Chhota Pegs

As a development economist, I read (or am occasionally forced to read) about experiments, especially the field and quasi-field experiments that are carried out in developing countries to test this, that or the other hypothesis. The idea is to randomize the subjects into two groups. In one group you do something to them: give them cash transfers conditional on health checkups, or mosquito nets, or subject them to various ordeals in order to claim a poverty line handout, or provide loans, or information about jobs. This is the treatment group. In the other group you typically do nothing. This is the control group. The idea is that treatment and control groups are statistically similar to start with, so that if there is a differential  change in behavior following the intervention, you must perforce chalk it down to the intervention. It can be exciting stuff: here is how the Economist  reacted , for instance, when Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo 's Poor Economics  c...

I'm in London now with the kids, enjoying a one-week holiday with family and friends before we return to New York. London is as lovely as ever, I'm immersed in a wonderful book that I should have read years ago, it's a world away from India, and I suppose I'm done with Calcutta; for a while, anyway. But as anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in Calcutta knows, one is never done with Calcutta. That last sentence will mean different things to different people. If you're not from India, it might spark a mild curiosity about Calcutta. If, instead, you are from Calcutta, that would probably signal a prelude to an extended paean to the city, that mad, idiosyncratic seat of learning, theater and the arts (in particular the Art of Extended Conversation, or the Adda)  of which little remains, except perhaps the very last of these items. Finally, if you are from India but not from Calcutta, which is to say (with some pardonable inaccuracy), if you are not a ...

Prawns in coconut milk, or, Chingri machher malai curry (To feed four as a main dish) Disclaimer.  This, my friends, is a classic. There are several fine recipes freely available on the internet. My take on this is that I dispense with cumin and I replace ground coriander by fresh green coriander at the cooking stage.  And I indulge my ongoing obsession with ginger and green chillies. So it's not classical, but hopefully it will taste good.  Prawn versus prawn.  Though this whole business of "tasting good" warrants more serious investigation. I have cooked this dish in exactly  the same way in both New York and in Calcutta. It just tastes different in the two places, and I have to say that it tastes quite a bit better in Calcutta. A seasoned cook will probably know why, and if so please comment here to your heart's content, but imho it has to be the prawn. (There is also some positive probability that it could be the coconut. In Kolkata, I've use...

Here is why the world (or at least that part of the world inhabited by my friends, relatives and good acquaintances) is completely mad:  there is a large demand for prawns cooked in coconut milk.  That demand cannot be supplied in the next 12 hours as I am wending my weary way, armed with mother, son and daughter, to the UK. But it will, my friends, it will, at least in the Form of a Recipe. 

My last evening in Kolkata, at least until I'm back next, and despite the heat and humidity and the divebombing mosquitos , I'm sorry to go. Oddly enough, so are my New Yorker kids, who love the --- you guessed it --- food. My mother went into a frenzy of last-minute culinary magic and emerged with that old chestnut: prawns cooked in coconut milk. Superb. For India hands this is a common enough dish but just in case Julian B. tunes in --- or anyone else who wishes to transform the art of Western prawn cooking, I'm going to blog the recipe in my next post. But Ma wanted a Spanish omelette for brunch, so I had to dip into my own relatively meagre resources. Out came the:  Bangla Tortilla Española ( a.k.a. bengali spanish omelette ) Warnin g: This seemingly innocuous recipe involves some serious physical gyrations in preparation. Remarks: 1. I wrote this for a recipe book when my friends Garance and Shub got married. Reposted here with minor updates. 2. ...

There are some things I must do when I visit Kolkata in the summer. Most of them are food-related, as you may have noticed in a couple of earlier postings. There are other little pilgrimages that are usually made, such as a trip to Presidency College (now known rather more grandly as Presidency University ) or a visit to Coffee House . Or to the OlyPub . I could, of course, write about each of these, and one day I probably will.  But there are also onerous tasks. I am currently engaged in one such activity, which is the filling-out of my mother's income tax return. My mother's return is filed on form ITR-2, available here just in case you are planning on filing a return to the Indian government and are one of those " Individuals and HUFs not having Income from Business or Profession". What's that? What's an HUF, you ask? You are not told, because India is the land of acronymic ecstasy, and acronyms lose their ecstatic charge if expanded. (The RBI is...

Last fall, I spent seven weeks in Abu Dhabi, teaching a course, eating Marie biscuits, looking for British adapters for my US plug points, staring at the desert, and thinking that the Brits had really been around the block. That thought came back to me a week ago when I was visiting Sydney: "The sun never sets over the British Empire."  Actually, the phrase was used to refer to Spanish and Portuguese colonization: "el imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol." Of course, in the case of Spain we may replace " se pone " by "s e puso " without fear of error, but what about the Brits? S hould I employ the past tense? It has been argued  (not unconvincingly, in my opinion) that the sun never set over the British empire because the British empire was in the east and the sun, as we all know, sets in the west. (This argument bears some superficial similarity to the proof of the assertion that Alexander the Great had an infinite number of limbs; see T...

I took this course in Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation last term; it needed some serious effort (what's i ? don't ask Lacan , please) but it was a lot of fun. Umesh Vaziran i was a fine lecturer as well, and in the end the whole experience sold me on online courses (at least for subjects with mathematical content; on Development Economics, my inner jury is still out).  As I worked through the course and read some of the supplementary material, I returned to my childhood hero Richard Feynman and ran into some of his great lectures on YouTube; here's one from 1964 at Cornell. (Fellow Cornellians: observe that Uris Hall is thankfully missing from the opening sequence; it didn't exist then.) Man, what a teacher. The greatest ever. I was also introduced to the bra-ket notation of Paul Dirac. Elegant stuff: a perfect example of how good notation can both serve as a mnemonic and as a simplifier of tedious computations. (In economics I have also seen it...