DesiPundit

Do you have 50 unread emails in your inbox, 550 new posts in your feed reader, tons of pending work and a general feeling of being buried under too much info?  Swaroop comes to your rescue with some really great tips.

• Never allow anything to be in your inbox > 2-3 days
  • If you’re not going to reply in that time frame, you never will. So simply archive it or reply with a one-liner saying you can’t look into it now.
• If you don’t have anything to add, don’t reply.
• Make sure you are clear on what is the action you are expecting from the recipient.
• Reply in bullet points. Because everybody skims.

Apologies for not posting the popular weekly links in the last fortnight. Our guest contributors are sharing some wonderful stuff. Judging by the votes on posts and clicks on the links, stuff that they are sharing with us all is proving to be quite popular. Here are the top ten links for the previous three weeks:

Wedding invitations have long resisted change. Nikhil takes a look at various features on wedding cards and wonders why we can’t get them sponsored by corporate partners [posted by JK].

IPL cheerleaders added to the tamasha mix in the currently ongoing Twenty20 tournament. Peter Foster, an ex-resident Delhiite and correspondent for The Telegraph makes the daughter argument in opposing this added feature [posted by Patrix].

A twelve-year-old blogger narrates a story about a young girl’s first experience with confronting uncomfortable truth [posted by Ideasmith].

Never assume that you know enough about Malayalis as MKT tells us that there is more to them than organizing a strike for incessant rains[posted by JK].

As summer approaches, another horde of desis head to India. But contrary to popular opinion, Apoo finds his homebound bags to be relatively empty [posted by Ideasmith].

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For Seinfeld fans out there, you know what this refers to! I tend to believe those who exclaim loudly, “Eek people don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom,” are those who actually are guilty of the same. Of course, bathrooms are not the only place to blame as being germ-infested as Shantanu shares in his post, Why a Namaste is “healthier” than a Handshake:

A recent BBC report suggests that, “…some computer keyboards harbour more harmful bacteria than a toilet seat“ … Now guess what happens when you take your fingers off that keyboard and shake someone’s hand.

Shrinidhi at eNidhi shares with us a delicacy of roadsides in some parts of South India. Personally, I love these kinds of posts because these parts of culture may be missed, and often are, by people living in cities and especially tourists to India, like me!

It is quite a common scene in Chennai roadside to see carts selling unpolished rice with its gravy. …Called KooLu or Kanji in tamil and Ganji in Kannada, they sell nearly 500 ml of this for Rs 5. Mixed with buttermilk and onion and served with fried chilli and raw mango slice, you might actually enjoy eating it.

Sandeepa continues with RCI Bengal and rounds-up more Bengali recipes, tried and tested by intrepid food-bloggers. This time around, they include snacks like muri and shingaras and of course, delicious Bengali sweets like rasgullas, sandesh and mishti doi!

Abhi at Sepia Mutiny enlightens us on another perspective of high food prices: the affect it has on our daily prayer.It’s a practical viewpoint, actually as buying supplies (in this case, food items) for puja and abhishekams are expensive- even so when food prices are not inflated. The writing style leaves me wanting to read more, especially as I opened the post and was drawn in by the question,

Can you imagine a world without any boys named Abhishek or girls named Puja? I simply can’t! It is too horrible and sad to even contemplate (unless it raises the worth of existing Abhisheks and Pujas). A generation from now, that’s where we might be headed if these crazy food prices don’t start to come down and these rituals become obsolete.

Baradwaj reviews Iron Man, the latest superhero movie to release this weekend.

But Downey is that rare combination of a performer who’s also an entertainer – there’s always that bad-boy glint in his eyes that makes it appear he doesn’t take the business of acting very seriously, which is perhaps the reason he’s so fun to watch – and this quality goes a long way towards redeeming the rather lightweight Iron Man, which, without its leading man, would surely have been yet another routine saga of a man in a silly suit out to save the world.

Why am I up late into the night, browsing recipes, reading bloggers who have sent me entries and whom I have not yet chanced upon, jumping from their RCI posts to others which catch my fancy, categorizing hoards of recipes, why oh why then ?

And I realize it’s for the love all of them have shown in cooking for an event, for their enthusiasm in trying out something new which might not be to their liking, for their courage in buying unknown spices and giving them a place in their comfortable kitchen, for their effort in digging out authentic recipes and reliving memories.

Sandeepa is hosting RCI bengal and has a round-up of delicious Bengali recipes. Enjoy!

We were advised before trying to plan a trip to Kenya, Tanzania may be the more wild, remote and breathtaking option. Now, it has one more advantage, that it is more politically stable than Kenya. Of course, coming into see the wild animals in their natural habitat is the allure which can’t be missed and must be shared with all, as Nita has on her trip several years ago,

The best part about this park is it’s isolation from the rest of the world… gives you a feel of the world before man took it over. It’s not just the animals. It’s the thick and singing jungle, spectacular scenery, the baobab trees, the sounds of the animals…we will carry this in our hearts forever.

Increasingly a handful of messiahs of misplaced morality have tried to seize the debate in one direction, taking the silent majority’s, well, silence for acquiescence in their retrograde acts. Maharashtra, unfortunately, has been in the forefront of many of these decisions imposed by small men unfit to rule a mohalla in the backlanes of Jhumritalaiya but who through a quirk of fate are today presiding over the fortunes of a great city. Rather than rise to its level, alas they find comfort in pulling down society to their level.

Saisuresh has a teenage daughter and so he applied the daughter test regarding IPL cheerleader issue, but did not reach the conclusion that it should be banned. He has a point when he says, he has seen more embarassing stuff on television and no one is bothered about it.