Chevy and Mitsubishi

Had a very interesting discussion with my PM yesterday regarding the whole India outsourcing thing. Lets digress for a while, he owns two cars, a Chevy and a Mitsubishi. Now essentially the Chevy is the flagship American car and the Mitsubishi is the 'foreign' model. However as far as manufacturing is concerned more of his Mitsubishi is made in the US as compared to his Chevy, which is made in Korea.

So if you are looking at sending people back then due to reasons of recession then there is a lot more to lose rather than gain. As this practice would then have far greater consequences. Like just because people are not buying a Chrysler over a Honda does not mean that to support the economy you send back Honda to Japan and make sure that people only buy Chrysler. Thus this finally hurts the economy even more if Honda also employs American workers, then you are looking at an even bigger blackhole.

Same thing goes for foreign workers,(like yours truly) they still pay taxes and buy products over here so if everyone of them is sent back just because there is a recession going on then there would be a greater backlash.

Taste-Bud

In India one of the most popular foods is Chinese food. And by that I mean Chinese food from 'Biswas Dragon Corner'. I will have a whole other post just
dedicated to this but for now lets move onto another Asian choice, Japanese Cuisine.

Now in India I have never seen Japanese Cuisine take off like the Chinese did. This always puzzled me no end until I had a chance to frequent and sample some amazing fare Japanese style. (Yes, I know how to use chopsticks)

I have gone to Teppanyaki and Sushi places several times now. And enjoyed them both a lot. Some things to be observed from both these places from a desi perspective.

Teppanyaki cuisine will never ever make it in India. The whole premise of the Japanese grill just cannot. First of all it isn't cheap. My dinner alone cost me about 35$ now. Theatrics is a large part of the whole experience. The chef will often perform juggling acts with sharp knives, toss egg shells into his hat, happy face, onion volcanoes etc.
Desis can watch juggling acts like these by the dozen if they just attend any mela type exhibitions. Also all the food is cooked on the 'teppan' (grill) in front of you. Thus this means that it is far from kosher for a vegetarian(Even if he does order vegetarian food explicitly). Thus this ultimately ensures that I have been to Teppanyaki places only with colleagues and the muse.

Now sushi is a whole different ball game. I have a vegan colleague who liked the food over here. (Vegan is the baap of vegetarians.) I have loved the chicken curry over here. A very different style of making curry than the Indian/Thai way. But yes if there was a place where vegetarians could go and eat some great food if they just explored then this would be the way to go instead of the same old choices between a cheese pizza, BK veggie burger, Subway sandwhich/pizza.

Coming to the point the muse hates sushi, which isn't a good thing and loves teppanyaki which is.

Jesus baba ki jai ho

A long weekend after a while now. The last one was on Jan 19th, MLK day. This earlier part of the year is usually devoid of any breaks unless you are a student and then you get springbreak.
I am mostly staying at home this weekend, maybe headout to detroit, again with the muse. So far it doesn't look it though. Which is good because the last weekend was very tiring with the taxes, car servicing(oil change) n detroit.

Hectic

I have hardly visited this place since the past couple of weeks due to a 60 hr work week thing going on currently. A lot of that work is to do with Document Generation again and making changes to hundreds of these word/pdf templates or so. In short very tedious and need to be very very meticulous and tenacious with this.

My review came in sometime in the past couple of weeks as well. It was positive overall. The comments were "His greatest strengths being flexibility of assignment and willingness to step up to the plate to complete any task". Feels great to know that work is appreciated as well and its not just about the green.

Am looking forward to weekends now more than ever not just to relax but to get my other stuff done including paying rent, utility bills, groceries, cooking etc. Also need to arrange and sort/tag my massive music collection sometime as browsing through coverflow in the iPhone gets a lot more easier.

Another post soon on the iPhone on my efforts in getting iTunes and the iPhone to play well with my Ubuntu box.