Chewing over jhal moori and chicken tikka masala

Culture shock is a strange thing. When I came to the UK in 1980, there were many things I had to get used to, and many things I got wrong; I’ve shared some of my thoughts with you over the years. But not this one.

You know, the scariest thing I had to overcome, in the context of culture shock, was this: getting used to Western cuisine. No, not what you think. Calcutta is a pretty cosmopolitan city, I’d been used to western cuisine.

What I hadn’t been prepared for was the way people here cooked Indian cuisine. That hurt. It really hurt. In the early years, everywhere I went, people were hospitable to me. Extremely hospitable. So much so that everyone tried to provide me with “Indian” food. And it was expected that I ate it.

It’s kinda hard to describe the feeling I had, when I went into a pub with friends, and it was time to order food. I was expected to order the “curry” on the menu. Which meant saying a little prayer and then manfully working through meat with apples and raisins, with a bit of stale curry powder thrown in, and if you were lucky, a large dollop of turmeric for colouring (which had the salutary effect of killing all other tastes for a short while).

Those were the days. We hadn’t really learnt about curry here at that time. [Actually the same could be said about wine. Those were the days indeed, when Black Tower and Blue Nun and screw-top warm Lambrusco were readily available, when French wine was conspicious in its absence, and the New World had not yet arrived. I remember a particularly bilious Bulgarian Laski Riesling that would have worked well as a paintstripper…]

Then the Invasion from Sylhet arrived, and we moved to Curry Awareness Phase Two. Now, when I went with friends to an “Indian” restaurant, I had to explain to them that for me, it was like being invited to a European restaurant. How would you feel if you went to a restaurant that served smorgasbord, paella, gnocchi, chateaubriand and wiener schnitzel? What would you think?

I had to explain to them that the Indian restaurant was actually Bangladeshi, and that the chefs had created an “Indian” set of dishes suitable for the western palate. That the vindaloo tasted nothing like the vindaloo I’d had in Goa, that vindaloo itself had nothing to do with degree of hotness. That chicken kashmir and meat madras were dreamt up by people who could not point to Kashmir or Madras on a map.

But at least the cuisine was edible, and I started enjoying myself at Indian restaurants.

Now? Now life is fantastic. I can eat good Indian food anytime I want, there are good North Indian restaurants, good South Indian vegetarian restaurants, good Bengali fare, even good Nepali fare.

And during this time, this strange beast called the Chicken Tikka Masala has become, and now stayed, Top of the Pops.

Which makes this video of how to make it interesting to watch. Actually it’s an excuse for showing the video. I haven’t tried the recipe, I have no idea how good it is, but I do like the way they present it.

Talking about recipes, here is one that I do want to try. CY Gopinath on jhal moori. I’ve met CY many years ago, he probably doesn’t remember. But the jhal moori he describes is the jhal moori I remember, so I intend to try and make it.

Just freewheeling about sharing and privacy

Sharing isn’t just about what you do, it’s also about the way you think. I remember, many years ago, learning this the hard way:

When I lived in Calcutta, I used to be pretty gregarious. We were that kind of family, and “home” had the feel of being a club. People coming and going all the time, a free and easy house. Meals on tap. No real concept of individual or personal space, in fact no real concept of individual friends either: you were either a friend of the family or you weren’t, that was that.

It was “normal” for me to come home and to be greeted by one of “my” friends leaving, saying he may be back later. We didn’t have a large house, so it meant that every room was pretty crowded, with stuff happening everywhere; people playing contract bridge, carroms, cards, cluedo, chess; people listening to music; playing table-tennis; just sitting and chatting.

And eating.

We ate all day and all night. Magically tea and coffee and food would arrive. And it would disappear. Fast. I have no idea how my mother coped with me during that time. I was capable of inviting a dozen (or two) people over to the house, with zero notice, and with the expectation that all would be fed. It was the done thing there. When you went to someone else’s house, food would appear. And you were expected to eat it.

That was then.  A long time ago, in Calcutta, when I was growing up.

Much later, when I’d been married for a while, this mindset caused me to come unstuck. Without thinking about it, I added a couple of people as invitees to dinner one night, just an hour or so before dinner. And my then fiancee looked at me strangely, and I knew I was in trouble. [Not that much trouble, really. We’ve been married over 23 years now, and we get closer every year].

So why did I get into trouble? Well, we planned to serve steak that night, and this meant we did strange things. Strange western things. Like counting out potatoes, three per person, with a handful over. And for that matter counting out steaks….

So we had 10 steaks and 12 people. Problem. And the only way to resolve it that late was for me to “make” two new steaks by trimming pieces off the existing steaks, sort of gourmet large-granularity hamburger I guess. And of course we as hosts had to have them.

That episode, a quarter of a century ago, taught me something. I never had meals in India that I couldn’t expand at will. Just add rice. Just add a few vegetables. Just add a bit of this and a bit of that.

Sharing is something that’s in your head. That goes for information too. Take collaborative filtering. You get out of it what you put into it, and something more. Of course you need to have choice, you need to be able to choose whom you share with, and what you share. Of course there are different decisions to make in terms of the sharing architecture, in terms of the way you implement collaborative filtering. Is it an opt-in or opt-out model? How granular is that option? Is the shared data anonymised or not? Should it be?

There are many things to be resolved, many classes of person to protect, many classes of action to look out for.

But it all begins with one thing. A belief in sharing.

Let’s not kid ourselves. I meet too many people who criticise social software, who rant against open communities, who come up with reams of excuses as to why virtual communities aren’t designed right, why there are a lot of problems with privacy. Most of them don’t like opensource either; most of them don’t like to see current IPR “regimes” being attacked; most of them don’t believe in wisdom-of-crowds.

Most of them don’t really believe in community.

Sharing is community. They don’t like that.

More musings about what makes Facebook different

A few days ago, I commented on the some of the reasons why I thought Facebook was different, and ended with this:

So that’s my guess, that Facebook is a multidimensional conversation. Why is that important to the enterprise? Why is it important to work-life balance? These are questions I will seek to answer over the next two days. If you’re interested, keep an eye out.

It’s time to keep my word.

Why are multidimensional conversations important to the enterprise? Let us first look at what I mean by multidimensional conversations.

[As with anything else I write, I urge you to pick it up, mangle it, shred it and in all probability improve it. That’s the important thing, as long as you also share what you improve. Who said I had a monopoly on articulation? I sure didn’t. I’d rather we opensourced the idea, as it were, so that we see Linus’s Law operate on ideas and concepts, not just on code].

When I say multidimensional conversation, I mean some sort of interaction that takes place between people in different contexts: family, work, beliefs, hobbies, interests, whatever. Each a “community” in its own right. With people belonging to multiple communities at the same time, some more than others. With people having different roles to play in these different communities.

I think that’s the first thing that really struck me about Facebook. That it wasn’t just a community site; instead, it was a site where communities coalesced and sometimes even collided. I felt this really resonated with real life; people often belong to multiple communities when they are young; it gives them the chance to be “different people” in different communities, so they do it. Over time these communities tend to merge and coalesce; in some cases, people fight to keep their different personas distinct and separate, and this causes them immense anguish.

What does this have to do with enterprises? I think people belong to different communities even in enterprises, each community with its own purpose, its ethos and values, its membership, rites, rituals, interests, what-have-you. If the communities are few, and if they don’t overlap, then you get tribalism. And an enterprise riven by tribalism is a dank and gloomy place.

Humour me for a moment, and accept, for a few minutes, the idea that people, even enterprise people, enjoy belonging to multiple communities. Multiple memberships in multiple overlapping communities. Why would this be of value to enterprises?  Let me try and explain.

When you belong to a community, you have some sort of relationship with others in that community. When everyone belongs to multiple communities, you land up having multiple “strands” of relationship with the same person. That’s really useful when you’re in a pinch together, or even in a full-blown crisis. Even if one of the strands is weakened, the others hold the two of you together.  This is not just true for a given pair of people, it works multilaterally.

Christopher Locke used to call this “organic gardening”, this concept of having shared interests beyond work, but at work. When I first met him in 2000, he was passionate about the need for firms to have multiple levels of relationship, both within the firm as well as across the enterprise boundaries.

Working together is all about relationship, about trust and respect. These things get fed and enriched when you spend time together. It’s the same at home. You want a worthwhile relationship with your partner, your children, your parents, your friends? You’d better put the time in. How do you put the time in? It’s simple when you have common interests.

So what am I saying? I think that Facebook facilitates relationships at multiple levels between people, by providing utility services to multiple overlapping communities. I think that as a result, multidimensional conversations take place. I think that the relationships that grow as a result are fundamental to enterprise success.

Talking about relationships. I think it’s time for a segue into privacy. Why segue at this stage? Because I think there is a critical link between relationships and privacy. I was talking over aspects of privacy with Kaliya Hamlin sometime ago in Brussels, and she recommended that I read Daniel Solove’s The Digital Person. Which I duly did. Great book. Actually, Kaliya’s great to talk to about anything to do with identity and privacy; while I don’t always agree with her, I always learn from talking to her.

Solove’s book covers a lot of ground. I won’t pretend to be able to summarise it here, but let me touch on a couple of points.

One, Solove talks about three “large databases” interactions to do with information about the individual: business to business; government and the individual; government acquiring from business. While Solove is concerned about malevolent use of the large quantities of  private data flowing around, he seems to be much more concerned about the Kafkaesque misuse of the same information, as a consequence of bureaucratic bungling.

Two, Solove makes the assertion that we can never train individuals to process large quantities of private data as efficiently as a (bungling) bureaucracy, and as a result most attempts to protect the “data” will fail. The bureaucracy gets information as a result, and the individual gets shafted.

I think Solove has a point there. I have never seen “data protection” legislation amount to much….. just look at what’s been happening in the UK recently…. the trouble with empowering bureaucrats with handling large quantities of private information is simple…. when something goes wrong, no one is accountable.  And the individual suffers.

In trying to get over this, Solove raises an interesting idea. Regulate the relationship, not the data. As with priests, lawyers and doctors, make the relationship between information provider and information gatherer a sacrosanct one.

[Incidentally, these should not be seen as attempts to paraphrase Daniel Solove. Please read the book for yourself. All you see above is some of the takeaways I had from his book, read some time ago. My apologies to all who feel I have misinterpreted what he said.]

Which brings me back to Facebook. As long as (a) I am free to choose what information to share with Facebook; (b) I am free to choose whom I am sharing it with as a result; and (c) I can see what I am sharing, and with whom …. we are making progress. Sure, I would like to see better tools for importing and exporting information in and out of Facebook, but I sense that it’s happening. Maybe it’s not happening fast enough for some people, maybe it’s not happening openly enough for some people, but it’s happening.

In that sense I think of Facebook like I think of iPods when they first came out. I was prepared to accept a degree of closedness initially, if I liked the design, if there was utility value, and directionally I could see an open way forward.

So much for the multidimensional conversation bit. What can Facebook do to help me with work-life balance? This is really an offbeat theme, something I’ve picked up from comments people have made over the last year or so. Where I work, I think we have around 7500 people on Facebook. Some 50 of those are my “friends” …. while I may know more of the 7500, we haven’t yet got around to exchanging friend requests.

Over the last year or so, we’ve had the opportunity to watch each other’s multidimensional interactions on Facebook, and this has accelerated our understanding and appreciation for one another. Some of my “friends”, observing my status messages and receiving updates on my activities in their Mini feeds, have commented on something I hadn’t considered. That what I do lays down an audit trail of my work-life balance. As a result, they can see whether I “walk the walk” or not.

Unintended consequence it may be, but I thought it was valuable. There is a level of transparency that comes about as a result of using tools like Facebook in the enterprise, a transparency that can demonstrate whether people actually adhere to the values they speak of.

Facilitating multidimensional relationships. Providing an audit trail showing whether people adhere to the values they speak of. These are the sort of things that, in my opinion, differentiate Facebook from other social network sites.

Is Facebook the greatest thing since sliced bread? No. Can it be improved? Yes. Will I expect to see better competition emerge, especially for the enterprise space? Yes. Is it open enough? No. If misused, can it form a gigantic threat to privacy? Yes.

There are a hundred questions, and a hundred answers. I’d rather not spend time pontificating about all that. What I’d rather do is to use Facebook in order to improve it, in order to build the right things outside it, in order to build the right things in it, in order to be able to make worthwhile comments.

So that’s what I’m doing. Comments welcome.

Meandering around as a result of strange Facebook status messages

One of my friends twittered : Gort, Klaatu Barada Nikto :  a little while ago, and it showed up in his Facebook stream. That took me back a while. I had seen that phrase in so many contexts over the years that I began to wonder whether someone had bothered to write a Wikipedia entry for it, given its unusualness.

I wasn’t disappointed; here it is.

I’ve rarely seen a phrase like this, one that migrates into multiple and different cultural contexts. Any better offers? Even the Inigo Montoya quote (the part where he says : Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die). doesn’t quite make it into as many contexts.

Musing about Kurt Vonnegut and writing software

Kurt Vonnegut, who died earlier this year, was that rare breed, a sane and articulate maverick. I’ve read most of his stuff, and enjoyed everything I’ve read. His last book, A Man Without A Country, was a wonderful read.

4.13 Kurt Vonnegut

Some years before he died, as part of a collection of hitherto unpublished short stories called Bagombo Snuff Box, he wrote this:

“Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”

When I read that, I could not help but think that we need a simple equivalent for software. Something along the lines of:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the user at least one function or facility he or she can root for.
3. Every function should satisfy some user need, however basic.
4. Every screen should do one of two things: reveal new functions or extend an existing function.
5. ………..

You get my drift. Don’t be put off by my paltry attempt, but I was thinking of setting up a wiki with the text and inviting readers to submit their entries and to vote for the best, just for the crack. What do you think? Let me know if I should.

My thanks to Steve Brodner of drawger.com for the drawing, I really think he captures something of Vonnegut’s attitude in it.