Month: March 2016

  • The Riverside Bar & Kitchen

    First published in Bangalore Mirror (That headline! It wasn’t me)

    The name Riverside, in Whitefield, might bring to mind visions of a frothy water body that’s infamous in the area, but thankfully the restaurant’s ambiance does a great job of helping us tide over it. The canoe near the entrance, the superb lighting, and a very enticing bar are some of the highlights of a décor job well done. Unfortunately the section upstairs wasn’t open for service, but our outdoor seating – with the bar on one side, and more standard liquid (water) flowing on the other – was quite pleasant. The other element worth a mention is the music. It was quite the ‘mixtape’ of 80s and 90s. From Lionel Richie to MLTR and “Nothing’s gonna change my love for you” to “How Bizarre”, it was quite a trip.

    In keeping with the name, the menu does have a lot of focus on aquatic food. Add to this multiple cuisines – Coastal, North Indian, Chinese and Continental – and you have a menu that travels really far, and across a lot of pages. The predictable problem with that though, is the unavailability of dishes. The good news is that, thanks to the elaborate menu, there’s still quite a lot of choice.

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  • Convenience & Choices

    It’s difficult to accuse Mashable of being thought provoking, but I have to admit that “After Harper Lee, will there be another literary recluse?” made me think. The article also brings up JD Salinger. Both the concerned books are personal favourites. Bill Watterson immediately comes to mind in this context of people who did not care for an encore. I can relate more to him because it seems more recent. I discovered the works of Harper Lee and Salinger decades after they became the classics they are.

    It is indeed tough to imagine creators of this era shying away from the public eye. In fact, I’d be surprised if they didn’t do exactly the opposite. Most of the world would consider that silly! After all, if one is pragmatic, it is easy to see that most art is business. And even if the business is niche, the select target audience needs to hear of it. Even in the cases that it isn’t a business, they are a method of self expression, and in the era of social media, sharing that point of view and starting a debate on it is easy and cheap. Just to clarify, this is not about being  judgmental about it, after all these are choices. (more…)

  • City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

    William Dalrymple

    After finishing the book, I was surprised that it was only 339 pages, there is so much in it, and unsurprisingly so. The author mentions in the prologue that depending on whom you ask, the number of Delhis that have existed before the current one is anywhere between 7 and 21, and it is to his credit that he has probably brought out many, many of them. Not in the way of the structured and stratified thirty feet wall that represents 3000 years of continuous occupation to which Professor Lal points and says “The whole history of Delhi is there”, but through different journeys.

    There is clearly a preference for the ‘Twilight period’ – between the Mughal decline and the British ascendancy, but there are quite a few pages spent on the Mughal golden age, Tughlaq and other pre-Mughal Delhi rulers, right up till the Mahabharata’s Indraprastha and before, and the post Independence era. It must be mentioned that despite the seriousness with which the author has approached the content, his wit shines through! (more…)

  • A shift in the world order

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    (via)

    It has been a while since I wrote about nation states, or notion states as I call them. Now is not really a good time to bring this up in India, but hey, it’s a free country. Oh, wait! Therefore, let’s talk about Apple vs the FBI on where digital security ends and national security begins. (via The Guardian) Washington-Silicon Valley shadowboxing as the publication puts it, and Apple has the support of Google, Facebook and Twitter. [If this were happening in India, by now Tim Cook would have probably been lynched by a mob, and charged for sedition – now a very loose word that can be applied to even things such as sneezing while watching the Republic Day parade on TV]

    This battle is interesting as it is because it will set a precedent for an individual’s privacy rights, and is being fought between the world’s most valuable corporation and the world’s biggest (one might even say only) superpower. On one side, we have and entity whose decisions affect billions of lives around the world, and on the other, a country marked by boundaries but influencing policies that affect an equal number. Phenomenally intriguing and layered as this is, I actually find it riveting because I see a couple of my favourite narratives coming to a boil. (more…)