ of chillis can infact be measured in units, thanks to the Scoville scale developed by Wilbur Scoville in 1912.

In1989 ,Frank Garcia, one of the founders of GNS Spices in Walnut, California discovered a plant with a red fruit in a field of Orange Habaneros. Subsequently, in 1994, Garcia’s Red Savina set a world record for heat at 577,000 Scoville units and was enlisted in the Guinness Book of World Records as The Hottest Chilli in the world.

On September 6, 2000, the Defense Research Laboratory in the Assamese town of Tezpur declared that they recorded an astonishing 855,000 Scoville Heat Units for the Naga Jolokia, named after the ferocious Naga warriors. However, soon after the AP report was published experts like Dr. Paul Bosland, Director of the Chile Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University and Dave DeWitt, author of books like The Davinci Kitchen (and you thought there is an industry which did not capitalise on the Dan Brown fever) disputed this claim and questioned the authenticity of the tests.

Two years later, the Chile Pepper Institute received the seed of a chilli named ‘Bhut Jolokia’ from a member who had collected it while visiting India. Dr. Bosland and his colleagues conducted a comparison experiment in 2005 at a plant science research facility close to Las Cruces, New Mexico. The ‘Bhut Jolokia’ recorded an astonishing heat level of 1,001,304 SHU.

“Such is the hotness of the chilli that it can drive away the ghost, and hence the name ” says Anandita Dutta Tamuly who is getting ready to eat not 1 or 2, but 60 Bhut Jolokias in two minutes to make an entry into the Guinness Book of World Records. Since the legendary chilli from Assam made it to the Guinnes Book last year, maybe it is time for Anandita to prove her mettle.

Click here to comment.

 

Biofuels Will Make China, India More Thirsty

Andy Mukherjee, a good opinion writer for Bloomberg, writes about the increasing interest in China and India for Bio-fuels. The consequence of this will be the impact on food due to the scarcity of water.

If water were a globally traded commodity, with unmet demand in China and India reflected in its price, the world might shed its newfound craze for biofuels. Growing corn to make ethanol to run sport-utility vehicles is downright silly; nowhere more so than in China and India.

As many as 400 Chinese cities are facing water shortages; farmers in the most-populous nation are forgoing millions of tons of grain production every year. Per-capita availability of water is expected to shrink to alarming levels by 2030.

Amid this water scarcity, China has gone on to become the world’s third-largest bio-ethanol producer after Brazil and the U.S., pouring thousands of gallons of water to grow a ton of corn, and then using more water to turn the corn into ethanol.

The tradeoff between water and biofuels may also be crucial for India. One-sixth of India’s food output is being supported by pumping groundwater, which is depleting rapidly. In the state of Tamil Nadu, more than a third of aquifers are “overexploited,” meaning the rate at which water is being extracted is more than the pace of recharge. According to the World Bank’s estimates, by 2050 demand for water in India will exceed all available supplies.

“If water would have its correct price, then we wouldn’t even be thinking about biofuels,” Nestle SA Chief Executive Officer Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “If I had to identify one resource I’m worried about, that’s water.”

Water is emerging as the main issue all around the world. I have written about this issue before.

Greenpeace suggested that the growing need for bio-fuels are fuelling the growth for deforestation in Indonesia.’

In Food or Fuel, Lester Brown comments that “By the end of 2007, the emerging competition between the 800 million automobile owners who want to maintain their mobility and the world’s 2 billion poorest people who want simply to survive will be on center stage.”

And Larry West from About.com says, The most valuable commodity in the world today, and likely to remain so for much of this century, is not oil, not natural gas, not even some type of renewable energy. It’s water—clean, safe, fresh water.

The current Water debate in Australia is clearly shows the need for leadership in this area.

And Water is Wealth. A UNEP Finance Initiate called water “an emerging risk of strategic importance to businesses and their financial backers around the world.”

Economics teaches the opportunity cost of goods and services. This is the basic principle to understand in this march towards alternative fuels.

Atanu Dey explains the importance of opportunity costs:

In fact, I would go so far as to claim that economics at its most fundamental is the careful systematic study of opportunity costs. Opportunity costs implies choices and tradeoffs, and is itself the consequence of a fundamental physical characteristic of the universe that we live in. That fundamental fact is that this universe has limits. Each one of us has a limited amount of time and other derivative resources at our disposal.

Understanding this core principle is important in deciding upon alternatives, making choices and taking policy and strategic decisions.

Crossposted at WorldisGreen.com

 

Coke set to launch Minute Maid in India

We in India are wary of Coke and this was aptly illustrated by a recent (strange!) request of the Indian government. Just a few days ago the Supreme Court of India actually demanded that Coca-Cola should reveal its secret formula! All this has happened because of a controversy  surrounding all soft drinks in India. Apparently, pesticides were found in the soft drinks and this generated a fair amount of hysteria. So much so that now some schools have banned colas altogether!

Interestingly, the pesticide hysteria has made people very conscious of what they are eating. It isn’t just the presence of pesticides that people are suddenly concerned about, but also the general lack of nutrition  in soft drinks. In fact there is a rising awareness of all the junk that we tend to eat, from burgers and bhajias to chips and namkeen, the last three being deep-fried snacks.

Fruit juices have gained because of the pesticide controversy and Coke has decided to cash in on it. By launching it’s already popular brand Minute Maid, Coke will not only be able to take advantage of a business opportunity, but will also be able to re-furbish it’s tumbling image from a seller of junk to a seller of health.

How well the Coca-Cola Company will do remains to be seen. Coke is entering the fruit juice a bit late in the day. Brands like Tropiciana and Real have already made inroads into the Indian fruit juice market. On the other hand, maybe Coke is the wise one. Real and Tropiciana have had to literally carve a decent place for themselves in a tiny market…but now the market has taken on a life of it’s own.

 

On the (potential) medicinal uses of turmeric

Here is a Scientific American article (via) about the potential medicinal uses of turmeric:

A chapter in a forthcoming book, for instance, describes the biologically active components of turmeric–curcumin and related compounds called curcuminoids–as having antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antibacterial and antifungal properties, with potential activity against cancer, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease and other chronic maladies. And in 2005 nearly 300 scientific and technical papers referenced curcumin in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database, compared with about 100 just five years earlier.

Scientists who sometimes jokingly label themselves curcuminologists are drawn to the compound both because of its many possible valuable effects in the body and its apparent low toxicity. They ponder how the spice or its derivatives might be used, not just as a treatment but as a low-cost preventive medication for some of the most feared ailments. As a treatment, it also has some enticing attributes. Because curcumin targets so many biological pathways, it could have benefits for cancer therapy: malignant cells may be slow to acquire resistance to it and so might have to go through multiple mutations to avoid the substance’s multipronged attack.

Not surprisingly, some Indian researchers played (and continue to play) an active role in the research:

Known as HALDI in HINDI, jiang huang in Chinese, manjal in Tamil (and just plain “yuk” as the yellow stain on a white T-shirt from the splatting of ballpark mustard), turmeric has a medicinal history that dates back 5,000 years. At that time it was a key medicament for wound healing, blood cleansing and stomach ailments in India’s Ayurvedic system of medicine.

The first record in PubMed of research on the biological activity of curcumin dates back to 1970, when a group of Indian researchers reported the effects of the compound on cholesterol levels in rats. The pace of studies picked up in the 1990s; one of the leaders was Bharat Aggarwal, a former scientist at Genentech who, before turning to curcumin, had taken another approach to seeking cancer treatments. That work led him circuitously to the compound.

Here is Dr. Bharat Aggarwal’s page, in case you be interested.

However, the story is also about the modern medicinal research methodology. In Ayurveda and other traditional Indian medicinal systems, most of the times, medicine is administered as part of the food; hence, we tend to think that an increase in the quantity of the specific material in our food by itself will cure the disease. But, modern scientific studies tell us otherwise:

M. D. Anderson’s FAQs might convey the impression of certitude by prescribing an eight-gram dose. But the low presence of curcumin in the blood–and the corresponding need to elevate the amount consumed if the substance does indeed fight disease–is a challenge that will continue to nag curcumin researchers. The animal studies that investigators cite as suggestive of curcumin’s diverse benefits have generally used less than the equivalent of eight grams in humans, and blood concentrations have usually been in the nanomolar range. “We don’t know how to explain how such low concentrations of curcumin can be beneficial in animals tested,” Shaul states.

Dose is everything for a new drug–any therapeutic agent, including aspirin, turns toxic at high levels. For most new pharmaceuticals, the best dose for achieving the desired blood plasma levels is usually found through round after round of preclinical trials in cell cultures and mice. Yet drug companies are not battling one another to be the first to conduct these tests on curcumin. They have a preference for highly targeted therapeutics: hitting a specific receptor, for instance, may treat disease while lowering side effects, whereas a drug with multiple actions could, in theory, increase the chance that an unwanted effect will occur.

Thus, a pragmatic approach would be to use the traditional knowledge as a pointer, and make in-depth studies to come up with remedies which are effective with a little or no side effects. Till then, try some of these recipes in which turmeric figures, and its antioxidant properties would surely benefit you.