Year: 2009

  • Cilantro

    Cilantro is the Spanish word for coriander leaves, say some on the www. (D was sure, i had to check. Makes sense – she cooks, I eat)  It’s a restaurant in Koramangala, say Bangaloreans, and as it happens many a time, everyone’s right. To get there – at the Sony World junction on the Intermediate Ring Road (Koramangala – Indiranagar), take a left turn towards Koramangala 1st Block (when coming from Indiranagar), and keep going till the next signal (thats where the Maharaja restaurant is – map), take a left at the signal, keep going straight, and where the road takes a natural right turn, you’ll see the Halcyon complex, inside which is Cilantro. Two wheelers can be parked right outside, and there are enough bylanes around for four wheeler parking.

    Cilantro is promoted as a ‘sunrise to sunrise cafe’, serves North Indian and Continental, and is spread over a semi outdoor and indoor space. We hadn’t reserved in advance, and if you’re going before 8, you can just walk in. We chose to sit outside, and realised that the unspoken part was that the mosquitoes joined anyone else who came after sunset, for their dinner. 😐

    They introduce you to their salad, pasta, and barbecue counters, which you can go for, in case the regular menu doesnt appeal to you. We thoroughly ignored the salad counter, gave a cursory glance to the pasta counter, where there was a choice of 3 pastas, and deliberated over the barbecue counter, where there was fish, chicken, lamb, pork, calamari, prawns before settling for items in the menu. The chef is quite eager to help you around.

    The menu has sandwiches – both veg and non veg, with prices ranging from Rs.125 – 230, burgers, priced between Rs.130-155, both of which are classified under ‘any time’.

    During regular meal hours, you have a choice of half a dozen soups, including veg and non veg, appetisers – including a couple of prawn and calamari options, and kebabs. For the main course, you could choose from the continental options – veg/prawn/ beef/ pork/ fish/ chicken or the Indian section which offers decent choices in veg and non veg, with rotis and rice to go along with them.

    We started with a Chunky farm style chicken veloute soup. Though there is a creamy flavour to it, it’s actually made from stock (not milk) and has chunks of chicken. A very good soup, and they bring you a bread basket from which you could take white/brown bread, bread sticks or croissants.

    For the main course, D ordered a “Red Wine Chicken Breast”, (chicken simmered in red wine, glazed and served with home made pasta) which was recommended by the staff, and i went for a Char grilled pork chops with bbq sauce, (served with cous cous and buttered tossed vegetables) which was recommended by the web reviews. The chicken dish was very good, from what little i tasted of it, and was served with sphagetti. The pork chops were well amde and the gravy was fantastic. The cous cous complemented it well. There were ‘strange’ vegetables, which I didn’t bother figuring out, since I had meatier things to consider. 😉

    There were the regular Indian and Continental dessert options – gulab jamun, chocolate mousse and the like, the only one that stood out was a coconut caramel custard, but we decided to skip. They also serve liquor. Our bill came to just over Rs.750. After the meal, have a few polite smiles ready, since the chef and at least two more members of the staff ask you if you had a pleasant experience, and also inform you about a Sunday brunch. You could check out the place – pleasant and relaxing ambience, with loads of greenery, and decent food.

    Cilantro, PB 4708, No: 9, Drafadila Layout, 4th Block, Koramangala. Ph: 41102200

    Photos at Zomato

  • The foreign object

    A search for a sticker – part of the memorabilia of a concert from about 4 years back – ended up taking me over a couple of decades back. I wonder if this is a coincidence – a lot of writing about memories these days, or am i consciously watching out for these trips so i can chronicle them?

    The sticker turned up many interesting things, some of which I knew existed, and some whose existence I had forgotten – my old carnatic music books, letters and cards from almost a decade back, an autograph of Nonie – a favourite VJ from a long time back, some of you oldies might remember her :p , a few old board games – Scrabble, Monopoly, stickers used to label video cassettes!! And journals 1.0 – the stuff i used to pen down regularly, fun to read the stuff from half a lifetime away – seems more like a lifetime!! Each of these have several stories around themselves, and then some that I perhaps have forgotten.

    It sits in the corner of a room in Bangalore housing these nostalgis triggers – a 25 year old massive veteran, not even Indian in origin – a Samsonite.

    It came from the US in 1985, when my dad came back after a year long trip. We became friends immediately – no, not my dad, that would take more time – because in it were Lego – the soldier set I had specifically asked for after seeing a catalog, the View-master – with Superman disks, little robots that turned into cars, chocolates, remote controlled cars – one with a  wire which was chucked only years later for a wirefree one, and assorted things that mean so much in childhood – pencils and rubbers (yes, we were innocent enough to call them that then) and fluorescent colored marker pens with the ‘Made in USA’ inscriptions, battery operated pencil sharpeners – all you had to do was dip the pencil and it came out sharpened. As Arthur C Clarke has rightly said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and magic is anyway an acceptable commodity for seven year olds. The friendship came to an abrupt end, as soon as the above items were taken out.

    We then got separated – mostly thanks to the distances – at home, it was kept on the top of a large almirah. Several attempts were made to reconnect – primarily because it was suspected of housing more booty. These suspicions arose from the fact that a lot of ‘Made in USA’ gifts were given to self and others on special occasions long after Dad came back. But we were kept apart, scraped knees, beseeching innocent expressions and bruised ego notwithstanding.

    It took a decade for the ownership to be transferred, albeit without any words being exchanged. There were only a few remains of the treasure by then, and i wondered aloud who would be interested in such junk now!! I think it started coming down in the world from then on.

    It moved to the less homely, and usually less cleaner habitats – the engineering college hostels, and played host to everything from the T Scale and other engineering drawing set paraphernalia to my favourite sliced green chillies pickle that was stocked and used with bread to survive the toxic waste that was regularly served in the hostel canteen. College mates used to eye it lustily because it was also suspected of containing quite a few literary works that kids at that age read for erm, pleasure.

    Conditions seemed to be improving as it hopped on to a train and reached that paradise – Goa and spent two years there. However, its contents were nothing more interesting than sets of clothes, sometimes unwashed at that. To be noted that the lusty looks continued, as the literature was suspected to be growing in quantity and quality, and even to be technologically updated – floppy disks!!

    It might have been happy to be home, but that was to be only for a year, and it soon traveled with me to Bangalore. And that’s where I stare at it now, a proud, dignified brown giant of a travel case, with the scars and keepsakes of its old journeys – the ancient tag of its first flight, Lufthansa, the light discoloration that happened when it served as a dining table, the scratch marks courtesy Indian Railways, and inside, the books, the board games and the posters that I used to stick on the walls of my college room……

    I look at it and think absurdly how wonderful it would be if i could have  a conversation with it. It has seen how I have changed, and not changed. We could sit and laugh at the suspected literature and sigh wistfully at the loneliness of places away from home. We share memories. I realise that in many ways, it is like the room, but in many ways, its different – it has changed too, with me, as only a traveling companion in the journey of life can.

    until next time, traveling baggage, literally 🙂

  • Re: Search

    There’s this lovely Greasemonkey script that does the job of getting the best of both worlds- Google and Twitter, for me, but then it would be quite interesting to have Google bring out a microblogging search engine. (conjecture, but very much in the realm of possibility) In fact, with the recent pain I’ve been having with Twitter Search, it would actually be a big help. What this would do to Twitter Search and would Google add sense (in terms of ‘authority’/ relevance etc and indexing shared links) and Ad Sense to it, and would they share revenues with Twitter are a few questions that interest me. Let’s wait for the engine before we talk about that.

    Meanwhile, the Facebook vanity url brought out an interesting service from Social Too. According to RWW, Social Too is “extending our existing Facebook profile redirect URLs, which redirect yourusername.socialtoo.com to your Facebook profile, and adding an additional layer of analytics to the whole process. So tonight, you’ll be able to get a Facebook vanity URL and get the SEO benefits, but the URL you’ll want to hand out to all your friends will be your SocialToo vanity URL because we’ll provide statistics around those clicking on the URL, the browsers they’re using, where they’re located, and where they’re clicking from.” This would be a very useful resource for brands and even people, just ask any blogger who obsesses over page views 😉

    So what is Facebook upto? I just read that Facebook has rolled out a beta version of its news search that allows people to search their News Feeds and brings up results chronologically from their streams. It means that I can now easily see what my friends think about a recent event/product/service, and that can be notes, videos, status messages, photos etc. ( I did ask for that 🙂 ) The kind of search results that used to get displayed in the earlier avatar of search (people, groups etc) are now listed on the side. (via Tech Crunch) Wonder if it searches comments on the shared content too? Also, thanks to this beastly tweet from Karthik 😉 ,  I noticed that there is a location tab in my newsfeed now. Nothing much for now, but that is a start, and they could add events, among other things. For instance, since a lot of people are auto updating their Twitter status on to FB, I noticed quite a few with the #cisia tag, which is for an event happening in Bangalore. But both the friends using the tag are from Mumbai, so they don’t show up in the Bangalore feed. But yes, it is a start.

    So it does seem that Bing’s launch and the simultaneous bundling of One Riot with IE8 (One Riot is a real time social search engine) has shaken the search box a bit, especially in the realm of real time, though it could be just a coincidence. I have wondered why Bing didn’t launch with some One Riot like mechanism, that would really have been a differentiator, at least in the short term. A reason why I should use Bing, which seems the problem that MS should be addressing.

    Before we end, while we’re on Search, a couple of services I came across that you might want to look at. Hunch, a new discovery engine, from Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, helps you answer questions, basis its understanding of you from the questions it asks you and your further usage of the site. Yep, this is a decision engine which asks you a few questions first 🙂 Mashable has a full analysis on it. I’ve just started using it a couple of days back, and it takes some time to get used to, and what it can do for you is directly proportional to the time you spend on it. So the task for Hunch would be to keep nudging people to interact with it more.  While I did start with a simple question, for which the sponsored link was an obvious choice, i think the question-answer way of search gives sponsored links a lot of relevance. I like the me+crowd way of answering questions and I think it just be the kind of service that grows on you. The other service I came across is Aardvark (via WATBlog – and they’re giving away free invites) which again uses a community network (via IM) to answer your queries.

    Google has claimed that search is in its infancy and there are many avenues for new and existing avenues to explore. Now while Hunch and Aardvark seem to be great products, if Google puts its mind to it, there’s no reason why it cannot replicate either of the services, especially considering the data it has of me from its various services I am a user of. Also, Wave, when it happens, can build on the power of incremental networks easily.  If the microblogging engine does emerge it will give Google the path to real time too.  The advantage for now, is that once these services reach a certain usage level, a me-too product, even from Google will have to work hard on getting people to jump ship, simply because of the lethargy and the time, content etc already invested.

    until next time, the search continues

  • A Small detail

    This post is special and the devil is in the details. Just as it is in the logo, according to some. Anyway, the details are simple – this happens to be the 666th post. Sau, what better time than this to coin an evil ‘pachpun’ – since this is also the blog’s 100th 55 word post? 😉

    until next time, a devil-may-care post

  • Its trending, trending..gone

    Much of last week’s discussions online revolved around some interesting news about, well, Twitter 🙂 . From the Twitpocaypse scare (“it will happen because the unique identifier –a signed integer, associated with each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,647 which is the limit of signed integers. At this point many of the third party clients for Twitter could either malfunction or crash if they are not coded to handle this problem”), which has been averted, to the Harvard study that brought out, among other things, the fact that 10% users contribute to 90% of tweets, Twitter, as is it is prone to these days, has been in the thick of the action. Facebook did have its own share of the spotlight thanks to the vanity url, but let’s save that discussion for another day. 🙂

    But among all this, the news that interested me was that Twitter’s rate of growth – that has been giving graph watchers neck cricks so far, thanks to stellar growth, seems to have flattened drastically at 1.47%, even as Facebook continues to grow at a healthy 8.54%. Though I did expect this to happen at some point, the timing was quite surprising, especially since Twitter has been getting a lot of mainstream attention these days, and even brands (most recently Pepsi) have been promoting it. I wonder if I could correlate this with the recent usage of Twitter (self fulfilling trends and ‘Spymaster’, for example) which has contributed to the reduction of my usage considerably. Back to that in a while.

    When i read that statistic, I couldn’t help but remember the article I had come across a few days back titled “Why Things become unpopular“. “According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out.”  I have to wonder if this applies to Twitter, Facebook and the other similar services. Now, for this result to not apply, there has to be obviously some utility that makes it go beyond a fad.

    Facebook seems to be in quite a good growth phase (even excluding the high growth coming from its international success). Does this have anything to do with the relative non-anonymity inherent in the service and the relatively limited number of uses that a majority of its users care to indulge in. In other words, is the Twitter user’s relative anonymity (which might be dealt with soon with Verified accounts) and lack of a specific purpose proving to be a disadvantage for the service? The trends, aimless banter could thus be a manifestation of the latter? Of course, all this would be irrelevant if this is just a minor glitch in its growth story. But meanwhile, if users were signing on, not finding the service to be of value, and then conveying this in discussions (WOM), wouldn’t it result in such dismal growth? Also remember that a recent study pegged the non returning users at some 60%. I, for one am still a Twitter user, but my ‘conversion’ rate is a dismal 1 in 10. And in the remaining 9, at least 6 are fairly active on FB. Ok, maybe its just me. 🙂

    Moving further, I also wonder about the impact of this finding on brands and their strategies. Is it fair to assume that, earlier, in a relatively less connected world,  trends and fads took more time to be formed, and therefore had lasting power. In today’s hyper connected world, a viral phenomenon reaches the peak of its popularity in no time. So what does this imply for brands, keeping in mind the perspective that Twitter, FB, You Tube etc are great platforms for virals. I would also like to question the ‘inherent value’ of a fad in earlier times, compared to now. Is it lesser? Say, a particular hairstyle vs a viral video on You Tube? Apples and pineapples, but still..? Meanwhile, assuming brands provide a great value proposition, do they make themselves hotbeds of trends, or do they look for longer lasting cycles? Is a balance possible? Given the frantic pace of technological advancement and its impact on lifestyles, would the audience really care about trends stretched over a long time, so is maximum reach in minimum time the way to go? From a business as well as brand objective point of view? Would that signal the end of organic communities? This decision could have implications on brands’ communication strategy, if not anything else.

    until next time, trend setter or follower?