Category: Wanderings

Quick Fix Recipe 1: Mushroom + Egg + Onion

Akshat Rathi4 Comments

Just like many students, I started cooking in September 2008 when I left India for my studies at Oxford. A few weeks before I left, I tried my hand at cooking simple dishes. It wasn’t that hard. But once you start cooking on your own you may realise that every recipe needs so many things. May be in small amounts but the list of ingredients is so big (especially for Indian food). Although I enjoyed cooking, I hated going to the supermarket in that cold weather just to get garlic paste or lemon juice. I complained about it and in response my mum said, “There is always something you can make from whatever you have in the kitchen.” As a student that statement is quite reassuring. Theoretically speaking, it is possible to make something, but will you that thing taste good enough to eat? Many of us might face this challenge.

In this process of learning how to fix myself a quick meal with as little number of ingredients as possible I have come up with a few recipes that I will share with you. Just to re-iterate, these are the recipes that I found tasted good to me and have been made with whatever I can find in my kitchen. Some of these have been tasted by others and they have seemed to enjoy it too.

Quick Fix Recipe 1: Mushroom + Egg + Onion

Ingredients:

  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1/2 small onion, sliced (rings or half-rings)
  • 200 g mushroom, sliced
  • 3 eggs
  • 40 g butter
  • salt, garlic paste

Method:

  1. In a pan, pour 1tbsp olive oil and sauté the onions till they are nice and brown.
  2. In a separate pan, do the same to the sliced mushroom. Once the mushroom have absorbed the oil, add 20g butter and mix rapidly so that the butter is spread evenly. Add garlic paste and then keep on mixing for 2-3 mins more till the mushrooms lose a little bit of water. You may add salt or pepper to taste at this point. Add these mushrooms to the onion pan and keep the pan warm at the least level of heat (easy on gas stoves than electric ones!)
  3. Break the 3 eggs in a bowl and whisk them together. You may add salt and chili powder to taste at this point. Pour the mix onto the pan which had the mushrooms on it. Mix vigorously and break any lumps formed (a bit like bhurji). When done, add 20g butter and mix for a little more time. Then add the contents of this pan to the pan that has onions and mushrooms.
  4. Mix them well for the last time. Pour them in a bowl and enjoy this with Toast or Garlic bread or Khakra.

Overall Cooking Time: approx. 15 mins (includes time needed for chopping onions &  mushrooms).

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How to stay awake for 22-hours everyday?

Akshat Rathi4 Comments

Physicists have not yet found a way to alter the Earth’s speed of rotation to give us a thirty-hour day, but sleep researchers may have found a way to get an eight-hour sleep in just two hours—letting you cram in six more wakeful hours a day. The key to this superhuman ability is polyphasic sleeping, a form of sleeping which was first reported was reported in Time Magazine in 1943. Buckminster Fuller, the great inventor and futurist, trained himself to take a half-hour nap every six hours, a pattern which he maintained for two years. This was the first polyphasic sleep schedule invented, and is known as Dymaxion sleep.

Today, there exist three polyphasic sleep schedules; Everyman, Uberman and Dymaxion in the decreasing order of sleep. Little scientific research has been done to show the safety of such sleep schedules, but enough proof exists for a thriving community of polyphasic sleepers. The longest scientific experiment was performed on a single subject, Francesco, by the founder of the Chronobiology Research Institute, Claudio Stampi. Francesco followed a schedule of sleeping for twenty minutes every four hours, now known as the Uberman sleep schedule. After the 48-day study, Stampi reports in his book, Why we nap: Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and Ultrashort Sleep that Francesco’s performance did not seem to suffer as a result of adopting the polyphasic sleeping pattern. The studies showed a change in the brain wave pattern during the short naps. It is only recently that a greater understanding of these brain wave patterns has been developed.

Natural sleep is divided into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM (NREM) sleep. In normal sleeping REM sleep is observed only at the end of a 90-minute cycle. REM sleep is associated with dreaming and consolidation of memories. However, when deprived of sleep, as in polyphasic sleeping, subjects fall into REM sleep within minutes of starting a nap. Based on these observations, polyphasic sleepers believe that REM sleep is the most important form of sleep & the brain when deprived of sleep capitalises on any chance to sleep in this mode. The online community of people who adapted themselves to the Uberman schedule reports on the blogosphere that they achieve heightened alertness and concentration when fully adapted. Polyphasic sleeping also seems to induce lucid dreaming, a form of dreaming in which the dreamer can consciously participate in the dream.

These anecdotal theories gained some credence in a study recently published in PNAS, which shows that REM sleep is responsible for improving associative networks in the brain. The study involved 77 young adults who were given a number of creative tasks in the morning. They shown multiple groups of three words (such as: cookie, heart, sixteen) and asked to find a fourth word that can be associated to all three words (like sweet). Later in the day, some were allowed a nap, and monitored using brain scans to see what kind of sleep they entered. They were then given the same and new tasks. For the same tasks, the passage of time and sleep allowed them to “incubate” their thoughts and come up with better and more varied solutions. However, for new tasks those participants that entered REM sleep improved by almost 40% over their morning performances.

If these theories are proven on a scientific basis, does it mean that people on polyphasic sleep schedules not only sleep less but are also capable of performing better than normal people? That seems a little counter-intuitive, but a fast growing community of polyphasic sleepers is trying to prove otherwise. More research in this field can lead to development of medically-endorsed techniques which could let to polyphasic sleeping being rolled out to a wider community.

Also published on Cherwell’s Science Blog: Matters Scientific

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Let’s freecycle India

Akshat Rathi4 Comments

Let’s Freecycle India

Everyone loves free stuff. What if you get free stuff and also get to contribute your bit to save the environment? That is what the idea behind Freecycle is. Freecycle is a network that has close, almost five thousand groups and seven million members in 85 countries around the world. This rapidly growing non-profit organisation claims to keep 500 tons/day out of landfills. Their work is neither charity nor entrepreneurship; it stems from the basic human value of give & take.

The concept is simple. If you have something that you don’t want or don’t have a use for and feel like throwing away in the waste then instead of binning it, give it to someone who has a need for it. Freecycle has city specific email groups where people advertise things they want to give away and whoever asks for it first gets to keep it. The giver may also oblige to drop it to your place if he is kind.

Mandar Mali, a graduate student at the Illinois Institute of Technology says “It’s very common in the US that the house you rent will be unfurnished.” For students who will be studying in a university abroad just for a few years it doesn’t make sense to buy new furniture just to sell it after sometime. This is where freecycle kicks in. “I got almost every piece of furniture in my house from people ready to give away things for free. All I had to do is rent a van for a day and go around the town picking up the items people advertise.” he continues.

Recycling in India although has existed for quite a long time. Thanks to the valiant ragpickers and kabaris who have made sure that they collect our unsorted garbage and recycle whatever can be. However theirs is indeed a difficult task. An undermined and unregulated activity, it renders almost a million people in India to live a very low standard of life. Most people in this profession earn very little daily which causes almost a million people in India to live a very low standard of life. The occupational hazard of working in this profession is also a serious issue. With the technological progress, India also has a growing electronic waste problem. A proper system does not exist to handle such waste and almost 150,000 tons of electronic waste is recycled informally every year, exposing these warriors of waste to radioactive tubes from CRTs and to toxic metals like Lead, Cadmium and Antimony

India currently boasts of very feeble numbers when it comes to the membership of freecycle. Compared to Freecycle India’s 4000 strong membership, Freecycle UK has almost 2 million members. Bangalore leads the way with over a thousand members but the numbers quickly fall. Cities on the list are: Bangalore (1150), Mumbai (546), Delhi (511), Hyderabad (427), Pune (426), Chennai (387), Gurgaon (192), Lucknow (116), Panaji (102), Jalandhar (36), Jaipur (35), Ahmedabad (32), Vijaywada (27) and Kolkata (21). Kolkata is the only metro city which has very few members.

Following a system like freecycle not only helps people get stuff for free but also enables the society to help reduce unnecessary waste from going to landfills or causing harm to people involved in this profession. Yet the success of this system depends on the number of people involved in the activity. More the number of people, more the choice of things available and more attractive does the whole scheme becomes. These low numbers can be attributed to lack of awareness but with the growth of the reach of internet in India, we only hope that green activities like freecycle will take a quick leap.

First published at YouthkiAwaaz.com