cshell 🐚

ok what the hell. ig we're a cooking account now. stay on to see updates to what i make to survive and/or enjoy eating everyday as a fulltime dev in blr

mumbai airport t1 is such a scam. bring back my luxury airport terminals. blr/del would never

Anybody who attended North Indian marriages in the eighties and nineties would remember that famous espresso coffee counter standing in one corner of the shamiana. Usually it became active a little late in the evening after most people had finished attacking the food. The paneer counters had slowed down, naans were no longer flying out at machine gun speed and people had started settling near heaters discussing relatives, politics and property rates. And from somewhere came that unmistakable hissing sound. The coffee machine. Why it was called espresso nobody knew. It had nothing to do with Italy or café culture. In those days simply adding the word "espresso" made anything sound sophisticated. For us kids, that counter had its own attraction. Half the children hovered around it not because they loved coffee but because the machine itself looked important. It hissed, rattled, released steam and made more noise than some of the bandwalas. Standing behind it was usually one serious looking fellow operating valves and steam nozzles as if he was running a railway engine. You could get quite close to it as a child if you were patient and quiet enough, and if you did, the steam would hit your face in sudden warm bursts while the froth climbed fast inside the steel container, almost threatening to spill before the coffeewala pulled it away at exactly the right moment. Sometimes he would glance down at the children watching and say nothing, just let them stand there. Sometimes with one look he made it very clear you were too close. We used to stand there watching milk boil, steam burst out and froth rise inside those steel containers. The smell itself travelled across the marriage lawn much before the tray reached people. In those days most middle class North Indian homes were not coffee drinking households anyway. At home it was mostly lassi during summers, hot milk during winters or kadak elaichi adrak wali chai for elders. Children hardly got tea, forget coffee. Our own nightly luxury was hot milk with badam floating on top. Even asking for tea at home used to invite suspicious looks as if the child had suddenly demanded rum. So naturally this marriage wali coffee felt like some forbidden adult item. The first time I tasted it, honestly speaking, I found it terrible. My face twisted the way it does with bitter medicine. The coffeewala took one look and broke into a smile. Without saying anything he sprinkled a little chocolate powder over the froth and handed the cup back. That changed everything. The same coffee suddenly felt richer, smoother and far more glamorous. In my head it immediately became some five star hotel item. From that day onwards, apart from hot gulab jamun with vanilla ice cream, this became my second favourite thing to hunt for at marriage parties. And this coffee always tasted best in those heavy white ceramic cups with matching saucers. Not paper cups. Not steel glasses. Those thick white cups which became too hot to hold within seconds while the saucer kept rattling softly underneath through crowded marriage lawns. The actual coffee itself was simple. Milk, sugar and instant coffee powder, usually something like Nescafé, blasted with steam till thick froth formed on top. Then the coffeewala would pour it repeatedly from one steel container to another from a height before finally filling those cups till the froth almost touched the rim. At jagrans and mata ki chowkis this coffee became something else entirely for me. I was part of a jagran mandli for six or seven years. I played chaine ( छैने), did jyot sewa, sat cross legged through those long cold nights. And during Tara Rani katha a few of us would quietly slip out, not far, just ten or fifteen meters outside the shamiana into the open night air. The cold out there was a different cold entirely. Inside you did not feel it. Outside it landed on you properly. Someone would have chai ready or that same hissing espresso machine would be set up nearby and we would stand there with our cups. We talked about how the mata ki pakki bhent had completely sealed the atmosphere that night, whose voice had carried better, which bhent had made the crowd go silent. Simple talk. Mandli talk. And then back inside. That cup of coffee or strong chai at midnight, standing in the cold with the bhajans faintly audible from inside, remains one of the clearest sensory memories I have from those years. It tasted like nothing else. Not because of what was in the cup but because of everything surrounding it. Today cafés discuss beans, roast profiles and brewing methods as if launching satellites. You can recreate the coffee easily enough. The right powder, the steam, even the chocolate on top. But you cannot recreate the marriage lawn in winter, the sound of the machine cutting through cold air, the particular crowd of that era, or the feeling of slipping out of a jagran at midnight and standing in the dark with a cup and a few quiet companions before going back in. That was never just a cup of coffee. It was an entire world around it. Maybe because it was never only about coffee. It was about childhood. And about those long devoted nights that taught you something about stillness without ever saying a word. #Coffee #espresso #Nostalgia

watching your parents grow old is difficult. watching your parents grow difficult is difficult

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did a FAT16 file system write this tweet

damn that @SarvamAI merch drop is beautiful

fuck mera toh mid 20s chal raha hai

man those farrier hooving videos on youtube are addictive

cd ls cd ls….

huh. is this where "burning" CDs comes from

Eat all mangoes. Eat every mango you can. The small, juicy, fibrous, nameless ones you pluck off that old tree down the gully. The planted-a-Dussheri-seed-but-never-grafted Dussheri-ish mango from your masi’s garden in Bhopal. Blushing Sindhuras. Sweet Kesars. Yes eat as many of those beautiful Alphonsos from Devgad packed carefully in cardboard boxes as you can. But also eat Pairi, Neelam, Ratna. And Sindu - a cross between the Ratna & the Alphonso which is slowly gaining more ground because climate change has wreaked havoc on the finicky Alphonso - ask farmers, yields have been down for a few years now, talk to farmers. Eat with the season. Eat the early mangoes from the south - Mankurad, Badami, Banganapalli, Imam Pasad in late April-May. Eat your middle-India mangoes - Kesar, Bombay Green, and also Malgova and Mallika which are late season bloomers from the south, and your Himsagar, Gulabkhaas, beauties from Malda and Murshidabad - try to lay your hands on a Champa, Saranga, or Kohitoor in May-June! And go both hands in, into piles of Amrapali, Chausa, Malihabadi Dussheris, Langdas in July. This is just the tip of the mango iceberg, there are so many more loved & delicious varieties - India has near 1,500 varieties of mangoes. Why would you eat just one? Of course have your favourites but also look at our beautiful biodiversity - please cherish it! Eat widely. Eat greedily. Eat because these mangoes are so delicious. Eat in RESISTANCE TO LOSS, eat like these mangoes might disappear because some of them already are!

reading this book as a kid genuinely changed my brain chemistry, i still believe this to this day

i am a 25yo software engineer why do I still think of descending order as dadi to ashi == big to small 😭😭😭

Had a Jane Street phone interview in 2016. "Price a 6-month forward on carrots." There's no carrot futures market, so I build one from scratch: seasonal harvest cycles, USDA demand elasticity, cold storage decay rates. One trader stops me. "Your storage cost function– you're modeling the carrot as dead inventory. Like grain in a silo." He asks me the metabolic respiration rate of a post-harvest carrot at 2°C. I estimate. "Your forward is overpriced by exactly that shrinkage. The underlying is consuming its own sugars. It's alive." Good correction. I adjust the model. I think I've recovered. Rejection email comes the next morning. Subject: "Ethical Review." My framework, they write, "relied on the severance of the root organism from its growth medium." The question about respiration was a test. The carrot was still alive and I'd built an entire derivatives structure on top of its death without questioning whether harvest was an acceptable act. I pull up the recruiter's original email. It doesn't say Jane Street. It says Jain Street– a non-violent quantitative commodities fund. The carrot was never supposed to be priced. It was supposed to be refused. I later learn the only candidate who passed that round was a former monk from Gujarat who sat in silence for eleven minutes and said, "I cannot put a price on life." He's now a partner.

turns out the phitku people are right???? just that local kirana 25rs bar of phitkari works as good

@IDFreshFood @flipkartsupport please have your cold chain investigated. Puffed paneer packets via Flipkart minutes delivery

So that’s London, New York, and pretty sure LA soon. Only Paris and San Francisco left and there will be all South Asian Mayors in all the Dard-e-Disco cities

what is going on in the boys bhai butchers dog??????

> be Alexandra Elbakyan > be born in Kazakhstan in 1988 > start coding at 12 > hack your internet provider at 14 > hack MIT Press at 16 to download neuroscience books you can't afford > get a CS degree from Satbayev University > intern in neuroscience at Georgia Tech > speak at Harvard on brain-computer interfaces > notice researchers can't read the papers they need > notice academic publishers charging $30 a paper > notice peer reviewers worked for free > notice editors worked for free > notice universities funded the research with billions of dollars of public money > build Sci-Hub in 2011 > upload nearly every paywalled research paper ever published > give it away for free > get sued by Elsevier > get hit with a $15 million judgment > don't give a flying f*ck > keep Sci-Hub up > get domain after domain seized > register a new one > keep Sci-Hub up > get investigated by the US Department of Justice > don't give a flying f*ck > get accused of working for Russian intelligence > don't give a flying f*ck > have the FBI subpoena your iCloud > get named one of Nature's ten people who mattered in science > get a parasitoid wasp named after you > get a deep-sea snail named after you > get the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award for Access to Scientific Knowledge > become a legend

nothing a lil harpic can't solve