Technology plays an important role in our lives today. It has penetrated into almost all the departments that we know. Education is no exception to this rule. Gone are the days when educational institutions had to burn the midnight oil to prepare exam papers for their students. Today, these question papers can be prepared in a jiffy, thanks to the technological advancements. Currently, there are lots of software packages that aim to make your life easy by creating innovative, responsive and interactive exam papers for all levels. Let us now look at some of the features and benefits of these packages:
Win-win situation for the teacher and the taught
Online examination software's main objective is to create a mutually beneficial scenario for the educational institutions and the students. Self-explanatory and straightforward questions with relevant options make the lives of students easier, as they don't have to waste time in reading between the lines like they usually do in the traditional format of exams. For the institution, this software not only helps in preparing the questions but also helps immensely in correcting, tracking and grading as well. You can easily download these packages from the internet and use it on your mobiles, laptops, tablets and desktops as they are compatible with all platforms. There are quite a few electrician qualifications you need to do this type of work safely and effectively. Getting involved with a top-notch program is a very important step in this process. It makes sense to have a solid framework in place. Then you can continue to build on it for a lifetime, over the span of your career.
There are many skills and areas of knowledge you need to do well with this type of work. Troubleshooting is a big part of the work. Knowing what needs to be fixed and how to fix it begins with outstanding electrician qualifications in place. A great program helps you learn through classroom setting work and hands on exercises that help you to problem solve.
New Career
Perhaps you have always been interested in the world of electricity. For others, this is going to be a career change. Regardless, you have to be committed to learning and to be safe. Paying attention to details matters. There are rules you must follow to make sure the work environment and everyone in it remains safe.
There are specific areas of this type of work you may wish to train in. Those specific areas need more electrician qualifications because they are more complex and precise. Yet they can give you a challenging and rewarding career. They often pay more too which can be an added bonus.
Safety
Any program you take part in offering electrician qualifications should be focused on safety. No matter how large or small the project is, that is at the core of it. There are rules for locking out machines and for testing. Following these procedures every single time reduces the risk of injury or death to anyone in the work area.
You can't be in a hurry and you can't cut corners when it comes to safety. Being well-trained on what to look for relating to potential risks is very important. Wearing safety gear to any work site is also going to cut the chances of something harmful taking place. While this can be a wonderful career, you have to know the risks too.
Testing
The training you get is going to be preparing you for the testing you will eventually take. You will need to pass those tests to verify your electrician qualifications. If you have planned, ready, learned, and asked questions you should be well ready for the testing and pass without any concerns.
Establishing Relationships
Throughout your learning and training, you will have an opportunity to meet a variety of people. Many of them are trying to get the same qualifications are you are. Some of them are already experts and they take pride in sharing what they know. Others are part of support services and they will do what they can to help you connect with the right program.
Some of these relationships will become very strong bonds. While you share a common interest in the field of being an electrician, it can branch out to many other areas of your life. This can be a wonderful bonus along the way. Imagine being shipwrecked on a remote, hot desert island many miles from the nearest civilisation. You spend each day foraging for food and fresh water whilst keeping out of the blistering sun with the shade of dried papyrus leaves and avoiding the acid bites of the always present termites.
One day you spot a bottle bobbing in the sea and swim out to recover it with view to later using it as a message carrier in the traditional @castaway@ manner. You have plenty of dried papyrus leaves to use as a writing material but you need the means to write the detail of your message. The chalk and charcoal that you have at your disposal do not fit the bill due to their size and inability to persist within a watery environment. A fine tipped, more precise writing instrument that will make permanent marks is required, something akin to the humble ballpoint pen that we have known and have loved for many decades.
With such an item of "advanced" technology, it would be possible to write many lines of text in a small space and know that the writing would have some chance of surviving many months at sea. Additionally, such a pen made of its hard shell would resist the hungry advances of the local termite population.
In the modern world over 150 billion disposable pens are produced every year, and yet on your desert island there is not one. The only solution is to make such a device, a device made of a mere half a dozen very simple components.
It cannot be that difficult, can it? The familiar ballpoint pen is such a simple device. A small waterproof tube to act as a reservoir for ink, a tiny rolling metal ball to deliver the ink onto the writing surface and a small metal housing to connect the reservoir, ink and ballpoint. All of this is housed in a small neat and tidy hard-wearing outer a case of plastic. To finish the whole thing, a small plastic cap is used to plug the tube. Simple!
So, consider how would you go about making one on your desert island?
First, the ballpoint: a tiny hard-wearing metal bead formed into a perfect sphere to allow smooth rotation and delivery of ink from a reservoir onto the writing surface. This tiny sub millimetre ball needs to be highly polished and may even benefit from tiny pits to help transfer the ink. The metal of choice for this component is normally tungsten carbide, and fortunately tungsten is available on your island. It simply needs to be extracted from the ground, pulverized into a very fine powder, heated, combined with readily available graphite and heated again to temperature of a mere 2000°C. For this particular task all that is needed is for you to create an extremely high temperature oven!
Once the tungsten carbide is formed, a way needs to be found to form it into a pellet less than a millimetre across and then shape and polish it into a perfect sphere. Once this has been achieved, the tiny sphere must be carefully put to one side in the hope that it doesn't get lost.
Next, the housing to hold the tiny ball. This can be made out of a basic metal alloy such as brass. Fortunately quantities of the common elements of copper and zinc are also available on our island paradise and using the oven, a reduced temperature of a mere 1100 °C is used to smelt carefully controlled quantities of both these metals to produce a small brass ingot. This is then formed into a small conical shape to act as the point for the pen, and then using a half millimetre drill that we fabricated out of high carbon steel in last months workshop(!), we form a fine hole down which the ink can travel. Very carefully, a wider pit in the brass pen point is formed to place the sub-millimetre tungsten carbide ball into and very carefully a narrow brass edge is folded over to help hold the micro ball in its pit.
Now for the ink. This really cannot be too difficult to do, it is only ink after all!
First it is necessary to find a carrier liquid in which to suspend some form of pigment. The pigment will be made by grinding highly coloured local materials into an extremely fine powder, so fine that it will not clog the very fine ball in the ballpoint and prevent it rotating. In order that the ink will flow smoothly and without drying out, it needs to be made out of some form of reasonably clear oil. Fortunately the island is populated with a plentiful crop of castor oil plants, perfect for the extraction of vegetable oil as long as extreme care is taken not to be poisoned by the highly toxic Ricin contained within the castor oil plant seeds.
Next a reservoir for this ink made from some form of durable, ink proof, non-degradable substance such as plastic. Being a clever castaway you are aware of the fact that bio derived materials such as egg and blood proteins have been used for centuries to create various forms of plastic materials, but that these are not very hard-wearing. Ideally some form of thermosetting plastic would be used that can be easily shaped with a little heat and will remain hard after it has cooled.
Given a chemistry set containing various highly toxic substances such as acetone, sodium cyanide and methyl alcohol, it may be possible to react these in a precise and controlled manner to form a suitable plastic. Unfortunately such a set was not washed up on the island, and in this case the easiest route is to find a straight and suitably sized dried out and hollow plant stem (eg a strong grass or small bamboo), and coat it with some plant resin to prevent the ink drying out too fast.
So, after many months of hard toil, this simplest of writing implement can be assembled, carefully filled with ink and a S.O.S. message finally prepared on a roll of finest Papyrus leaf. This is placed in the bottle and the neck sealed with some leftover plant resin. With one smooth action the bottle can be cast into the sea to begin its long journey.
Whilst waiting for a response and rescue, this "ordinary" lightweight, durable device could then be used to keep a daily diary, to doodle, to label, to calculate, to improve drawing skills, and can be taken anywhere on this hot and humid desert island as and when needed. Naturally, after months of effort this valuable item would be treated very, very carefully Academics call businesses unethical and dishonest. This seems problematic to me. First, it is amazing how often those who have a certain character flaw call out others when they notice others have that similar flaw. Second, academia has a tremendous amount of ethics rules, why? I mean if academia is so noble and ethical to call out businesses, then they certainly must be beyond reproach. Unfortunately, they aren't and they know it, thus, trying to control themselves through rules. Sometimes this works for them, sometimes it doesn't, but they believe businesses must be controlled by rules that they in their infinite wisdom believe will keep everyone honest.
Remember this coming from a group that isn't honest and thus, has to enforce their own to be good (being sarcastic of course). A group that gets its money by charging outrageous tuition fees and economically enslaving their students with college load debt, while brain-washing them into a socialist mindset. A group that has never had to make a profit or run a business - yet, tells us they are wiser than those of us in the free-market and therefore, should make the rules that we run by. This is flawed logic - why you ask?
It's simple; in the free-market we are kept ethical by the customer, client, and consumer - if we fail to deliver, then we'll be out of business and lose market-share as soon as those negative YELP comments start coming back - why do we need academic inspired increased regulations for that? We don't, but isn't that just like the arrogance of academia to think that they should be the Philosopher King's over our domain.
Okay so why the hard-hitting commentary from our resident genius you ask? Well, because soon the academic bubble will pop, just like any sector that grows too fast - the longer this goes on the bigger the bubble and the harder the fall. But who will they blame when the bubble bursts - sure it could perhaps go another 5-10 years, anything is possible, but the end is now known, tuition costs cannot keep rising and we only need to have an economic downturn and it will erase the ability to continue this hyper-growth. Today we see politicians calling for debt-free tuition (FREE) but of course we all know that is all it will be worth if they are able to make it so.
For a group of academics and politicians running around calling everything they don't like "unsustainable" it is ironic that they are creating some of the most unsustainable sectors of our entire economy.
Now then, everyone knows ethics are important in science, and yet, the claim of integrity is questionable - because if everyone in the process was so ethical by nature as arrogant academics often purport - then we wouldn't need all the checks and balances in the grants review process. What we have now is runaway bureaucracy and typical government administering $100s of Billions per year propping up the academic bubble even further - to what avail I ask? Pure science - you ponder? Doubtful, we don't need that much regulation and rule-making or bureaucracy for pure science - we need less of the former and more of the latter in my observation.
We can simply explain flowers as blossoms or blooms. Science teaches us that the flower is the reproductive structure of a plant and facilitates fertilization. The ovary of the flower develops into the fruit that we consume; most fruits contain seeds from which further plants can sprout. Flowers offer different kinds of fertilization or fusion -
• Selfing - which is the fusion of egg and sperm from the same flower
• Outcrossing - fusion of egg and sperm from different varieties in a given population
Flowers have evolved just like other life on Earth; some produce diasporas without fertilization, some make themselves attractive to insects and animals so that pollen transfer takes place.
While these facts may seem very simple for us to absorb, in reality flowers are a very complex mechanism of nature with different properties and aspects that have enabled them to survive through many millennia through coping mechanisms.
What we know about flowers generally is that they are an object of beauty and admiration and are used to beautify and enhance spaces and environments as objects that are not only synonymous with religion, ritual and romance but also as sources of food and medicine.
A University of Texas study shows that bees not only pick up food i.e. nectar and pollen from flowers but also transmit bacteria to the flowers through their 'micro biomes' which is the term used to indicate the community of bacteria in the bee's gut. One of the most common bacteria is Lactobacillus Micheneri, largely associated with fermented foods. Lactobacillus is a common bacterium, also called 'good bacteria' and plays an important role in ensuring good health. This type of bacteria is found to accumulate more on flowers that are pollinated by wild bees that are mostly solitary and carry pollen on their undersides.
Such research throws a great deal of light for future bee research and the role of flowers. It helps us to learn that flowers are not just sources of food but also act in transmitting good bacteria that help protect pollinator populations.
While not all flowers are beautiful and fragrant, some flowers have evolved in the most strangest of manners to ensure survival. The 'corpse flower', so named because of its putrefying smell of decaying animal flesh and urine grows on a plant that is quite small. Its original presence was in the dense jungles around the world. To attract bugs and insects the flower made itself become bigger and bigger and smellier to attract pollinators and reproduce more efficiently. Some specimens flower only once a year while some others take longer. Probably the best introduction India receives globally is through its Indian curry. What actually is Indian curry and for how long we have been enjoying it are 2 topics that are no less than mysteries, until recently, when archaeological evidences have shed light upon curry's date of origin. Dictionary describes curry not as a single dish but the term is used for a mind-blowing number of spicy meat and vegetable stews from as far-flung places as the Caribbean Islands, the South-Pacific and of course, the Indian subcontinent. What constitutes a curry is a major debate and it hardly seems to get a fitting answer very soon.
Colonial History of Curry
The term curry probably has its origin in Tamil term 'kari' used to describe a spicy sauce. Bewildered by the region's large variety of lip-smacking dishes, the 17th century British East-India traders mixed them all under a single term called curry. As defined by the British, one may call curry as a blend of ginger, turmeric, onion, garlic, coriander, cumin and chilli cooked with vegetables, shellfish or meats.
We cannot say that the present form of curry is exclusively an Indian creation. Culinary traditions of Middle-East and South-East Asia have considerable amounts of influence to give it its present form. Trading relation with South-East Asia has introduced cloves into the Indian cuisines whereas large consumption of meat among the public was reported after Muslim invasions from 1000 AD onward.
Europeans came in touch with the taste of Indian curry after the Portuguese set up their trading posts on western coast of India. They introduced chillies and spices from the New World inside the European kitchens. However, the basic form of curry predates the presence of Europeans in India by more than 4000 years as is revealed by recent archaeological excavations at a site of Indus Valley Civilisation.
Prehistoric Origin of Curry
Established duration of Indus Valley Civilisation spans from 3300 to 1300 BCE. One may say that this was the golden age of Bronze Age India. Until recently, historians have few evidences to know about the food habits of these people when significant development came up from the study of starch grains at the North-Indian site of Farmana. The granules were extracted out of pot vessels, dental remains of human burials and stone tools.
Win-win situation for the teacher and the taught
Online examination software's main objective is to create a mutually beneficial scenario for the educational institutions and the students. Self-explanatory and straightforward questions with relevant options make the lives of students easier, as they don't have to waste time in reading between the lines like they usually do in the traditional format of exams. For the institution, this software not only helps in preparing the questions but also helps immensely in correcting, tracking and grading as well. You can easily download these packages from the internet and use it on your mobiles, laptops, tablets and desktops as they are compatible with all platforms. There are quite a few electrician qualifications you need to do this type of work safely and effectively. Getting involved with a top-notch program is a very important step in this process. It makes sense to have a solid framework in place. Then you can continue to build on it for a lifetime, over the span of your career.
There are many skills and areas of knowledge you need to do well with this type of work. Troubleshooting is a big part of the work. Knowing what needs to be fixed and how to fix it begins with outstanding electrician qualifications in place. A great program helps you learn through classroom setting work and hands on exercises that help you to problem solve.
New Career
Perhaps you have always been interested in the world of electricity. For others, this is going to be a career change. Regardless, you have to be committed to learning and to be safe. Paying attention to details matters. There are rules you must follow to make sure the work environment and everyone in it remains safe.
There are specific areas of this type of work you may wish to train in. Those specific areas need more electrician qualifications because they are more complex and precise. Yet they can give you a challenging and rewarding career. They often pay more too which can be an added bonus.
Safety
Any program you take part in offering electrician qualifications should be focused on safety. No matter how large or small the project is, that is at the core of it. There are rules for locking out machines and for testing. Following these procedures every single time reduces the risk of injury or death to anyone in the work area.
You can't be in a hurry and you can't cut corners when it comes to safety. Being well-trained on what to look for relating to potential risks is very important. Wearing safety gear to any work site is also going to cut the chances of something harmful taking place. While this can be a wonderful career, you have to know the risks too.
Testing
The training you get is going to be preparing you for the testing you will eventually take. You will need to pass those tests to verify your electrician qualifications. If you have planned, ready, learned, and asked questions you should be well ready for the testing and pass without any concerns.
Establishing Relationships
Throughout your learning and training, you will have an opportunity to meet a variety of people. Many of them are trying to get the same qualifications are you are. Some of them are already experts and they take pride in sharing what they know. Others are part of support services and they will do what they can to help you connect with the right program.
Some of these relationships will become very strong bonds. While you share a common interest in the field of being an electrician, it can branch out to many other areas of your life. This can be a wonderful bonus along the way. Imagine being shipwrecked on a remote, hot desert island many miles from the nearest civilisation. You spend each day foraging for food and fresh water whilst keeping out of the blistering sun with the shade of dried papyrus leaves and avoiding the acid bites of the always present termites.
One day you spot a bottle bobbing in the sea and swim out to recover it with view to later using it as a message carrier in the traditional @castaway@ manner. You have plenty of dried papyrus leaves to use as a writing material but you need the means to write the detail of your message. The chalk and charcoal that you have at your disposal do not fit the bill due to their size and inability to persist within a watery environment. A fine tipped, more precise writing instrument that will make permanent marks is required, something akin to the humble ballpoint pen that we have known and have loved for many decades.
With such an item of "advanced" technology, it would be possible to write many lines of text in a small space and know that the writing would have some chance of surviving many months at sea. Additionally, such a pen made of its hard shell would resist the hungry advances of the local termite population.
In the modern world over 150 billion disposable pens are produced every year, and yet on your desert island there is not one. The only solution is to make such a device, a device made of a mere half a dozen very simple components.
It cannot be that difficult, can it? The familiar ballpoint pen is such a simple device. A small waterproof tube to act as a reservoir for ink, a tiny rolling metal ball to deliver the ink onto the writing surface and a small metal housing to connect the reservoir, ink and ballpoint. All of this is housed in a small neat and tidy hard-wearing outer a case of plastic. To finish the whole thing, a small plastic cap is used to plug the tube. Simple!
So, consider how would you go about making one on your desert island?
First, the ballpoint: a tiny hard-wearing metal bead formed into a perfect sphere to allow smooth rotation and delivery of ink from a reservoir onto the writing surface. This tiny sub millimetre ball needs to be highly polished and may even benefit from tiny pits to help transfer the ink. The metal of choice for this component is normally tungsten carbide, and fortunately tungsten is available on your island. It simply needs to be extracted from the ground, pulverized into a very fine powder, heated, combined with readily available graphite and heated again to temperature of a mere 2000°C. For this particular task all that is needed is for you to create an extremely high temperature oven!
Once the tungsten carbide is formed, a way needs to be found to form it into a pellet less than a millimetre across and then shape and polish it into a perfect sphere. Once this has been achieved, the tiny sphere must be carefully put to one side in the hope that it doesn't get lost.
Next, the housing to hold the tiny ball. This can be made out of a basic metal alloy such as brass. Fortunately quantities of the common elements of copper and zinc are also available on our island paradise and using the oven, a reduced temperature of a mere 1100 °C is used to smelt carefully controlled quantities of both these metals to produce a small brass ingot. This is then formed into a small conical shape to act as the point for the pen, and then using a half millimetre drill that we fabricated out of high carbon steel in last months workshop(!), we form a fine hole down which the ink can travel. Very carefully, a wider pit in the brass pen point is formed to place the sub-millimetre tungsten carbide ball into and very carefully a narrow brass edge is folded over to help hold the micro ball in its pit.
Now for the ink. This really cannot be too difficult to do, it is only ink after all!
First it is necessary to find a carrier liquid in which to suspend some form of pigment. The pigment will be made by grinding highly coloured local materials into an extremely fine powder, so fine that it will not clog the very fine ball in the ballpoint and prevent it rotating. In order that the ink will flow smoothly and without drying out, it needs to be made out of some form of reasonably clear oil. Fortunately the island is populated with a plentiful crop of castor oil plants, perfect for the extraction of vegetable oil as long as extreme care is taken not to be poisoned by the highly toxic Ricin contained within the castor oil plant seeds.
Next a reservoir for this ink made from some form of durable, ink proof, non-degradable substance such as plastic. Being a clever castaway you are aware of the fact that bio derived materials such as egg and blood proteins have been used for centuries to create various forms of plastic materials, but that these are not very hard-wearing. Ideally some form of thermosetting plastic would be used that can be easily shaped with a little heat and will remain hard after it has cooled.
Given a chemistry set containing various highly toxic substances such as acetone, sodium cyanide and methyl alcohol, it may be possible to react these in a precise and controlled manner to form a suitable plastic. Unfortunately such a set was not washed up on the island, and in this case the easiest route is to find a straight and suitably sized dried out and hollow plant stem (eg a strong grass or small bamboo), and coat it with some plant resin to prevent the ink drying out too fast.
So, after many months of hard toil, this simplest of writing implement can be assembled, carefully filled with ink and a S.O.S. message finally prepared on a roll of finest Papyrus leaf. This is placed in the bottle and the neck sealed with some leftover plant resin. With one smooth action the bottle can be cast into the sea to begin its long journey.
Whilst waiting for a response and rescue, this "ordinary" lightweight, durable device could then be used to keep a daily diary, to doodle, to label, to calculate, to improve drawing skills, and can be taken anywhere on this hot and humid desert island as and when needed. Naturally, after months of effort this valuable item would be treated very, very carefully Academics call businesses unethical and dishonest. This seems problematic to me. First, it is amazing how often those who have a certain character flaw call out others when they notice others have that similar flaw. Second, academia has a tremendous amount of ethics rules, why? I mean if academia is so noble and ethical to call out businesses, then they certainly must be beyond reproach. Unfortunately, they aren't and they know it, thus, trying to control themselves through rules. Sometimes this works for them, sometimes it doesn't, but they believe businesses must be controlled by rules that they in their infinite wisdom believe will keep everyone honest.
Remember this coming from a group that isn't honest and thus, has to enforce their own to be good (being sarcastic of course). A group that gets its money by charging outrageous tuition fees and economically enslaving their students with college load debt, while brain-washing them into a socialist mindset. A group that has never had to make a profit or run a business - yet, tells us they are wiser than those of us in the free-market and therefore, should make the rules that we run by. This is flawed logic - why you ask?
It's simple; in the free-market we are kept ethical by the customer, client, and consumer - if we fail to deliver, then we'll be out of business and lose market-share as soon as those negative YELP comments start coming back - why do we need academic inspired increased regulations for that? We don't, but isn't that just like the arrogance of academia to think that they should be the Philosopher King's over our domain.
Okay so why the hard-hitting commentary from our resident genius you ask? Well, because soon the academic bubble will pop, just like any sector that grows too fast - the longer this goes on the bigger the bubble and the harder the fall. But who will they blame when the bubble bursts - sure it could perhaps go another 5-10 years, anything is possible, but the end is now known, tuition costs cannot keep rising and we only need to have an economic downturn and it will erase the ability to continue this hyper-growth. Today we see politicians calling for debt-free tuition (FREE) but of course we all know that is all it will be worth if they are able to make it so.
For a group of academics and politicians running around calling everything they don't like "unsustainable" it is ironic that they are creating some of the most unsustainable sectors of our entire economy.
Now then, everyone knows ethics are important in science, and yet, the claim of integrity is questionable - because if everyone in the process was so ethical by nature as arrogant academics often purport - then we wouldn't need all the checks and balances in the grants review process. What we have now is runaway bureaucracy and typical government administering $100s of Billions per year propping up the academic bubble even further - to what avail I ask? Pure science - you ponder? Doubtful, we don't need that much regulation and rule-making or bureaucracy for pure science - we need less of the former and more of the latter in my observation.
We can simply explain flowers as blossoms or blooms. Science teaches us that the flower is the reproductive structure of a plant and facilitates fertilization. The ovary of the flower develops into the fruit that we consume; most fruits contain seeds from which further plants can sprout. Flowers offer different kinds of fertilization or fusion -
• Selfing - which is the fusion of egg and sperm from the same flower
• Outcrossing - fusion of egg and sperm from different varieties in a given population
Flowers have evolved just like other life on Earth; some produce diasporas without fertilization, some make themselves attractive to insects and animals so that pollen transfer takes place.
While these facts may seem very simple for us to absorb, in reality flowers are a very complex mechanism of nature with different properties and aspects that have enabled them to survive through many millennia through coping mechanisms.
What we know about flowers generally is that they are an object of beauty and admiration and are used to beautify and enhance spaces and environments as objects that are not only synonymous with religion, ritual and romance but also as sources of food and medicine.
A University of Texas study shows that bees not only pick up food i.e. nectar and pollen from flowers but also transmit bacteria to the flowers through their 'micro biomes' which is the term used to indicate the community of bacteria in the bee's gut. One of the most common bacteria is Lactobacillus Micheneri, largely associated with fermented foods. Lactobacillus is a common bacterium, also called 'good bacteria' and plays an important role in ensuring good health. This type of bacteria is found to accumulate more on flowers that are pollinated by wild bees that are mostly solitary and carry pollen on their undersides.
Such research throws a great deal of light for future bee research and the role of flowers. It helps us to learn that flowers are not just sources of food but also act in transmitting good bacteria that help protect pollinator populations.
While not all flowers are beautiful and fragrant, some flowers have evolved in the most strangest of manners to ensure survival. The 'corpse flower', so named because of its putrefying smell of decaying animal flesh and urine grows on a plant that is quite small. Its original presence was in the dense jungles around the world. To attract bugs and insects the flower made itself become bigger and bigger and smellier to attract pollinators and reproduce more efficiently. Some specimens flower only once a year while some others take longer. Probably the best introduction India receives globally is through its Indian curry. What actually is Indian curry and for how long we have been enjoying it are 2 topics that are no less than mysteries, until recently, when archaeological evidences have shed light upon curry's date of origin. Dictionary describes curry not as a single dish but the term is used for a mind-blowing number of spicy meat and vegetable stews from as far-flung places as the Caribbean Islands, the South-Pacific and of course, the Indian subcontinent. What constitutes a curry is a major debate and it hardly seems to get a fitting answer very soon.
Colonial History of Curry
The term curry probably has its origin in Tamil term 'kari' used to describe a spicy sauce. Bewildered by the region's large variety of lip-smacking dishes, the 17th century British East-India traders mixed them all under a single term called curry. As defined by the British, one may call curry as a blend of ginger, turmeric, onion, garlic, coriander, cumin and chilli cooked with vegetables, shellfish or meats.
We cannot say that the present form of curry is exclusively an Indian creation. Culinary traditions of Middle-East and South-East Asia have considerable amounts of influence to give it its present form. Trading relation with South-East Asia has introduced cloves into the Indian cuisines whereas large consumption of meat among the public was reported after Muslim invasions from 1000 AD onward.
Europeans came in touch with the taste of Indian curry after the Portuguese set up their trading posts on western coast of India. They introduced chillies and spices from the New World inside the European kitchens. However, the basic form of curry predates the presence of Europeans in India by more than 4000 years as is revealed by recent archaeological excavations at a site of Indus Valley Civilisation.
Prehistoric Origin of Curry
Established duration of Indus Valley Civilisation spans from 3300 to 1300 BCE. One may say that this was the golden age of Bronze Age India. Until recently, historians have few evidences to know about the food habits of these people when significant development came up from the study of starch grains at the North-Indian site of Farmana. The granules were extracted out of pot vessels, dental remains of human burials and stone tools.
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