• A piece of happiness

    I always equated happiness with peace of mind. That having one automatically meant having the other. I somehow doubt that now.

    Does happiness come from going after what you’ve wanted, irrespective of the roadblocks that appear before you? And does peace of mind come from an acceptance of things happening around you and to you?

    Would you have peace of mind if you tried your best and still not got what you wanted? Would you still be happy then?

    Would you be happy to get what you wanted irrespective of the sacrifices you had to make, and the paths you had to take? Would you still have peace of mind then?

    Do you think they are the same? Or does the presence of one immediately dispel the other? If there had to be a trade off, what would you choose – happiness or peace of mind?

    until next time, mindful happiness

  • ShipX

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  • Coorg @ Koramangala

    Koramangala now offers a pork in the road for those interested in pigging on pigs. Ok, not on the road itself, but on 1st Main Road, 7th Block in Koramangala, same road as 64, almost opposite Corner House (map), there’s this amazing building that houses two eateries, each specialising in cuisines that give pork the culinary respect it deserves.  In what seems like a neat representation of the Indian map, you climb one flight of stairs and you reach Coorg @ Koramangala. Climb one more and you reach Zingron, that specialises in Naga cuisine! Yes, a huge dilemma, but after NE Diner, getting D to ‘acquire’ the taste of Naga cuisine is turning out to be more difficult than I thought. 😐

    So, Coorg it was, and we entered an area dominated by a shade of blue going towards purple. With one low-seating table, chairs we regularly find at ‘fine dining’ restaurants, and branded place mats the ambiance was easily better than the other Coorg specialist we had visited, but had a friendly neighbourhood restaurant feel to it.

    There was a commonality though, thanks to the single page menu. Beginning with four pork dishes, they sure know the priorities. We asked for a Pork Pepper Dry, Chilly Pork, a Ghee Rice, Chicken Masala, 2 Masala Rice Rotis and a Butter Milk. We were told later that they were adding to this menu from tomorrow. Early birds get a worm that may not be the best. Damn!

    The Pork Pepper Dry arrived first, and was awesome. With a beef like texture, and a pepper + curry leaves flavour, we thought this would be unbeatable. But the Chilly Pork, that came up next, was equally good, if not better. It’s dynamite in terms of spice, and had a nice tangy edge to it too. The butter milk came soon after, but turned out to be a disappointment – too diluted and lacking in flavour.

    In what can perhaps be described as our main course, the Masala Rice Rotis were quite unique and went reasonably well with the Chicken Masala, which had a coconut based gravy. But the ideal combination was with the Ghee rice, which was extremely good. Despite knowing that ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’ is more true from a cholesterol perspective in my case, we asked for a Pork Fry. This was reasonably good too, though greasier and tangier than the other two dishes.

    All of the above cost us just less than Rs.600. The service is very prompt, and with what will likely be an expanded menu, this place is worth a visit when the hogging mood strikes you.

    Coorg @ Koramangala, No.62, 1st Floor, Near Corner House, 1st Street, 1st A Main Road, 7TH Block, Koramangala Ph: 40991191

  • Weekly Top 5

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  • Brand-streams

    Last week, I got a beta invite from a new lifestreaming service called Memolane and I’ve added my blogs and quite a few services I use to it. You can check it out here. I’m quite a fan of lifestreaming – as a concept. Though I have seen quite a few web based services perish, I persist. In the meantime, I maintain my own twitterstream (though I started it 2 years after I began using Twitter) and even used Sweetcron to try out a self hosted stream sometime back. These function more as activity streams than anything else and only faintly show the connections to other people.

    When I saw my stream, I was reminded of a thought from a couple of years back – a post I had titled ‘Communities and Brandstreams‘. Though I’d referred to quite a few posts then, in this context, the two significant ones are @misentropy‘s “The future of: user generated advertising” and RWW’s “Brandstreaming: What is it and who’s doing it?”. The former is about the concept of an open source product/brand wiki and the latter is about how a couple of brands used Friendfeed and other services to stream their content.

    Now that I am revisiting this, and with last week’s thought on ‘the structure that would hold the identity of a brand together’, I’m wondering if a brand-stream might be a way to approach it. So if we mash the idea of a lifestream – connecting the individual nodes of interaction [in my case, it would be the web services like Twitter/Faceb0ok/Foursquare/Flickr/YouTube etc, but for a brand, it would not just be its web services but also apps and even ‘real world’ data collection via sensors or the Internet of Things or say a variation of  barcodes/QR codes/ stickybits] with a brand wiki we could do at least a couple of things. One, if we open it out for users/consumers to share (with the brand-stream, as well as with their own community) how they interact with these nodes we could then capture and use data by time, kind of activity, user profiles, services used, ‘reach’ of individual users and so on. The entry to the stream could be across platforms. It would  make it easier for a user to not only experience the brand through a medium he’s comfortable with, but also check out ways in which others are experiencing the brand and suggest new ways for the brand to interact with others like him. Two, on the other side, users on the enterprise side could also connect to this stream basis various contexts (brand, customer service, operations, even HR) and make the business truly ‘social’. Sounds interesting? (see this for a vague visual cue 🙂 )

    until next time, streaming out loud 🙂

    PS: On Lifestreaming, on the personal blog. Check related posts for more. 🙂