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Manav Jaini has posted two top-10s on the Asian Tour in 2011 and is placed 27th on the Asian Tour Order of Merit at the moment. Jaini recently won the SRF All India Professional Golf Matchplay Championship, making it his first victory. How is your game shaping up? I have stopped worrying about what the perfect golf swing really is. Instead, I have been trying to get to know my golf swing better. I think training with Nonita Lal has helped me and I have over the last few years had some good finishes as well. Its about getting consistency and I think I am coming close to that. I want to find my feet in Asia over the next two years and focus on getting the game right. A few more wins would be great as well. What about the SRF Championship win? Last year I played 19 tournaments and ended up in 11 top-tens. Even though I didnt win, I felt confident about my game. I also played a few Asian Tour events last year and that helped. I have enjoyed myself a great deal and the only thing left was to win a tournament. Golf has grown and the Indian tour is really doing well now. Anyone who has played here can confidently take on the Asian Tour. How do you keep cool on the course? I enjoy the pressure. I dont stress and fret too much about whats going on. I am laid back and I think thats what works for me. How do you keep cool on the course? I enjoy the pressure. I dont stress and fret too much about whats going on. I am laid back and I think thats what works for me. Who would your favourite four ball have? My favourite 4-ball is the one I play with when I am home in Delhi. That includes Gaurav Ghei, Vivek Bhandari and Naman Davar. I dont want to change that one at all. So you always wanted to golf? And not grow into an technology guy or an astronaut etc? If you ask my teachers, I wouldnt have made it to NASA anyway, so in one sense it was the easy way out that I was taking. Golf was the best thing I could do and I also got bitten by the bug because I loved to be out on the course. Life since has primarily been golf even if I were at a pub with friends. Even there, the conversation steers to golf.. Is Indian golf at a turning point? The fact that global brands are queuing up in India does say a lot about where Indian golf is going. We are in very good shape We have surely made a mark both in India and overseas. Little wonder, multinational players like Callaway and Taylormade are coming here to see the quality of the players Watch "Tee Time and the game for themselves. With Shaili Chopra

Sanjiv Garg,
CEO Jindal Intellicom

Whats Luck Got to Do With It?

WHY MANAGEMENT SCHOLARS WHO STUDY SUCCESSFUL COMPANIES DONT ACKNOWLEDGE THE LUCK FACTOR
V I V E K K A U L
other operating system that was available, a system that was, depending on whom you ask, based or inspired by Kildalls. According to Sams, Gates said, Do you want to get that operating system, or do you want me to? Sams, apparently not appreciating the implications, said, By all means, you get it. Gates got the operating system for around $50,000, made a few changes, and renamed it DOS (disk operating system). IBM, apparently with little faith in the potential of its new idea, licensed DOS from Gates for a low per-copy royalty fee, letting Gates retain the rights. And the rest as we have seen is history. Much of Microsofts success since then has been built on that sheer lucky break. If luck is such an important part of business success, how does one possibly explain the deluge of management and business books that keep hitting the market? "It is always possible to select a number of companies that have been successful for many years, then look back and try to offer explanations for that success," says Phil Rosenzweig, a Professor of Strategy and International Management at the IMD and the author of The Halo Effect...and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. And thats what authors of these books tend to do. A couple of years after their books appear, things do tend to change. Take the case of one the best selling management titles of all time In Search of Excellence written by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. In 1982...the two authors working with their colleagues at McKinsey, used a mixture of data and subjective judgement to settle on a list of fortythree excellent companies, which they then studied intensively to unlock their secrets, writes Tim Haford in his new book Adapt Why Success Always Starts with Failure. Two years later things changed and the Business Week magazine ran a cover story with the headline Oops! Whos Excellent Now? Fourteen of the 43 companies that Peters and Waterman had studied were in financial trouble. In conclusion, this little story about a Spaniard who won a lottery explains the situation very well. As Michael J Mauboussin points out in his research paper titled Untangling Luck and Skill, In the mid 1970s, a man sought a ticket with the last two digits ending in 48. He found a ticket, bought it, and then won the lottery. When asked why he was so intent on finding that number, he replied, I dreamed of the number seven for seven straight nights. And 7 times 7 is 48.
vivek.kaul@timesgroup.com

I Far-out destination:

Krasnoyarsk, Siberia

I Bon Vivant moment:

Blanket wrapped earthen pot ice cream in Kaithal, Haryana

surprises:

When I was picked up by a private plane in New York to play golf in Las Vegas and dropped back the next day. I was the only passenger both ways and food and wine were served to order

I Worst Hangover:

On vodka after negotiating a large scale transportation deal in St Petersburg, USSR

I Out-of-body experience:

I On Natures Trail:
Cross country skiing in Eagle River, Wisconsin, USA and canoeing down Kickapoo river (6 days- no phone/ human contact) in 1986

Sitting in a teepee smoking a long handled pipe in a (Red) Indian reservation

I Best Bed: I Gourmet delights:

My waterbed at home

I Emptied your pockets on:

a beggar on the corner of Aurangzeb and Safdarjung Road on getting my US students Visa

Mapes (my wife) biryani, tandoori parantha with butter at Murthal on the Delhi border; Medium rare steak and crme brulee at III Forks, Dallas

he erstwhile Unit Trust of India(UTI) was started quite by chance. The story is recounted by the late Vishwanath Gopal Pendharkar, the first Executive Trustee of UTI, in his book Unit Trust of India: Retrospect and Prospect. TT Krishnamachari (TTK), Minister for Economic and Defence Coordination, had seen a news item, about the formation of a governmentsponsored unit trust in Pakistan. This gave him the idea of setting up a similar institution in India. TTK raised the issue with the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who in turn took it up with the finance minister Moraji Desai. Initially nothing much happened. TTK took over as the finance minister after Desai resigned and thereafter, the government began to move on the draft bill to set up UTI. Over the next 30 odd years, before it fell prey to scamsters, UTI was a very successful institution. But the fact of the matter remains; the institution was started just by chance, and then built its success on it. LUCK@GOOGLE The search company Google is now the darling of the stock market, but it wasnt always like that. As Duncan J Watts writes in Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer, In the late 1990s the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, tried to sell their company for $1.6 million. Fortunately for them, nobody was interested, because Google went on to attain a market value of over $160 billion. Now if this is not luck, I dont know what is. LUCK@MICROSOFT The other great example of an institution that started quite by chance and then built on it is Microsoft. Leonard Mlodinow, a faculty at the California Institute of Technology, the author of a book titled The Drunkards Walk How Randomness Rules Our Lives, feels that Bill Gates was very lucky in his initial days. In 1990, IBM was looking for a programme called operating system for their home computer. A group of executives from IBM went to meet Gates, who at that point of time was running a small company. Gates told them that he couldnt provide the operating system they wanted and directed them to a programmer called Gary Kildall at Digital Research Inc. The talks between Kildall and IBM did not work out. Around the same time Jack Sams, an IBM employee, met Gates again. As Mlodinow writes, They both knew of an-

I Memorable journeys:

I Gourmet gaffes:
Snakes blood, Taiwan

Sailing as crew on a small sailboat from Miami to the Bahamas

I Goofy traveler moment:

I Streetfood

Take a leak OUTSIDE in -26 deg C weather in Krasnoyarsk)

ON
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8 6970,SMS hoIidays to 58767100, Mail: holidays Lhomascook.in

Which global golfer do you look up to? I am a big fan for Ernie Els. His attitude game is truly inspiring.

V I K R A M

D O C T O R

BESIDES BEING A CORE INGREDIENT IN REFRESHING SOLKADIS AND SHERBETS, KOKUM IS USED AS A GENTLE SOURING AGENT IN KONKANI DISHES

he traditional Indian foods that are a major feature of this column are fascinating and (usually) delicious. But it can sometimes be hard to find information on them. Because the larger market neglects such niche local foods (while paying high prices for supermarket products from abroad), those who use them feel little need to explain or promote them, which unfortunately results in even more neglect. Kokum is a case in point. Living in Mumbai, I was hardly unaware of this sour fruit from the Konkan. I had eaten fish curries flavoured with its black peel, and drunk gallons of solkadi, the savoury coconut milkbased drink that gets both its flavour and striking purple colour from kokum. I once tried to find the best solkadi in Mumbai - this was in the days when Konkani restaurants were still relatively few. If I remember cor-

rectly, the winner was, surprisingly, a Girgaum beer bar that made a particularly creamy version. But the place has disappeared, and today there are too many Konkani eateries, each with its own solkadi, for me to attempt the feat again. But when I started using kokum myself, I found it confusing. The dried black peels varied in taste from mildly sour, to salty sour, to very tangy sour. Then there was a totally different looking version, like a small round dried tomato, with big seeds, that was also sold as kokum. Nobody seemed able to explain which was which, and I figured the reason was because people who did use kokum frequently had a fixed source - one of the small Konkani shops in Dadar, or maybe from their home village and were just familiar with what they used. I finally realised the reason for the differences when I came across the fresh fruit in a

The Kool King of Indian Fruits

small Konkani shop in Sewri. The owner seemed surprised that someone wanted the round reddish fruits that he was going to make into the syrup used for kokum sherbet. Cutting into them was instant proof that kokum is closely related to the wonderful mangosteen fruit (already featured in this column). There was the same contrast between dark purple peel and pulpy white interior, but the kokum was less clearly formed, like an abandoned mangosteen prototype. My other realisation was that fresh kokum has two distinct types of sourness. The peel, which is soft enough to eat, has a slightly harsh, metallic sourness, while the white pulp is very tangy, fruity-sour. J.S.Pruthi's reference book, Spices and Condiments, explains that the peel is often soaked in the pulp and

then dried. That would explain the very tangy type of kokum, while the other types must be made by just drying the peel, or salting and drying it. The round spice with seeds was the fruit dried whole. I also learnt that kokum seeds produce a fat called kokum butter that is used in cosmetics. This is the main commercial use of kokum, and is probably why the peels, as by-product, are easier to find than the whole fruit. I think I've also understood the particular value of kokum. Indian cooking uses many souring agents which are as important as our masalas for dishes. But most of these souring agents, like lime, amchur, tamarind or toddy vinegar, are notably strong and can quickly become dominant in a dish. We tend not to use the gentler souring agents abroad, like lemon or wine vinegars, though dahi fulfils that role, but can be limited because its milky base doesn't match all foods. Tomato is another gentler souring agent, which may be why it is now so essential for Indian food, adding a sour note to the onion-ginger-garlic base. And kokum is a gentle souring agent too, adding a background tang, but never drowning out the main taste. This is why it is so useful with fish, if one wants to appreciate their subtler tastes, as people still do in the Konkan, where there is still appreciation for the varied tastes and textures of different types of fish (there are other places where fish is now, like chicken, just a neutral vehicle for masala). Kokum's tanginess can be enjoyed by itself too. There's a candied version called kokum khajur which is very nice to eat. The fresh juice is concentrated with salt to make kokum agal, which when diluted tastes like fruity salt lassi. The sweet form is kokum sherbet, which I'm ambivalent about because of the jeera that is always added; it gives a warm spiciness, but also a certain muddy taste that I don't like. (The sweet-saltspice combination of kokum sherbet though, is an ideal drink after workouts or in muggy weather; it's a natural version of bottled energy drinks). The best, I think, is just to add the fresh fruit to water; it quickly tinges it pink and gives a pleasant sour tang. A jar of this in the fridge is much more refreshing than plain water, and a good reminder of why it's worth getting to know all the different types and uses of kokum.
Vikram.doctor@timesgroup.com

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Reg. No. MAHENG/2002/6295 Volume 10 Issue No.25 Published for the proprietors, Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. by R.Venkata Kesavan at The Times Of India Building, Dr. D.N.Road, Mumbai 400001 and printed by him at The Times of India Suburban Press, Western Express Highway, Kandivili (E), Mumbai 400101. Tel No: 66353535, Fax No 22731520. Editor: Vinod Mahanta , '(Responsible for selection of news under PRB Act)'