• Yana Sizzlers

    The post title is going to get me a lot of traffic! If you’re among those who are hoping to see the “actress’” videos, really sorry. This is about a restaurant in Koramangala. Hot stuff, but of the food kind, though my tee was a hat tip to the actress. 😀 For those who are here for other drooling reasons, Yana Sizzlers is a chain based in Pune. Yana means ‘come again’ and you can stop sniggering! The Bangalore version is on 60 ft Road Koramangala, just after G K Vale – the same road as ‘Flambe‘, China Pearl, Vicky’s Tava Lounge, Oye Amritsar, The Esplanade etc. Parking for 4 wheelers may not be very easy, but there are a few side lanes around. (map)

    The restaurant has seating on two floors. The upper level seemed a little less crowded in terms of space and people, so we chose that. The seating is comfortable and they have puzzle tablemats that will help you while away time in case you are tongue tied.

    You can take a look at the menu on Zomato, though the Continental cuisine was completely missing in the menu we were given. We decided to start with the Scotch Broth. The guy who took the order seemed confused about it, and brought back another person who seemed to easily know more about the menu. We were told it would be creamy. It turned out thick but not creamy with barley, potato, pieces of mutton, and garnished with fried bread crumbs. Quite tasty if you add a dash of pepper to it.

    For the main course, I chose the Spicy Chicken Square and D opted for the Chicken Kebab Masala. You might want to try out the Barbeque sizzlers, which are a specialty of theirs. I somehow missed the ‘spicy’ in my dish and asked for the hot chilly sauce. The second guy (from earlier) then turned up to point it out and I shifted to the BBQ sauce. D chose the Garlic Pepper Sauce. The Spicy Chicken Square indeed lived up to its name, with prominent pepper flavour, and juicy boneless chicken. An excellent dish if you can be patient and wait for it to cool a bit. D’s kebabs turned out to be more like manchurian though. Not a bad dish, but just wasn’t what we expected. But it wasn’t very spicy, and D was sober, so she didn’t complain and therefore escaped unhurt. This is a good time to mention that the usual cabbage leaf base is missing. I’m not sure if that somehow contributes to the increased cooling time. However, despite that absence, there wasn’t much of burnt food thankfully.

    The service is quite prompt, though some of them do seem a little out of sorts. The meal cost was just less than Rs.900. Our favorite remains Tangerine in Indiranagar, and Kobe is around on a parallel road in Koramangala, but this is worth a visit too.

    Yana Sizzlers, #145, 60ft. Road, 5th Block, Koramangala Ph: 25505538

  • Personal Brand

    ’10ways to unlock your personal brand’ would guarantee hits, but the problem is that I can’t bring myself to write it. That’s what the post is about.

    The title is because the post is related to me, and the raison d’être of the blog. To give you a quick update, I have been considering various employment options in the last couple of months – not just ‘the next job’, but even at a ‘consultancy vs job’ level. Given the options, I believe I’ll be able to put that to rest next week, at least for the medium term. Since the blog’s existence played its part in providing me these options, I thought it deserved a ‘take stock’ post.

    I had always intended this to be a resting space for my ideas and perspectives. But I have realised that the blog is at best, a strategy, and not an objective. The objective is to tell the world that I have perspectives on the areas I specialise in – brand and social. Notwithstanding my interest in these areas, it has been driven a lot by the same blogging discipline that has kept the personal blog alive for more than 8 years now.

    However, the autopilot discipline, in cahoots with my general nature, has kept me writing more for myself than an audience, which completely goes against the objective. It not only affects the content generated, but the brand/communication strategy as well. I have followed a ‘build and they will come if they are interested’ approach, something that I advise brands and publishers not to do in an era of abundance. Also, I rarely publicise posts beyond a single tweet/ LinkedIn status, and refrain from baiting. (brand or individual) In fact, I very reluctantly started sharing my own posts on GReader only a few weeks back. Bad strategy in the era of aggressive personal brands.

    This thought had been gnawing at me for a while, but hit me when the afaqs guest post happened, and the reactions started coming in. This is a good time to mention that left to myself, the article wouldn’t have happened. It took consistent ‘do it’ pushes from the ever kind and wise Vijay Sankaran for the article to see the light of day. It took just a little more time than the average post to be written, but the amount of people who sat up and took notice was many multiples more than anything this blog had seen. It has also led me to the question of identity and a single web location (unifying the blogs), but that’s for later.

    Considering that time is going to be my most valuable resource going forward, I will need to prioritise.  I experimented with tumblr and paper.li to see if i could produce more content in lesser time (to be used here) and leave ‘heavier’ writing for platforms with more reach. But I realised I would just be adding to the noise, and not being original at all. I like what I do here, and won’t stop. What I might have to do is skip a week once in a while so that I can also meet the objectives I had initially set for myself. Interestingly, the immediate trigger for this post was that while I was writing the original post for this week, i realised it could make a decent article elsewhere. 🙂

    In case you have reached here, I have a question. If you could change something about the posts here, what would it be? Shorter? Better scope for debate? More personal/topical examples? Let me know.

    until next time, happy I-Day 🙂

  • Thought Bubbles

    Compassion is a value I strive for, but that does not make it any less a strange thing. It doesn’t help that we are in an era where it has been simplified to a Like and an RT. But each time I mock that these days, I am forced to acknowledge that I have absolutely no right to get judgmental.

    In the case of personal relationships, where circumstances require me to show compassion, I have caught myself holding on to baggage, and playing judge on whether the people in question deserve to be the recipient of any compassion. I doubt whether it is supposed to work that way.

    With people I don’t know, I wonder if the miniscule I offer in terms of time, money, thought, energy will amount to any significant change in their lives. If it does not, how different is it from clicking a button and transmitting the message to an audience? Do they, after all, vary in intent?

    On both kinds of occasions, I have wondered why I am not able to go outside my bubble and do more. Perhaps I am afraid it will upset the careful balance I have created, afraid to tamper with the default detachment. One part of my mind cares, the other carefully weighs the pros and cons, shakes its head and moves on. I follow. Being unaware of the bubble is one thing, being aware of it and yet unable to do anything about it is quite another. Perhaps I have to first learn not to be judgmental about the self, but then I wonder if that’s what leads to apathy.

    until next time, kam passion 😐

  • UniApply

    When you have to sift through information about various colleges and courses, choose your career options and then apply, UniApply can be of help. In conversation with co- founder Ranjan Banerjee

    [scribd id=61843588 key=key-1eogp4m3mdxuj9ywz3uh mode=list]

  • Quarantine Papers

    Kalpish Ratna

    This book was an impulse purchase, a rare thing for me. The ‘trailer’ (not a synopsis) on the jacket hooked me, and thankfully, unlike a couple of cases earlier, this book didn’t disappoint.

    I think what takes it beyond a ‘thriller’ set in two ages is the layering and detailing, and that starts right from the author name. The book is credited to ‘Kalpish Ratna’, which is actually an “almost anagram” of the two original authors – Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan. This layering is present across the book and so forced me to pay attention to each line because of the nuances. I wondered why they had to use different fonts but a few pages showed me how sensible they were in doing it.

    The story too is interesting in itself and has Ratan Oak as a protagonist who leads a ‘double life’. Ratan has a submerged identity, that of his great grandfather Ramratan Oak, and is able to recall his life – events and people.

    The book proceeds to juxtapose the 1992 Bombay riots following the Babri Masjid demolition with the plague that first appeared in Bombay in 1896-97. And not just juxtapose but create a plot that links the two events and show how the attitude and behaviour of society are just different manifestations of the same basic feelings.

    The narrative pace never slackens. The detailing of characters is excellent, and the different pieces of the puzzle are made to fit, with attention to details. From characters in history like the Kiplings, Bal Gangadhar Tilak etc to Urdu poetry, and the amount of research that has obviously been done, this is a very unique book and a must read. It has been mentioned that this is their first Ratan/Ramratan Oak novel, and if they’re planning more historical juxtapositions, I’ll certainly be waiting to grab a copy.