The Branded and Gilded Life
The Branded and Gilded Life
The Indian doughnut
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The Indian doughnut

The resemblance is superficial.

Both are round rings. As cultural icons, the Indian version is more of a South Indian staple, though that is changing

The Indian Medu Vada is culturally as distant from the American doughnut as Indians are from Americans.

Eating a doughnut is basically like chomping a re-designed bun. Doughnuts need makeup. They have to be bathed in chocolate, drizzled with sugar, slathered with caramel or stuffed with things a chef can imagine to acquire a character.

And they're sweet, fluffy and airy.

The medu vada, on the other hand is spicy and crusty.

Getting the medu vada right is an art. It has be perfectly brittle and crumbly on the outside and  layered softness on the inside. The best way to eat it is piping hot, dipped into sambar or the chutney of your choice.

When cold, they are best enjoyed submerged in hot rasam or sambar. Or marinating in curds with a seasoning of curry leaves and mustard and a sprinkling of fresh coriander leaves.

Depending on which Southern state you belong to this can be an intensely spicy experience or soulful.

East is east and west is west. Truer words were never spoken.


Solving an impossible problem

In the 90s, I remember using digital diaries from Casio. 

They could store up to 6000 addresses and messages.

The capacity? A grand 32 kb. It's not as if those devices were cheap. They used to cost about Rs. 5-6000 back then.

Upgrading to a new device was hard work. 

Music cassettes were the rage until the compact disc took over

Video microcassettes, popular for decades are all but unusable now. Unless you find stores with the original hardware to convert them into .mov or mp4 files.

As technology evolves, new formats are created.  And the old ones are trashed.

That is the impossible problem.

How do you make formats accessible beyond their expiry dates?

Making everything backward compatible is not a solution because too many technical aspects are involved.

For most people, the answer is simple. Move on to the new one.

Anyone remember Flash? Even in the early 2000s, it was the tech that defined animation. All the wonderful work done is Flash is now mostly inaccessible.

That's why the File Format project deserves to be better known. It's trying to gather every electronic format ever used and create a solution.

Universal access to every file format ever created.


The rebirth of electric batteries

What happens to electric vehicle batteries after they die?

Rebirth is the only option

The number of electric vehicles on the road in the next decade is going to increase by 800%

And the batteries cannot be disposed off without causing an environmental catastrophe.

Fossil fuels posed a different kind of issue. Fouling up the air.

So engines had to evolve. 

It's been a tug of war between car manufacturers and governments on the standards to aim for.

Electric cars have no engines.

The batteries are pivotal and vehicles are built around them.

But in a few years, after multiple charges, they run out of juice.

They won't disappear into thin air. 

It was a problem the former CTO of Tesla saw as an opportunity to build what he calls a 'remanufacturing ecosystem'. In other words, rebirth.

It's a contest to figure out how it can be done at massive scale. The change in mindset from seeing spent batteries as waste to harnessing it as a resource.

There are already multiple environment friendly approaches to conversion - using it to create raw materials for several industries

Rebirth is no longer a spiritual issue but one looking for practical solutions


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The Branded and Gilded Life
The Branded and Gilded Life
Marketing is a never-ending set of experiments to understand human behavior. It's still opaque even after billions are spent every year. Predicting human behavior is like the horizon - visible yet hard to reach