Punjabi By Nature

A Mobile Paypal

Celpay a company doing m-commerce is thriving in Africa!!!

http://www.celpay.com/zm/

A company called celpay offers mobile phone-based virtual bank accounts with features like account transfers, bill payments, cash deposits etc. It has created a large retail base (shops, petrol stations etc) who will accept these transactions.(cellpay uses a solution from a South African company called fundamo

Also according to the feature
Celpay has also developed successful m-banking business services. This includes mobile phone-based order entry with cash on delivery payment functionality. Current users include Coca-Cola, breweries and a cement manufacturer. In DRC (Democratic republic of Congo) alone, there were over 80,000 transactions per day on the Celpay system in November 2004.

Bunny and Chow

I like trying out different cuisines once in a while and this time, I had the pleasure of eating at Bunny and Chow, courtesy Swetank and Heidi who were visiting us from US. Bunny and Chow is located at the Food Court at DLF CyberGreens in Gurgaon.

Bunny and Chow started in Africa, where an innovative entrepreneur realized that white men who were not allowed to visit the restaurants of non-whites could be served food on a platter by putting curry inside a shell made from flour buns. Interesting lesson to be learnt for anyone. Dont let limitations stand in your way. Find innovative solutions around them.

                                                                                                 

From the web...

http://www.congocookbook.com/c0192.html

It's not food for rabbits. It's not made from rabbits. Bunny Chow is the result of an only-in-South-Africa combination of Asian curry, European bread, and South African apartheid.

What you need

• unsliced loaf of white bread (the kind used for making sandwiches or toast, baked in a standard 8 ½ x 4 ½-inch (22 x 12 cm) loaf pan [one loaf for every two servings]
• curry of your choice

What you do

• Cut the bread into two halves, by cutting halfway between the ends of the loaf. Put each half on its end, pressing down a bit to make it stand upright. From the top of each half (where you made the cut that divided the loaf into halves) scoop or cut out the soft middle of each half and set it aside. Fill each half with curry. Put onto a bowl or plate (if desired) with the soft bread that was scooped out.
• Serve immediately. Use the scooped-out bread to sop up the curry. Then eat the remaining curry with the bread it was served in. Use a spoon if needed.

Enslaved Asians from Indonesia and Malaysia were brought to South Africa soon after the first Europeans arrived. Later, servants and workers from India arrived. And more than any other African country, South Africa was the destination of European migrants, who grew European grain and made European bread. Malay and Indian influences became a fixture of South African cuisine, and by the early 1900's curry restaurants were found in every South African city. An inexpensive meal was a bowl of curry served with a few slices of bread. Over time, apartheid laws were tightened to enforce strict segregation of black, colored (Malay, Indian), and white people, and many restaurants were not allowed to seat black patrons. They could sell take-away (carry-out) food to anyone, but this was before disposable plates and bowls. An enterprising restaurateur in Durban hit upon the solution: put the curry inside the bread -- the bread doing for the curry what the cone does for the ice cream. Somehow this "bread bowl" of curry came to be called bunny chow. (Why? Putting curry into half a loaf of bread hardly makes it look any more like a rabbit than it did before it contained the curry. Or is it that half a loaf of bread looks like a bun?) Bunny chow became a tradition in South African take-away food. And though the apartheid era is over it is still a popular item, especially in Durban.

Saurabh's Wedding - Part 1

I have been off blogging for sometime now but now I am back with a vengeance!! Expect to see a lot of posts on all topics from me over the coming few weeks...

One of the reasons I was off blogging is that I had to attend two weddings. Here is a brief account of one of them.

This wedding was on November 25, 2005 at Gorakhpur, a medium sized city in eastern Uttar Pradesh, about an hour from the border of Nepal. It is also quite famous for the Gita Press which is the largest publisher of Gita, the Indian religious text and associated religious texts.

I also remember Gorkahpur for a definitive treatise on Trigonometry written by S. L. Loni.

However, this post is not about Trigonometry or Gita Press its about a friend's wedding.

Saurabh got married to his longtime girlfriend Shriya and we all went to attend "Our big fat Indian wedding".  We boarded an overnight train to Gorakhpur at New Delhi Railway station. I was joined by Dennis, Amit, Vaneet, Umesh, and Anurag who is a native of Gorakhpur. The train started a bit late and we then soon got into a discussion about religion, technology, current affairs and everything in between. Soon, however we were fast Zzzzz....

In the morning we woke up and waited eagerly for Gorakhpur to arrive. We finally arrived 2 hours late and then we were met at the station by Saurabh and one of his friends who is a manager at a local hotel.

Gorakhpur station...                 Saurabh & Tarun at the station..