Year: 2009

  • The Esplanade

    Koramangala meets Calcutta at  The Esplanade, a restaurant serving Bengali (traditional and Anglo Indian contributions) and Continental cuisine. This lies between China Pearl and Vicky’s, on the one way connecting Inner Ring Road with the road from Forum to National Games Village. (refer either of the two links for a detailed route) You’ll find it on the right, a few buildings after the Unilet showroom. Parking shouldn’t be too difficult to find. Don’t be misled by the dark, vacant ground floor, the restaurant is on the first floor, and the entrance is through a small door that you might miss at first glance. Check out some great posters of the Calcutta that was, on your way up.

    We reached at half past seven and easily managed to get a cosy table, that gave a nice road view, but you might want to reserve if you’re planning to go after 8.30.

    “Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French; sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek; soy sauce makes it Chinese; love and divinity make it Bengali.” so said Pandit Ravi Shankar, according to the menu. Also as per the menu, The Esplanade tries to amalgamate the indigenous Bengali cuisine with the European influence that was acquired during the pre independence days. A modest tribute to famous restaurants, like Peliti’s and Firpo’s, that dotted the original Esplanade.

    The place doesn’t serve alcohol but has quite a few mocktail choices, including a Regent Rave, their version of an aampora sharbat. But the chilly Bangalore weather made us skip that. We’d have liked a soup but there seemed to be only a couple of options (veg, non veg soups of the day) so we decided to go for a starter – Paddo Pataye Kasundi Murgi, which is “a perfect mixture of chicken and raw mango mustard steamed in a lotus leaf parcel” Unless you have a huge problem with the mustard flavor, you’ll love this spicy, tangy mix. A plate has six portions, perfect for a group of 2-3. The Chicken Kabiraji, meanwhile, is in my watchlist. There are quite a few veg options and even some salad options. They give you papads while you’re waiting.

    For the main course, you could choose from a range of Continental stuff, with plenty of veg and non veg options – chicken, lamb and sea food. We, however, decided to explore the Bengali dishes. The beginning of that section rivals the Bay of Bengal in terms of the aquatic life represented – at least about 25 sea food dishes!! From this humongous set of options, we chose the Elish Machher Roast , “boneless hilsa roasted in grill topped with spicy tomato gravy and served with steamed rice” From the relatively small selection of chicken and mutton dishes (4 each) we selected the Esplanade chicken curry, “a contribution by the Anglo Indian community to Bengali cuisine”  Thanks men 😉 Ok, before you grass eaters mutter, you have over a dozen choices too.

    To go along with that, you could choose rice (steamed or two veg options or the elish pulao, which I have earmarked for later use) or bread options. We ordered a basket of loochi (poori for our limited consumption purposes 🙂 ) which had 3 of them, so we also ordered a Tinkona Paratha, “whole wheat bread roasted in ghee”. You could also try a hinger kachori or a hathh roti.

    We began with the loochi, the chicken curry was quite good, but the fish stole the show, its combination with the steamed rice is finga lickin good. Yes, I did do that. If you’re calorie conscious, leave your consciousness at home, that fish dish had an entire container of ghee devoted to it. If I hadn’t seen the desserts beforehand, I might have placed a repeat order. They also gave us amshotwer(sweet mango) chutney, which offset the effects of the chillies i had munched.

    And thus we reach the last (but never the least important) page in the menu. In addition to the regular Bengali desserts – rasgulla, rasmalai and mishti doi, there’s also chhanar jilipi, fried natun gruer ice cream, tia maria mousse (though the last two weren’t available) and Mishti Chaanar Paturi, “sweetened and flavoured homemade cheese roasted in grill”, which I ordered. D ordered a Baked Rashogolla, “tiny rasgullas baked with thickened milk and topped with dry fruits”. It actually turned out to be one big rasgulla. Unfortunately, though the desserts weren’t too bad, they didn’t live up to our expectations, especially after our experience in Koramangala’s other bengali restaurant – Kolkata.

    All of the above cost us just over Rs.1000. I’d recommend a trip to the place, preferably after skipping a meal, since you’d be tempted to eat a lot. You could also try the weekday lunch buffet priced at Rs.215, and get a valid excuse for sleeping in office. 🙂

    The Esplanade, #151, KHB Colony, 1st Floor, Koramangala 5th Block. Ph: 40927878/7888

    Menu and Photos at Zomato

  • The Axe effect

    It happened exactly a week back. D got to know about it first. I was surprised, especially since I was the one really affected and should’ve known first. I had to share this since you shouldn’t wonder if this site should disappear suddenly at some point. You should know that it could happen to anyone.

    It was a rude shock, especially having worked hard for over six years. Forget the long stint, it’s as though all that you’ve done has suddenly been reduced to nothing. I wondered if it was because of my recent online activity splurge, but got to know that it wasn’t personal, other people were affected too.

    And it’s thanks to those friends that the nightmare didn’t last long. Help started pouring in. After a few checks, I realised that though the site had been hacked, it was a relatively simple hack, and thanks to some help and some great virtual hand holding, I got the site back on in an hour.

    until next time, the great escape 🙂

  • Wave Content

    And just when Microsoft seemed to get moving on Google, with Bing, its new search engine (in case you haven’t heard) with a $80-100 million ad budget, and bundling the real time social search engine OneRiot with IE8, Google comes right back with what could potentially be a game changer for a whole set of services, including Facebook and Twitter, in addition to the obvious mail, and search services. Last week, most of the web world were giving raves for Google Wave. In many ways it took the zing out of MS’s announcements.

    Look no further than Mashable’s Google Wave guide for details. To summarise, Google Wave combines email, chat, IM, wikis, social networking and many other potential uses. A ‘wave’ is a conversation thread that can feature one or more friends and even bots (that can source and modify information, communicate with users etc) and have documents, videos, images, maps etc, there’s drag and drop file sharing too. It can be modified by any participant, who can also add other participants and all this and can even be taken outside to say, a blog. And all this is real time, and really real time, where I can even see the other participant/s typing.  There are also gadgets (like Facebook apps) built on the OpenSocial platform. (so if someone develops a Scrabble gadget, we can play a multi user game live, and maybe add photos of our playing while at it). And there’s an API for developers to build more and more applications. To really understand what the fuss is all about, check out the video. Its way more than an email+real time communication and collaboration  tool on steroids. But with all this content, Google really needs to have a lot of storage space.

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

    Wave seems to be aiming at turning the entire concept of social networking on its head. Instead of a single service (Facebook/Twitter), a conversation could be started on anyone’s Wave interface, participants dragged in, and new content created and collaborated upon, and then taken outside. Take a few Google products, for starters – Blogger, Google News, Picasa, YouTube and imagine what one could do with real time collaboration on these. Create a post, have live comments, and then post it. Wait, maybe I won’t even bother to post it!! I am wondering what sort of privacy settings would happen here, would we able to create groups (like say, FB) and set different criteria for different sets?

    Now, look outside Google, say Twave – Twitter + wave, that uses a Tweety Google bot to display your entire Twitter feed on Wave, where you can archive it, thread conversations and so on. Imagine what this could do to say, news reporting. Live wikis, with witnesses collaborating to create authentic news stories, and the crowd being the check and balance.

    Gmail is addictive, and many users usually neglect their other ids after they become used to the functionality of GMail. If Wave does deliver all the above, then the season’s favourites – Facebook and Twitter really need to look over their shoulder, more so, because the new stream creator is not just another player, its Google. There’s another aspect I am thinking about. Mashable’s testing report states that “Central to Google Wave’s interface is search – you create specific searches based on not only keywords, but activity, history, person, and more.”  Unlike FB and Twitter, GMail users are used to ads, if Google Wave starts off with ads, the resistance to it might not be a lot, especially if they’re of the useful contextual+semantic kind. Twitter was called a protocol (Seth Godin, I think), perhaps the protocol standards have been upped.

    Meanwhile, though i think that Google Wave is a great piece of work, as always, I am also worried about Google being the beginning and end of my web experience. There’s just too much power there. 🙂

    until next time, surf the wave

  • Liberation.. deliberation

    PD*28939360

    It’s been a couple of weeks since this image was THE news item on all forms of media. It’s stale news now. Like most people, yet unlike them because of the descriptions, Velupillai Prabhakaran was a different person to different people – many people here associate him with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, to most Sri Lankan Tamils he was a messiah, to the Sinhalese, he was a ruthless killer, and so on.

    A day before this photograph was released, Rediff had a very interesting slideshow on him, with a set of photos that showed a completely different side. A married guy with children, who would’ve celebrated his 25th wedding anniversary later this year. Within a day of the above photo being released, the bodies of the family members (except Charles Anthony, who was killed a few days earlier) were also found, within 600 metres from where Prabhakaran’s body was found, all with gunshot wounds on their head.

    I couldn’t help but spare a thought for the man. The person that existed, perhaps forgotten, beneath the persona. If this article is to be believed, a persona that was created by India. In his last moments, if the cliched ‘whole life flashing before the eyes’ happened, what would’ve been his thoughts? Was it that of the persona – the crushing sadness that a collective dream, of which he was the keeper, had been left unfulfilled? Or was it that of the person – the despairing helplessness of someone who suddenly realised that it was all over, and wondered whether dedicating a lifetime to a cause was worth the life he had taken a long time ago – his own.

    until next time, the purpose of it all….

    image courtesy: The Telegraph

  • Inside Intel

    A video that was shared yeterday on Facebook by a friend got me to check out Intel’s latest global campaign – Sponsors of Tomorrow. I then remembered that a few days back I’d seen a half jacket (a page takeover on pages 1, 2) in TOI, which talked about the same thing though it seemed a cobranded effort with TOI called Innovators of tomorrow. [Disclosure: I work for the Times Group.]

    The campaign videos on YouTube were quite interesting. In addition to the ‘Rock star’ and ‘Oops’ TVCs, there are also videos of real employees at intel (is that the same Ajay Bhatt referred to in the Rock star video?) and an interactive ‘In the future i want..‘ which featured random people interviewed at the Times Square, and billboards which displayed these ‘ideas’. I was a bit intrigued by the campaign, and a Google search took me to the press kit and the official site.

    While the tagline is ‘Sponsors of tomorrow’, the campaign’s communication strategy seems to be two pronged – one, to expand on the line, and show what happens behind the scenes and how through innovation, they aim to be the ‘sponsors of tomorrow’, and two, to promote the people behind the technology. What got me intrigued was the execution.

    The single line take outs from the videos were – “Our big ideas aren’t like your big ideas”, “Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars”. While the videos are indeed funny and convey the perspective clearly,  I wonder if those are the kind of statements, that will really inspire people to send in ideas. From the Innovators of Tomorrow effort and the website, there seems to be an agenda of interactivity, since it calls for ideas.

    On innovation and technology. Somewhere, hidden in the press release, I saw a sentence that amounted to “Its not technology, its what technology can do for them that’s important to people”. It’d have been great to see Intel expand on this and show consumers what Intel technology has made possible and what it is attempting to make possible. The global site wasn’t very impressive. “You on tomorrow” is the interactivity effort there and I promptly filled up “in the future I want__________” with “websites that load faster” and that wasn’t being frivolous. Maybe I’m reading too much science fiction, but even the 2128 Delhi video wasn’t very futuristic – holography and body scan after 19 years isn’t exactly the kind of advancement a bleeding edge  technology giant like Intel should limit its imagination to, IMHO.

    People behind the technology. Funny videos and self deprecating humour is great, the point is made. But if they wanted to showcase the people behind the efforts, this seems to be a better thing to have promoted – employee blogs. (the first comment is worth a read) And better ways using different platforms to get the people working on the technology to share how the technology they work on helps improve consumer experiences, lifestyles etc. That might generate a little more involvement than ads showing how Intel’s rock stars are different, and interactive games that deal with suiting up an engineer!! As a consumer this just made Intel geekier for me. What happens inside Intel is  definitely important, however, what it does to life outside could’ve been a more effective communication from an interactivity perspective. What do you think?

    until next time, I don’t think Intel will sponsor tomorrow’s posts 😉

    The views expressed here are solely mine, that really should go without saying. But we live in an evil world. 🙂