Chinese Masala Dosa – A really unusual but awesome Gastronomy

I do not use my kitchen at home. Many reasons, lack of time and interest being some of them. But the most important reason is I am not the best cook in the world, and I want to explore the gastronomy of others who are much better than me.

Being an ardent lover of food, I never stop experimenting. Everytime I move into a restaurant, I try to order something which I did not order before in that restaurant. And yes most of the times I enter into restaurants where I have not entered before. And if the restaurant has a good, long and fancy menu, I am a regular visitor for the next few days to get a taste of more or less everything in the menu.

One night, I was late from work and was in search of a descent restaurant near the Outer Ring Road of Bangalore but I could not find one. I wanted to have something light and was slowly strolling in the service road with my bike in search of a food joint. Suddenly I saw a small stall with 3 small round tawas where a lot of people were crowded. I saw that place a number of times but never bothered to stop. I thought of giving it a try that night.

There was no signboards, no menus, no tables and even no chairs. It looked like a big pan stall near any footpath. So I asked the guy – what do you have today? He started chanting the menu in a fast pace and after he had almost taken around 20 names I asked him to stop. The few names which I can recall are Muglai Dosa, Paneer Dosa, Chicken Dosa, which had cheese and butter versions as well. The name which struck me the most was Chinese Dosa.  Chinese and Dosa, does those words seem any similar by any chance? I thought  - This is what I need to try out tonight.

I asked the chef – “What is this Chinese Dosa all about?” He answered – “Sir, have it and see, you will come to know.” I asked him – “What is it made of?” He answered – “I recommend you to have this, you wont repent..” Having said so, he started preparing the dosa. In the meantime I asked him, “How many varieties do you have in your menu?” To my utter surprise he answered – “200 different types of dosa, Sir”.

I kept quiet and just observed him preparing the dosa in the small, flat and round tawa. He spread out the batter first in the tawa, like any other dosa. And then he started putting the ingredients inside the dosa, he started with noodes, 3 different kinds of ketchups, some chicken pieces, some vegetables, lot of cheese, some butter and some other ingredients which I did not recognize or do not remember. However I took the dosa and had it, it was an awesome gastronomy, a strange but tasty outcome. It was a good treat for just Rs. 50.

If any of you(my readers) want to have Chinese or any other variety of dosa from this shop in the outer ring road, the treat is on me, if you comment here and vote for my post in Indiblogger. J

Get a Google Plus Account just in 3 steps.

I have seen many people bragging around with a Google plus account asking people if they need invites. So many people out there also are looking for an invite to stay in tune with the most recent social networking site which got much hype - The Google Plus. It may be quite irritating for those who really want to check this out but this is the known marketing policy or you may say prank of Google to create a scarcity initially. We had seen the same in case of Gmail as well.

Now, there is a really easy way to join Google plus even without getting an invite from anyone. Follow the below procedure and you will be the master of yourself and gain unlimited bragging:-

1. Go to Google and search Google Plus and then open the link. Or just click here. On clicking this link you will see something like below:-

After clicking the Sign In button you will be redirected to the following page where you can login using your Google Account. If you don't have a Google Account, just get one immediately.

After signing in you will be surprised to see that you already have a Google Plus Account. Wondering if there are more steps. Sorry to disappoint you, there are no more steps. Just wander around the interface create your circles, import your contacts etc and check out how you like it. And yes, no need to beg for invites any more, you may yourself brag of having a Google Plus account.

The Great Facebook Fiasco

I have worked in startup web development and internet marketing teams, and whenever we used to make some content live, it used to go through several approvals. If a wrong content live in the internet that’s alright, until you do a massive advertisement, if it is live in the Social Networks, you are in a trouble. Because it gets shared and again shared, and the viewer ship multiplies over time. By the time you correct it, it would be too late and millions of people would have damned it.

Every small company wants to be perfect. I remember my manager calling me up in the weekends, nervous and worried, because some spelling mistakes were there in the website. I used to correct it immediately. And there used to be a few mistakes, which mostly went un noticed because the audience we were serving was smaller, compared to facebook.

What about the Big Companies? I have seen facebook, google, yahoo, amazon, ebay go weird at times, name any other site, it has at least some mistakes in its content, coding and everything else. This time facebook has crossed the limit, and a huge mistake committed by it caused trouble to thousands of people worldwide. Below is the plot.

I registered for the Hacker’s Cup Qualification Event on Facebook. Like me thousands of other people registered for the event. The event page clearly says – 4 PM on 8th to 4 PM on 11th. It never mentioned the time zone there. The time zone was mentioned in the Description which most of the people did not notice. Now here goes the fiasco – Facebook sent event invitations through its own inbuilt application to the 90K odd participants where the time appears at 4 PM of the respective time zones of the participants.

Actually the time zone is 4 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST) which is 5:30 AM(9th Jan) IST and different other times across the world. People from over 180 countries had joined the event and were logging into the event page when their respective times showed 4 PM on Friday. Today is Friday and I did the same at 4 PM and saw nothing was happening although my event alert in my profile page was showing that the event was happening now!

I had a chat with a few co-participant developers and come to know that 1 guy had cancelled his evening plans with plans to participate in the event. Another guy had taken leave from his work to participate in this event. But the event did not happen at all.

And people are hating Facebook for this:-

Facebook could have checked out a time conversion mechanism in its events application which could have saved them from this silly mistake which created a trouble and wasted time of thousands of developers. So the conclusion is that, even Facebook guys are made of blood and bones and can do mistakes. So all other managers in the world, never compare your guys to Facebook or Google guys, because even they commit mistakes just like your guys do.