Movable Feasts – A Behind the Scenes look

Managing the kitchen has been an interesting experience when moving from city to city every couple of months. A few people have asked me how we manage the cooking part. We do eat out frequently, but we mostly cook our meals. We can't eat out 3 meals a day, every day.

Back in our apartment in Chicago, we had lots of utensils and kitchen appliances. Since we are now restricted by luggage that we can carry by ourselves, we move around with a very limited amount of utensils. Our kitchen stuff fills about half of one suitcase.

We are forced to be very strict with what we can cart around: 2 dinner plates, 4 bowls, 2 cups and a few spoons. (It is sort of like what they hand you at the start of a week-long Zen retreat, or like going camping, but for a really extended period of time.) We have one small pressure cooker, 1 frying pan, a few stainless vessels, a knife and one flat griddle for dosas, and a few more microwavable plastic takeaway containers for heating and storing.

There's pretty much a checklist for the items in our first grocery shopping in each new place – rice, sugar, salt, cooking oil, instant coffee and a few ready mixes to start things off. We carry a small bag of spices which we refill as needed. Fresh vegetables are plentiful in India. We started out managing with long-life UHT milk cartons, but there's enough competition among milk vendors so now we get milk packets delivered to our door each morning.

What we now have is surely much less than 20% of what we once had in our kitchen. And what has been a revelation to me is that we are managing quite fine. I don’t feel the lack of those other things except on rare occasions. If we desire something fancy, we have to eat out. We have even hosted dinners for others (with some borrowed vessels and cutlery).

We are very Spartan about adding to our kitchen acquisitions now, which implies that we must have been inefficient before, buying lots of redundant stuff.

And the big lesson (to me) is that cutting back and adjusting to a having a simplified kitchen has not been as difficult as it once seemed from the outside. You just have to be mentally prepared.

Short Stay Rentals

We're now in Indore, having completed our stint in Chennai. The plan is to stay here for around 1.5 to 2 months.

In Indore, we wanted a furnished place to stay in. We tried to find something in Indore from Chennai, but nothing was working out. However, on our first day here, we learned of a furnished apartment. A couple, who are distant relatives of a distant relative were visiting their son in Singapore and we could rent their 2 bedroom apartment. And it worked out. So this is the fourth city where we were fortunate enough to be able to find short-term accommodation.

As someone who cares about optimized resource utilization, it occurs to me that there must be 1000s of such homes and apartments that are kept locked up and being under-utilized. At the same time, there is a decent sized demand for these apartments. Someone should be able to figure out a way to tap into this and create a marketplace.

GatesNotes - A site worth visiting

I recently found out about this site – TheGatesNotes. In it, Bill Gates shares the things he’s reading, viewing, working on and thinking about. It is sort of like a blog, but it has a lot more material.

The whole site is very aesthetically laid out – with his travels, his reading and even several of his conversations shared with the readers.

Under the title “What I’m learning” I found out about The Teaching Company. Bill Gates endorses them with very high words of praise. I plan to check out the “Big History” course and the two economics courses he mentions when I get to the US later this year.

We live in good times, where a good majority of the readers of this blog can have access to the same materials (books, CDs, DVD’s) that the richest of the rich also consume.

On the 5th of Feb, he has posted another article about The Teaching company.

Do take a look at the GatesNotes site and see if anything appeals to you.

Thanks to Nandita P. for the pointer.

Link: Planning Out Your Year in Detail

This is related to the previous post about creating a year-in-review document.

Charles Kirk of "The Kirk Report" has written about the importance of taking the time to plan out the coming year. He is a trader and writes from that point of view, but I could relate to everything in the post. (Most of us only have vague hopes for what we'd like to happen this year.) His is a much more rigorous approach, in a post titled: Create A Vision For Your Life.

Thanks to Kalyan for the pointer.

Creating a “Year In Review” document

For over 10 years now, in early January of each year I create a “Year in Review” document about the year that just got over. I have shared bits and pieces of it with a few others, but I primarily write it for myself.

For 2009, you should definitely try and create a similar document for yourself.

Back in 1998, when I started to feel that the days were just running together and that all the years were getting “stapled together” as one, I started creating these personal Year In Review documents.

Whenever I have read my review documents a few years after they were typed up, I have always come away learning something and invariably being surprised about how faulty my memory is. I can’t be sure, but I do believe that these documents have subconsciously helped me to change course.

My review document is 1 to 3 pages long. Here are some of the “easier” categories to include in a Year in Review. A few sentences each about:
Your family: Additions/losses/get-togethers in 2009
Professional: Your job, your bosses, close colleagues, key projects, conferences, skills learned in 2009, kudos received that you are proud of.
Travel: Where all did you manage to go, what’s still at the top of your “must visit” list.
Personal Finance: How you feel about your earning, savings and expenditure. Any investments you tried, their results and what you hope to do in the coming year.
People: Who did you meet and spend time with this year? People who influenced your thinking and who had an impact on you.
Entertainment/Arts: Books read, movies that had an impact, music concerts attended, songs and albums that you got.

And then there are categories that I make up. Personal projects (and hobbies), new things I get temporarily addicted to, volunteering attempts etc. Often I include new internet sites that I discovered and spent time on that year. (For example, this year I am including a section on TED Talks because they were such an important part of my life in 2009.) Since mine is a Word document, I sometimes include a few photos. I have also started adding things that I was disappointed with about myself in the year gone by.

This document is not at all like the “Annual Performance Report” that we create at work for our annual review with our supervisor, where we play up everything. Your Year in Review is just for your eyes.

Give it a try. You might enjoy writing it more than you initially think.

Ten years from now, around 2020 or so, when you look back at your 2009 list you will be thanking yourself. Creating a “Year in review” is a gift that you give to your future self.

The Khan Academy – One guy making a difference

If someone pinned me into naming a personal hero for 2009, I’d probably pick Salman Khan, though I only heard of him in December. He is the creator of The Khan Academy.

I came to know of Salman’s work, while volunteering at NPTEL. This guy has single-handedly created more 1000 short educational videos, and made them all available for free on the net.

He first started out with a few videos intended for his nephews. They were so well received and satisfying to him that he just kept going and has never looked back.

What is particularly impressive to me is how he has taken the simplest of tools (MS Paint and free web-casting software) to do all of this. And, he’s managed all of this while holding a full time job! (In September of 2009 he quit his job to devote his full time to The Khan Academy.)

He has a great FAQ which is well worth reading. His reply about why he didn't try to make money from this venture really resonated with me:

I've been approached several times, but it just didn't feel right. When I'm 80, I want to feel that I helped give access to a world-class education to billions of students around the world. [...] I already have a beautiful wife, a hilarious son, two hondas and a decent house. What else does a man need?

Because of his background in banking and finance, he even has a few short videos on the government bailout and the Geithner Plan.

Do check out a video or two. Salman is an example of one person making a difference. Do pass on the link (www.khanacademy.org) to any students and learners who you think might benefit.

Volunteering assignment at NPTEL

When I got this non-paying assignment I was just as excited as I was when I landed my job years ago.

Around 3 months ago I heard about a program called NPTEL, being run in my alma mater. Very briefly, NPTEL is an effort by the Indian Government to develop web- and video-based courses for all engineering disciplines and make them available to the public for free. In Chennai, I am volunteering my time and abilities to the effort.

For the past three months we are working on creating awareness (mainly among engineering faculty in the numerous Engineering colleges that have come up in South India) and in trying to reach out to students. I am helping coordinate workshops with these faculty members – they tell us what’s working and what needs to be tweaked in these web courses.

Volunteering for NPTEL provides me with two things I was hoping for: Scalability and no requirement about me having to spend long durations at any particular office.

For the past 6 months, my wife and I have been talking to a number of people in the public service domain, looking at different volunteering opportunities. Most of the suggestions we received were very generic or they were targeted at very small groups of individuals. As a matter of personal preference, I wanted something that had a larger scope.

For me, NPTEL fits the bill nicely. I fully realize that huge hurdles exist to learning difficult engineering concepts from the Web. This project falls under the HRD Ministry’s very ambitious National Mission for Education (NME) effort. The vision in NME is to expand the NPTEL effort to have courses developed for students of all ages, right from kindergarten to post-graduate courses in all disciplines, not just for engineering.

I will definitely post more about NPTEL later. Meanwhile, if you have acquaintances who are currently enrolled in an engineering degree, direct them to NPTEL’s Official Website.

Over 250 full courses (~40 lectures of 1 hour duration each per course) can be viewed via Youtube’s iit channel. If you have heard of MIT’s OpenCourseWare, this is very similar in the Indian context, and is based strongly on a commonly agreed-upon curriculum.

I don’t have an official designation in the NPTEL office. My initial goal is to just help build awareness. Effectiveness will take time, but will eventually follow after a number of iterations.