Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Meghna tagged in her post on good places to eat in NY so now I have to recommend 5 places to eat in my location. Since I have been traveling a lot and have been in various cities over the past few years I am going to recommend good food places in different parts of the world that I liked.

Delhi:

Spent most of my life in Delhi but as far as restaurants are concerned I am not very upto-date on whats good. After all when you come back home after a year of eating restaurant food you want to stick with home cooked meals while you are at home. Anyways here are a couple of places that I really liked in Delhi:

1. Karnataka Food Center: This awesome restaurant is located at Sector 1, R.K. Puram. I have been eating here for the past 15 years (maybe more) and I love this place. It the THE palace to go in Delhi if you want some good south Indian food at a reasonable price. The decor is not the most classy but their food is heavenly. I really like the Onion Uttapam and Badam Milk.

2. Punjabi Dhaba’s: This is a generic entry for all the Punjabi dhaba’s located on any road going west of Delhi. These are usually small places with cots /small tables in front and while they may not look like much the food they serve is really good and reasonably priced. So if you are ever driving to Punjab/Gujarat/Rajasthan from Delhi and get hungry stop at one of these places and you wont regret it.

The best way to judge the quality of the food is to look at the amount of trucks parked outside as the truckers are the best judge of good food and if there are a lot of them around then the food is good.

Yes, their food is the really unhealthy, colestrol increasing and diet breaking swimming in butter and oil but it still tastes so damm good. 🙂

As a precaution if you don’t like spicy food tell them!! Otherwise they will make it really really spicy. And don’t tell them to make it mild as their mild is very spicy for most people.

New York City:

Have been there for almost 8 years now and I love the place. Its a food lovers delight with awesome restaurants everywhere. It is said that you can taste every cuisine in the world without leaving NYC and I agree. Some of these places are really good and here are some of my favorites:

3. Cafe Habana: This gem of a place is located in SOHO and if you like good Mexican food you will like this place. The food is cheap and really really good and their corn on a cob is to die for. Plus their service is really good. I have eaten at a lot of places where while the food is good the waiters/waitresses look and act like they are in a funeral but in contrast the waitress over here were friendly, cheerful and helpful.

The place is really busy so expect a wait when you show up. On weekdays its not that bad, though on weekends however the wait is a lot longer. One thing to keep in mind is that the larger your group is the longer your wait is, so don’t show up with a group of 15. The max I would take to this place would by 7 – 8 people, any more than that would be a bit difficult to fit in as the place is quite small. Another plus point is that they play some really nice music.

4. Lapalapa: This Mexican restaurant is located in the east village. I really like their brunch menu. They have a nice and friendly service with waiters that are ready to help you choose and don’t act like they would rather be doing something else. They have a heated room in the back with a glass ceiling that looks really nice when its snowing. Its sort of like sitting in a green house. If you go there, try and get seated in there. Its lovely.

5. Jaiya: This Thai place is located on the 28th street and has some really good Thai food with some good choices for vegetarians that don’t taste like boiled vegetables. Its a bit pricey but the food and the atmosphere are good.
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That ends my list of restaurants that I liked. Wanted to list this really good Irish place I went to in Kansas but can’t remember its name 🙁 But it was really good and I will update the post when I remember its name.

Now I get to tag 5 other people and I choose: Aditya (Delhi), Arvind (Bangalore), Sakshi (Bombay), Surabhi (Hollywood, FL) and Vinit (Hollywood, FL)

– Suramya

PS: For some really yummy cakes check out Wengers located in Connaught Place, Delhi.

As if there weren’t enough annoying things in the world, here’s a new one. This company called Emotive has created a product that allows the Caller to choose the ring tone on the receiving end. Yes you read that correctly. The caller can choose the ringtone on your cellphone. They have already released it for Skype where a lot of people have downloaded and installed it, and now they are going to release it for the mobile market on April 24th.

I don’t think its such a good idea as I can imagine so many abuses for this technology thats its not even funny. For example, telemarketers can set their tones to be an advertisement for their services and everytime they call someone that person becomes an advertisement for them. Or a person can set the receiver’s ring tone to something embarrassing to discredit them, think something like a loud horror movie style scream when the receiver is in a meeting or trying to sleep.

The worse part is that as far as I can figure it out the control is entirely with the caller, there is no way for the receiver to opt out of this “benefit”. Whats next? Overriding the sounds on my PC?

Source: MobileTechNews

– Suramya

The Virginia Tech shootings shocked the world with their savageness and they were totally unexpected. Now the entire world is asking questions about the tragedy and guessing how it could have been averted. They don’t realize the following basic fact: Hindsight is perfect. Now that we look back we know that the guy is a killer and we are re-evaluating all his information taking that into account and this gives us a totally different picture of the person as a deranged killer. Before the killings we would have painted an entirely different portrait of him.

The shootings made Cho into a instant celebrity, his works are now plastered all over the web with people commenting on them. His manifesto was broadcast on TV and is now available on the web for download. Guess what? Thats what he wanted… He wanted to be famous. Now the media gave him his wish. All for the all mighty ratings. Not saying that they shouldn’t have reported the crime. They should, with all the details. But publishing his plays was not required, neither should they have broadcast his manifesto. That didn’t achieve anything other than increase their ratings.

People worldwide are condemning the Virginia Tech officials and the cops for not reacting fast enough. Guess what its really easy for us to point out mistakes. We weren’t there. We didn’t have to make the decision based on limited info. The arm chair analysts all over the world are jumping over each other pointing out the failure’s in the system.

Let me tell you a bit of personal experience with terrorism. I was in Newark, NJ on Sep 11 2001. I was in class after just having landed in the US on the 10th. The WTC was attacked, the first tower fell followed by the second tower. I only found out after I got out of class and even then it took me over an hour to figure out what was going on because so many rumors were going around. We finally got to know the truth from watching the news and talking to Public safety officials. The first reaction of everyone was disbelief, followed by horror and panic. Thats the killer. If NJIT had been attacked after WTC it would have had been bad because no one had the entire story inspite of the best efforts of the administration.

In the Vtech shootings a lot of people initially thought that he was playing a practical joke when he walked in with the guns. Think about it, what would you have thought when you saw a friend/acquaintance walk in with something that looks like a gun? Would you have thought he was joking or that he was about to shoot you?

Reading online about the tragedy we find out that he was bullied in school, was depressed, was acoustic. That doesn’t excuse what he did. If he was bullied/picked on in school he should have dealt with it like a million other kids do. These are just excuses. We are trying to justify what he did. Guess what? Nothing can justify what he did. There are a million ways he could have dealt with his issues, he didn’t have to shootup innocent people to make his point.

As far as I am concerned people who chose violence against the helpless as his means of protest deserves the same label: barbarian. They are not the oppressed, anti-hero’s or fighting the establishment. They are barbarians. Period.

But for every Cho we have a hundred people like Liviu Librescu. Liviu died trying to protect his students from the mad man attacking them. He is the hero in this tale not Cho. However I only read about him in one paper ONE!. Everyone else is busy posting the body count, the blood bath photos and talking about Cho ’cause thats what sells the papers. The media should give people like Liviu more coverage. It shows that the world is not all bad and gives people hope.

My condolences to all the people who lost someone at this senseless killing. I hope you find some peace in the coming days.

– Suramya