Author: Akshat Rathi

Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News. He has previously worked at Quartz, The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.

Quick Fix Recipe 3: Onion + Tomato

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This is part of a series on recipes that I use to fix myself a quick meal with as little number of ingredients as possible. The recipe below was put together by Deeksha. The speciality of this tomato chutney is that it can go with a lot of things. All kinds of rice, chips or bread.

Ingredients

  • 400g tomatoes
  • 1 large onion
  • Indian Spice Box (chat masala, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, fenugreek leaves)
  • 1 tbsp olive oil

Method

  1. Heat oil in a pan on low flame. To it add some cumin seeds and mustard seeds.
  2. While the cumin seeds get mildly roasted, chop the onion finely. In some time the cumin seeds will give a pleasant odour.
  3. Add finely chopped onions to the pan and let them fry till golden brown (tip: Add salt to the onions as they then get cooked faster).
  4. Add finely chopped tomatoes or an equivalent amount of tomato paste. Let it cook for atleast 15 minutes on a medium flame.
  5. Add 1tbsp chat masala and 1/2 tbsp dried leaves of fenugreek (kasturi methi), if available. Mix well and cook for another few minutes. (Honey may be added to taste)
  6. Once cooked, pour in a bowl and enjoy it with corn chips, pilao rice, khakra, or any kind of bread.

Overall cooking time: 25 minutes

The Treasures of Urine

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Michelle Clement’s post on What can urine tell us? has arrived at an opportune time. I am reading John Emsley’s The Shocking History of Phosphorus and much of the first chapter is about the discovery of phosphorus from urine.

Alchemists of the day were desperately and highly secretively searching for the philosopher’s stone. Henning Brandt, the discoverer of phosphorus, thought because urine is golden there must be something in it which make is to golden. Possibly gold?

In his attempts to isolate gold out of urine, Brandt evaporate urine to a paste and heated the residues hard to find shining vapours rising from it. When condensed he found that the shining liquid burst into flames if brought in contact with air. So he started collecting the vapours under water instead. The waxy, white solid that formed at the bottom was phosphorus.

So why phosphorus from urine? We tend to eat a lot more phosphorus than is needed by our body. So most of it is excreted.

A typical sample of urine from an adult male contains (per litre) – 52 g creatine, 21 g urea, 6.5 g chloride, 4 g sodium, 2.2 g potassium, 2.3 g amino acids, 1.4 g phosphorus, 0.7 g ammonia and  0.3 g magnesium.

Although Brandt had discovered this light-giving element in 1669, he did not divulge the method of obtaining phosphorus until 1678, by which Johann Kunckel, professor at the University of Wittenberg, had succeeded to isolate phosphorus and was touring the  European royal courts showing off the element and claiming to be its discoverer.

For many years it was thought that Kunckel discovered phosphorus, until papers from Leibniz (yes, the same calculus guy!) revealed that he had conversed with Brandt’s wife about the discovery of phosphorus and which finally gave credit to the its true discoverer.

It seems that for at least a hundred after its discovery, urine remained the only source to obtain elemental phosphorus. Even today 3 million tonnes (worth ~$1 billion) of phosphorus is obtained from human excreta. Such are the treasures of urine.

The art of finishing

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Even before starting to follow Seth Godin, I believed in the value of finishing what I started.

May be this habit stems from a childhood experience. My parents did not allow me to leave the dining table till I had finished everything on my plate. If I had to over eat then so be it, next time I will learn to put no more food on my plate than was needed.

The habit then extended into other things. I am not satisfied till I’ve finished the book that I started. I cannot leave a cinema midway even if the first half isn’t exactly great. I won’t leave a conversation in the middle (if I had the choice too), I will wait for it to come to a conclusion or bring it to one.

This habit of finishing what I started helps quite a lot. I am able to derive maximum value from an activity that I can. Most importantly, it provides me with enough motivation to keep going. Most activities have a great start, a boring middle and superb end. Many people start something because it looks interesting but give up in the middle because the initial charm has disappeared. Many times if an activity is continued till the end, there is something in store that no one expects. If for nothing else, it is worth finishing something just to get to this unexpected outcome.

There is also a good selfish reason for finishing what you start. An activity when completed can go down on the list of things that you have ‘done’. That list is a self-confidence builder. When you look back, you know that you had the ability to not only start but also finish so many things. It allows you to start something new knowing what all you are already capable of doing. That can be a great motivation to start a new activity that is more challenging than anything you have done before or even motivation to finish something you haven started knowing that you have done something more difficult than this before.

Although finishing is a great habit, it has it’s downsides too. For example, when I am reading an article on the web or even a research paper I would like to read every word of text even though that may be unnecessary.

I think what it boils down to is our ability to judge the value of an activity. And to be able to accurately judge the value of an activity is a hard thing to do. Mostly because of lack of experience, in my case at least. It is then when I decided that if I am not sure what the value of a certain activity might be then I will finish it and evaluate the value at the end of it. In this way I can improve my value judgement for such activities in the future and thus improve my capacity to take the decision to quit or to keep going.

I am proud of many things that I have finished and I am sure to have many more in the future if I can keep going.