Fine Dining!

I took Megha to a french dining place called La Papillon in Saratoga on 8th October (yup, that’s right. Mark your calendars!).

Neither of us had been to an exclusive French restaurant before. If there’s one difference in our tastes, it’s the appetite for experimenting new meats! I was very interested to try out the Foi Gras or the Grain Mustard Crusted Rabbit with Golden Chanterelles and Tarragon or perhaps the Noisettes of Red Deer. However Megha hates all that meaty stuff and we decided to stick with fish.

The appetizer was the Ahi Tuna Sashimi with Grated Daikon and Soy Wasabi Sauce which being mostly raw was entrusted all completely to me 

The entres were Slow Roasted Wild King Salmon with Truffled Hearts of Palm “Risotto” and the Herb Crusted Halibut on Saffron Basmati Rice with Dill and Cherry Tomatoes which were very good.

And the desert, the Grand Mariner Souffle was the part I liked the best.

And last but not the least, the wine was also very nice. … And expensive. That’s when we also learnt what “corkage fee” meant.

Overall a good foray into fine french dining. But not a cuisine that either of us would die for. Perhaps Italian, or maybe Middle eastern would be something closer to our tastes outside of Asia.

You know, I wonder if the food we eat reflects the type of people we are. The Italian, Middle Eastern, and other Asian cultures have a flavor of chaos in them. The large crowds in small gatherings, the casual lifestyle… does stand out from a more refined attitude that the French or the English have historically known to have. Ofcourse all this is mainly historical and stereotypical at best. But somewhere down there, in between speaking in whispers with Megha lest the others at the restaurant get bothered, and those silent sips of wine, I realized that everyone eventually likes the food that they grew up on the best. And for me… french wasn’t it!

Hope!

We had been at Ravianna’s (Megha’s cousin) place last night. Three of his contemporaries, Ajit Shelat and Raghunath Iyer from IIT Bombay and Mukund (Emulex CTO) were also there. Ajit and Raghu were the early founding members of Switch-on which they successfully sold to PMC Sierra. They then went on to start the India operations of Nevis Networks and were here on work.

It was interesting meeting them over a glass of single malt. I’m always in awe of entrepreneurs. Contrary to what I used to think, they all come in different flavors. Ajit is a very quiet person. Raghu was very energetic and was passionately showing photographs of birds in his garden in Pune that he had taken. Mukund came across as someone eager to know about everyone and catching up with old friends. And I’ve met enough entrepreneurs to say that each is unique in his or her own way.

And so it was over a glass of single malt that I wondered what was that common characteristic that makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur. Surely there is something that binds them all. Perhaps its not seen on the outside. But somewhere in the far distance, when one gets to the top of the hill and jumps over to the other side, I have a feeling one will find all these entrepreneurs waiting there with open arms, knowing that you’ve figured it out…

The (Better) Half Iron Man.

The funny thing is, whenever I met anyone after this event and told them I completed a half iron man, their first reaction was, “why???”.

I would’nt blame them. The 1.5Mile swim, 56 miles bike and the 13 miles run definitely took its toll. Was eleventh out of the water after the swim. Lost count of the number of people who overtook me on the bike. But managed to maintain a consistent average pace of 17.5 miles an hour. Now the run was the hardest. I had injured my knee running in the San Francisco half marathon a couple of weeks earlier. Owing to that, I had almost decided to opt out of this one. But I figured I would walk it down in the worst case. And that is pretty much what I did through half of my run. By the time I finished, my left knee was really sore and I could barely sleep that night.

Here’s a link to the final result http://www.capitalroadrace.com/results/07_BK_AGEGROUP.HTM

It reminded me of the line from Grey’s Anatomy where Meredith says something like, “Sometimes I wonder why we keep hitting ourselves on the head with a hammer. And then I realize it’s because when the hammering stops… it feels real good!”. Touche!

Swim-Bike-Run: My First Triathlon!

Well, not exactly my first. I had run one back when I was in school. But I had not seriously trained for that back then. And had pretty much decided that the bike was not for me after that event.

Thanks to my poor memory, the pain of the triathlon back then was not there to prevent me from signing up for this one. The main cause of my madness in signing up for this one was that completing a triathlon figured in my list things to do before I was 30.

Of course, working at Marvell and on just about everything else, meant I had very little training before the event. the race was a 1.5K swim followed by a 40K bike and finally a 10K run. I was 2nd out of the water. 300th after the bike. And finished 298th after the run, managing to avenge my bike loss to two runners ahead of me.

A great experience and definitely addictive. Met Vikram Asrani, a batchmate from IIT Bombay. Hadn’t met him since IIT days (8 years ago). He said he planned to do the Half Iron Man which is twice this distance. I was impressed at his resolution. Decided I would or rather should do it too.

Hello World!

“Hello World!” Its funny how these two simple words have had an increasing significance in my life. Every programmer is taught to start a program which can print these two words. It’s an initiation, a first step, an eye-opener, a magician who opens the the doors to a world of awe and wonder. That’s how I felt when I was introduced to my first programming language: Fortran. And that’s how I still feel every time I learn a new programming language. And when you think about it, our lives our a chain of programs having its beginnings in such “Hello Worlds”. Every new beginning, every endeavor in our lives we start off in a modest naive way. The first time we learnt to walk, our first friend, the first date… we start it all in our own little “Hello World” way. Unlike computer programs, there’s never a structured way to doing this, never a book to tell you how it should be started. We just learn to put our own structure to it, our own syntax. The best or the worst of it all is that often we don’t remember how it all started .

Yet, such is life. The best things are the ones that grow on you without you really knowing it. And that’s why I am looking forward to this blog. It’s another of my firsts in the millions of firsts that I’ve done in my life so far. And like its predecessors, there’s always the excitement that this will lead to something…. maybe I’ll learn something new in web technologies, maybe someone will read this and will start another blog, maybe this blog will die and I’ll realize blogging is not for me. In any case, every beginning leads to something; and that’s what makes this exciting.

But for the moment, here’s to another new beginning, to my own little way of telling all of you online in two simple yet powerful words, “Hello World!”.