FOSSKriti at Techkriti 2008 -- The IIT Kanpur Technical Festival

Cleartrip is supporting FOSSKriti – a 4 day mini-conference about Free/Open Source Software. It'll have technical talks, hands-on workshops, hackfests, and general geek chatter.

In an RoR workshop I'll be creating the OARS (Online Academic Registration System) website in 90 minutes – or something that can at least be called the OARS website. My friend Chaitanya will be giving a talk on Common Lisp.

If you're somewhere around, be there – it'll be fun.

Cross blog promotion :-)

Back with a bang at my Foodie For Life blog. Two posts (a) Tavaa (Bandra, Mumbai) and (b) Monsoon Malabaar @ Mocha

It's strange to be reviving my foodie blog while desperately trying to lose weight. Any guesses on the number?

Mumbai food sucks!

This side of the country has the suckiest food... ever. Period. No debate about that. It's not quite south, it's not quite north, it's some random "mash-up" gone horribly wrong!

My pet peeve is that Mumbaikars don't know what a sookha bhaaji means. Go to any wayside restaurant, order a plate of mix veg and you'll get potatoes, peas, and carrots floating around in a red coloured slurry. Order chana masaala, and you get boiled chhole (white coloured chickpea) in the same red coloured gravy. Paneer tikka masaala -- same gravy. Paneer handi -- same. Kadhai paneer -- ditto. Veg Kolhapuri, sounds like an authentic Maharathi dish, but no! Same goddam red curry! And it tastes awful. Yechh!

They make a mess out of North Indian food. Which is sort of understandable. But order any South Indian dish and the accompanying sambhar (which is the thing you need to get right) is a semi sweet, semi solid piece of mess.

Don't even bother trying out the paani-puri at chowpati -- sucks! I've had much better and much cheaper paani-puri in Kanpur. They're called gol-gappas up in the north and they can give the Mumbai paani-puri a run for its money. Fifteen (or twenty) bucks to six pieces seems to be the norm here in Mumbai. Back at IIT Kanpur (in front of Hall 3) we used to have five of them for Rs 2.50! Seriously. And after two years when inflation caugh up, the fellows increased their prices.... to Rs 3.00!

So you're only left with Marathi cuisine. Which, IMHO, is virtually non-existent. The only Marathi thing I've eater here is Missal/Ussal Paav which is not that bad. But, heck, how long can you keep eating dried peas and daal-moth in spicy curry?

The only saving grace in Mumbai is the rasta sandwiches and the rasta bhel. The sandwiches at that price simply ROCK! I'm especially fond of the ones I used to have right ouside Star TV's Mahalaxmi office.

And please don't tell me that I'm eating at the wrong restaurants. Sure, if I go to a swanky restaurant every time I need to eat my lunch, I'll probably get a better deal with the food. But swanky restaurant make not the local cuisine. ITC hotels all around the world are going to serve the same Dal Bhukhari. It's the wayside restaurants, the dhabas, the samosa-cutting corners which make the difference...