Lets stew some

Well you might have seen a lot of mis-spelt words, here is something about cooking and eating cooks :) I found this at a famous restaurant in Gandhinagar, Bangalore.

How to listen?

Seth nails it...

Live interaction still matters. Teachers, meetings, presentations, one on one brainstorms--they can lead to real change. The listener has nearly as big a responsibility as the speaker does, though. And yet, Google reports four times as many matches for "how to speak" as "how to listen." It's not a passive act, not if you want to do it right.

If listening better leads to better speaking, then it becomes a competitive advantage.

Ask an entrepreneur leaving the office of a great VC like Fred Wilson. She'll tell you that she gave the best pitch of her career--largely because of the audience. The hardest step in better listening is the first one: do it on purpose. Make the effort to actually be good at it.

Don't worry so much about taking notes. Notes can be summarized in a memo (or a book) later.
Pay the person who's speaking back with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm shown by the expression on your face, in your posture, in your questions.

Play back what you hear but in your own words, using your own situation. Don't ask questions as much as make statements, building on what you just heard but making it your own. Take what you heard and make it the foundation for what you are trying on as your next idea.

If you disagree, wait a few beats, let the thought finish, and then explain why. Don't challenge the speaker, challenge the idea.

The best way to honor someone who has said something smart and useful is to say something back that is smart and useful. The other way to honor them is to go do something with what you learned.

Good listeners get what they deserve--better speakers.

Kannadadalli Maataadi

Lovely idea isn't it? The picture speaks for itself. A little extra discount always helps. Here is how you get it.

Accent & Credibility

Money Control: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger overcame his accent and secured the trust of voters but new research shows that an accent can impact a person's credibility.

In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers from the University of Chicago found that people unconsciously doubt harder to process statements more than easily understandable ones.

"Instead of perceiving the statements as more difficult to understand, they perceive them as less truthful," Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar said in the study. The result of this unconscious mental operation has an "insidious impact on millions of people, who routinely communicate in a language which is not their native tongue," they said, adding that an accent might reduce the credibility of job seekers, eyewitnesses, reporters or news anchors.

In the first study 30 people listened to phrases such as "a giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can" or "ants don't sleep" in Austrian-German, Korean, Italian, Polish, Turkish and other accents and graded them as to how likely they were to be true. "People were just influenced by the accent, so when people had an accent people rated the sentences as being less true than when people heard them without an accent," Lev-Ari, a post-doctoral researcher in psychology, explained.

In a second experiment, the researchers asked people to consciously correct for the accent, and forewarned them of the accent's potential impact on their judgment. The 27 native English speakers, however, were only able to compensate for moderate accents, and as they became more pronounced, the participants found themselves doubting the information more.

"It's just a natural thing that we do ... we're just not aware of it," said Keysar, a professor of psychology.

Lingo!

Staying at Anekal has its own advantages. The town is so near that many people walk to it, daily. Chethan and myself go to the small Nayars restaurant which is like a 100 year old antique piece, the Nayar Sr started it in1905 here. You get to eat Raagi Muddai (you need to take a small ball of the muddai and dip it in boiling hot soup and then swallow it, no chewing) with hot chicken soup and chicken fry(the best chicken till date in Bangalore sparing Ohris), then comes the SP parota. 

What does SP stand for? No its not the usual Special Parota. It stands for Ceylon Parota! When Ceylon starts with a 'C' how come this is 'SP'. After some research we found that some restaurant was run by a Tamil chap from Srilanka who used to make butter-coated parotas at Majestic and called them 'Seylon Parotas' and 'SP' in short and the lingo spread all over. People started to ask for the SP/Ceylon Parota and hence the name. Everywhere else the name is forgotten except in this small town where the language (pure Kannada) and culture is intact.

So next time ask for SP parota and know what it means!