Author: manuscrypts

  • Soul City

    The last Thai dine out didn’t really work for us, though it was at a (now former) favourite. The cuisine is a preferred one, and thus was seeded the idea to Thai up the loose ends. And that took us to the city within the city. Soul City in UB City (map), located within the Oakwood Service Apartments, right next to Shiro.

    Tastefully done interiors, and since we were early, we got the choice of seats. There are TVs too, in case you really run out of conversation topics. The windows are curtained, though I’d have loved to watch the skyline! In addition to this menu, (courtesy Zomato) they also have a well stocked bar. From the menu, the idea is all about good food without categorising it into specific cuisines or dining experiences. Not a bad thought at all, and it meant that we got representation from Thai, Vietnamese, Chettinad, Moroccan and many more cuisines in the menu.

    Not the regular modus operandi, but we started with a vegetarian soup – a case of coconut milk scoring over chicken. The Tom Kha Taohu was a spicy soup, and the tofu and mushrooms ensured that we didn’t miss the fowl play. I’d have liked it to be a tad thicker but that is probably just greed. The coconut milk theme continued in the main course too. We ordered the Penne with Red Curry Coconut Sauce and Gang Kua Subparod. (Chicken) The Penne dish was actually a veg dish. but they were nice enough to add chicken on request. The red curry coconut sauce was extra good thanks to the cheese and the mild spice made it a fantastic dish! The Gang Kua Subparod was very good too, again coconut based curry served with rice, but the fruity flavour (pineapple) that it is supposed to have was completely missing.

    We would’ve liked to order a starter too, but the reason we skipped that was the desserts section. I wouldn’t say it was a really tough call, but the Banana and Chocolate Pancakes were quite tempting too. However, in the presence of a higher chocolate power, it had to lose. The Chili Chocolate Mousse did look quite good, but turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, since the chili was totally missing. What replaced it was a vague tart flavour that also took away from the chocolate. 🙁

    All of the above cost us about Rs.1250. Despite the anti-climax, the service was quite helpful and prompt. The overall experience was quite positive, and we’ll definitely drop in again to listen to music that reminded me of mixtapes –  R Kelly, Cyndi Lauper, Dido….

    Soul City, Oakwood Premier Prestige, UB City, Vittal Malya Road Ph: 22348888

  • Oh, you rockstar you!

    Season 1, Episode 3 of The Dewarists brought together Indian Ocean and Mohit Chauhan, in “Maaya” and took me back to 2001. Goa. When Silk Route’s Dooba Dooba was still a popular number and I was loaned the Kandisa tape by my hostel neighbour A. After several months, he stole it back from me. (because I wouldn’t return it voluntarily!)

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

    As I watched the video on YouTube, I noticed the silver creeping into Mohit Chauhan’s sideburns. 🙂 I suddenly realised that it had been more than a decade since the yellow car slowly sunk into the water and it’s been 2 years since Asheem Chakravarty died. It made me wonder about succession plans for artists and their bands. Yes, some bands do keep evolving, their members change, but their peaks of popularity is restricted to a timeframe – a generation at best. In some cases, the music they created lives on even after them, though the members themselves may have moved on, within this life or beyond.

    But imagine, each member being able to pick out his own successor who is able to recreate the music as well as that extra something that made the band what it was. Imagine The Beatles now with 4 new members doing concerts with a new sound but retaining the DNA that made them great. Quite impossible no? It’ll never be the same.

    And that perhaps explains why they’re special. And it’s not just artists, it goes for people who excel across the spectrum. There is no succession plan they can make. They are unique, ‘single piece’. But then so are all of us, one of a kind. The difference is in scale. What they created left a mark on many more lives. They found something at a point in time that only they could have done, in such a way that anyone who experienced it was changed.

    We do many things on any given day, and many a time we are also rockstars in someone’s life, even for a brief period. Is that purpose enough for us or will we want further? Will we open ourselves to possibilities and grab the chance when it comes? Will we go beyond that and chase opportunities down? Maybe the way we answer this frames our life journey.

    Mann ka panchhi Tan ka pinjara 
    Bin maange ki jail

    until next time, rock sako to rock lo 😀

  • The Curious Case of 221B: The Secret Notebooks

    Partha Basu

    Partha Basu takes Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective Sherlock Holmes and shows him as well as many of the cases that Baker Street fans are familiar with, in a wholly different light.

    The primary narrator is Jit, who comes across the secret diaries of Dr.Watson, the original chronicler of Holmes’ adventures. One one hand, the diaries recount the stories that were never formally published, with ‘mid-words’ from one Emma Hudson, whose identity is also a little mystery, and which add multiple layers to the official adventures, and on the other, we have Jit’s story and that of his parents, and how they happened to be in possession of the diaries.

    Partha Basu seems to have done quite some decent research, though whether the tales he has chosen were the best possible for this exercise would always be debatable according to personal Holmes favourites. But the concept itself is very interesting and adds multiple perspectives to the iconic character of Holmes, and to a certain extent to Watson’s too. This is more so because Holmes has always been the one on whom the focus has been on, while Watson has been content playing the foil to the superb skills of Holmes’ mind. Here, they seem to share the stage almost equally in terms of focus with Watson even outwitting Holmes in one case.

    So ‘The Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘The Illustrious Client’, ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’, ‘The Speckled Band’, ‘The Three Students’, ‘The Solitary Cyclist’, ‘Abbey Grange’ are all taken apart and reset in terms of either characters or circumstances as events that happened either before or after the case was published are brought to light, Characters and their motives are suddenly shown differently, thereby revealing that all may not have ended well. The book also gives a hat tip to the unofficial Holmes work – written by one Seamus Hyde.

    I also like the expressed aim of the author – to get more people to read the original works of Sir Conan Doyle. Its not very easy for a Holmes fan to be told that the master detective may have been wrong more than once – either in the specific context, or for failing to grasp the larger picture, and that he may have had character flaws that were significantly worse than portrayed in the published works, but if you can live with that, this book is a very interesting read for Holmes fans. I quite liked the touch of Holmes (once) corresponding with Arthur Conan Doyle.

  • In the beginning…

    Over on the other blog, I had discussed one of my favourite 2012 trend decks – by Ross Dawson. Within that, my favourite trend was #4 – Institutions in question, in which he talks of political situations (Arab unrest), and the change in status of financial institutions leading to movements like Occupy Wall Street. The last slide is titled “Transformation not apocalypse”, in which he mentions the significance of 2012 for several reasons – from the Mayan calendar’s end of the word prophecy to it being hailed as the year of the Singularity – a subject that keeps popping up on this blog. 🙂

    I, for one, believe that we’re in for a transformation. But it’s not just the political, economic or even technological changes happening around us, I think we’re fundamentally going to change as individuals and how we relate to others – society. So it’s not just the economic and political institutions that will be transformed, but even social institutions – marriage, family, parenthood, friendship and so on.

    As the average human life span increases thanks to medical advances, the ‘rational’ reasons underpinning these social institutions will be under scrutiny. I have a feeling that technology will soon allow us to find surrogates for each of these, one way or the other. It isn’t as though the institutions themselves will disappear, but their importance and the solidity they had thus far enjoyed would diminish. What exactly the changes would be is something I’m still trying to imagine, but the effect of social networks on relationships is probably the beginning of this transformation, and we are likely to be known as the generation under whose watch it all began.

    until next time, a happy 2012 to you 🙂

  • Haramain

    The last time we’d visited The Chocolate Room (map) to ensure we completed the year’s chocolate quota, we saw a restaurant right opposite it, with a bright red signage, and something undeniably Mallu about it. 🙂 [Twas also nice to see the review I had done for Mirror pinned up on their board]

    So a couple of weeks later, we decided to drop in at Haramain. It belongs to the Imperial/Empire mould but without the combos. To compensate, they have a smattering of Arab dishes, and burgers, juices, shakes etc which is probably to get the Christ College kids to drop in. Here’s the menu.

       

    We succumbed to the cold and started with a Chicken Hot & Sour soup, which though hot and spicy, is hardly the dish I’d recommend here. Though we’d ordered the Mussels Dry (day special) and the Haramain Special Chicken Kabab, they were the last to arrive. We didn’t like the mussels much since it was more pakoda than anything else, with the crisp covering completely dominating the mussels. The chicken dish was much better, with the masala not being relegated to the outer layers. It was served sizzler-style, and quite spicy, and tasty.

    For the main course, we’d wanted a Brain Fry, but that was not available. So we asked for fish fry and Haramain Special Chicken Curry, with a couple of Kerala Porottas to start with. The Biriyani was also not available, so we had to settle for a couple of coin porottas. The Porottas were good, but the coin versions looked like they would have liked to spend more time getting cooked. The fishy fry masala was good, but unfortunately hadn’t seeped in enough. The Chicken dish was quite quite tasty – spicy and with a mild coconut milk flavour.

    In essence, nothing we’d really go back for, except probably, the Hosur Road view that included The Chocolate Room. All of the above cost us close to Rs.700.

    Haramain, #9/10, Hosur Main Road, Near Christ College, DRC Post. Ph: 41515151