Tagged: friends

Dinner with Greeks


Its a bit late for this post, but whatever.

Ragesh and I had been thinking about calling over some of our Greek friends for an indian dinner at our place for quite a while now. Actually Kostas, Yannis and Periklis have already invited us twice, and we had promised them that a dinner would soon be held at our place. That was like a quarter back, and so it was kind of embarassing. Part of the delay was the fact that our house never seemed to be in a hospitable shape. Another reason was that I was not very sure if all my room mates would be okay with such a dinner.

After the quarter got ever, we really didn’t have an excuse coz we had ample time to clean up the house and sort things out. So finally Ragesh gave out the invitations for Tuesday night. I had a paper deadline coming up, and Manish and Mac were both busy with some of their stuff, so despite the summers it looked as if the dinner was a mistake and would end up in a miserable disaster.

We had chalked out an ambitious menu — poori, chhole, dal makhani, kheer, raita, pulao — the works. However, till tuesday evening it wasn’t even clear who was going to do the groceries, who was getting the drinks and who was cooking what! And most importantly, the house wasn’t ready either. I came back at around 6 pm on Tuesday, the invitation was for 9. After that it was just a race against time!

But it was fun! Ragesh cleaned up the kitchen while I arranged the living room and cleaned out a whole lot of trash. Then I made chhole and dal makhani, while Ragesh cooked Pulao. I made the dough for the poori, Ragesh rolled them and I fried them. We took off kheer because of lack of time, but we still managed to get the Raita in place.

In the end, it didn’t turn out to be bad at all. Infact, the guys loved the food and I was really glad to see that we almost ran out of food that day! :D We had some wine and apple juice for drinks. But the really interesting part was that we ended up watching “monsoon wedding” with the greeks! Dubey ji totally impressed those guys too!! More on the greeks some other time

Happy birthday to moi!


For a change, I had fun on this birthday! I mean, not that I didn’t have fun on my other birthdays, but somehow I never felt like celebrating birthdays. I mean, what is it so special about a birthday? Why is it always a “happy” birthday?

I guess the spirit behind the notion is that there are people around you who feel you are special and important and that this day is to celebrate that feeling, and to enjoy in the company of loved ones. But to me it often seems that this meaning has been long lost. These days, the “happy” birthdays are just associated with birthday parties where you go with a present, eat drink and then come back. How often to do we **actually** feel happy for a person on his birthday? How often do we really find our selves thankful to have enjoyed the company of a person, and thus want to celebrate this occasion?

Atleast to me, it seems that this is happening less and less. Nevertheless, I had a great birthday. Its actually on 21st June (which, I like to tell everyone but most people don’t appreciate, is the summer solstice too… or was it equinox?? well something!), but since 20th was a sunday and a treat from Himanshu for his internship in Qualcomm was also due, we decided to celebrate on 20th evening itself.

The day didn’t start off very well, since I was slogging on this paper but not making much progress. Then finally sometime in the afternoon I made a breakthrough which lifted my spirits and put me in the mood for a party. Initially we were thinking of going to an Indian or Thai restaurant, but since we didn’t have a car, we really didn’t have many options. We ended up picking California Pizza Kitchen; a) coz we’d never been there, and b) coz i’d always wanted to go in there :-D We made it to CPK at around 9:30 or so. Nishant was generous enough to sponsor the drinks. We started off with a bottle of red wine. I still haven’t been able to develop a taste for wines

Abhishek Thakkar


I ran into [[http://home.iitb.ac.in/~thakkar|Abhishek Thakkar]] online today — an old school friend. It was nice talking to him after quite a while. He’s a strange character. Weighs around 300 pounts, more than 6 ft tall, he has a passion for computers and a unique sense of humour. Back in our IIT preparation days, he would ring us up late into the night and pretend to be Spock (Star Trek)!! But he’s come a long way since then. He got into civil engineering at [[http://www.iitb.ac.in/|IIT Bombay]], but never quite was into his department. And then he shocked everyone by winning the [[http://www.iitb.ac.in/~moodi/|Mood Indigo]] personality contest!!! After that, Thakkar was on a roll. He went on to be runners up at Malhaar as well. Off late, he’s been doing design. Right now he’s gearing up for a masters in design. Really interesting fella (check out his [[http://thakkar.blogspot.com/|blog]])