So what exactly is Butter chicken

The story goes that one day a small restaurant in post partition Delhi called Moti Mahal received a high standing patron after closing time . The kitchen was nearly closed for the night . So the intrepid chef took a tandoori chicken some tomato gravy , cooked the two together and at the finishing moments put dollops of butter in it . That day butter chicken was born . Of course it has nothing to do with Jerusalem , butter chicken is the very opposite of kosher . It in a way is a misfit here the way I am .
The name is borrowed from Pankaj Mishra's 'Butter Chicken in Ludhiana' , a travel book about small town India .
Disclaimer : I have no connection whatsoever to Pankaj Mishra or Penguin India but I wouldn't mind if they pay me for giving them free publicity :-)

Tandoori chicken ..

Musical Notes

Any reference to music has to begin with a reference to Pandora Radio , one of the greatest things to happen in the online music world . In the field of suggested music , Pandora is the tops , it allows you to create your own music station , in fact a 100 of them , according to your taste and using the music genome research , suggests music similar to that . Very impressive , exposes a number of unknown artists .
Lastfm is another great option but somehow I feel it is too influenced by uninformed people. It works on a sytem of tags , so if everyone goes and tas Kenny G as jazz , your jazz listening experience is doomed .
So I stick to Pandora . There is a little bit of advertising , links to amazon.com ,itunes etc but nothing more agressive . Also you don't look at the ads as the music continues in the background even when you are on a different tab ( Naturally a tabbed browser like Firefox ) At the moment I am listening to my Albert Ayler station . The link will take you to the definitive Albert Ayler biography on the net .

Getting started with this blog thing

Took me some time to get started . Was too busy with the DIY webserver . alongwith Pushpullbar forum also taking a lot of eyeball time . Add to it the peripherals of making a living and raising a family ...
Pushpull bar is an architectural forum dedicated to contemporary modern architecture .Sketchup is the design tool of choice and generates a lot of discussion on the boards . Sketchup was recently acquired by google and very soon a free version of sketchup was offered for anyone who wants to get his hands dirty with 3D modelling .
The other distraction I had was the the DIY webserver site . I am trying to put up a website for my wife which at the moment is called Architecture without architects aka Architecture for the Cattle class. At the moment the website is only an empty page but once it starts running it should have be a forum for people who are interested in architecture , not just for professionals. The beauty of it all , once it starts running , will be that the forum will be served from my homecomputer running open source software , Apache , PHP, MySql and SMF SMF is s wonderful piece of software that allows just anybody to start running a forum once he figures out the PHP Mysql part . If somebody does your hosting , you can rest easy and an not worry about the php, mysql part .
Somehow these two distractions will come together with the forum becoming an online class for sketchup I suspect :-) .

The proposed Calatrava bridge in Jerusalem modelled in Sketchup