(An old post which I wrote but forgot to publish it :))

…and then back on track now.

Does it ever happen that life appears to change for you in a bat of an eye? At times, making professional decisions over personal ones triumphs and sometime we need to take stricter and more futuristic decisions for ourselves which means leaving behind everything and starting from scratch. I am not sure if it is such a big decision for many since it is such a common thing to quit your job and enter the start up world. But for us, it was a Herculean decision. Yes Priyendra decided to quit Google and move ahead in life.

This itself was a colossal step in his life. But the interesting thing is that in front of him lay two options. One was to stay here and join a 3 month old start up in a core field where he would continue doing what he is best at and the other was to move to New York and join the 2 week old start up as a CTO. Yes! moving to New York came as a big shock to me but becoming a CTO of a small company kind of lured my husband.

There was a lot of back and forth. Priyendra went to New York to visit the company too. Thank God he went before Sandy struck the east coast. He came back pretty excited about the opportunity and the weekend Sandy hit the mainland USA, it also hit our lives. We had almost decided that we are moving to the east coast. I had started looking up apartments and jobs. I was gradually trying to get excited about the move too by watching a lot of New York based chic flicks.

After a lot more thinking, some Math and some emotional decisions, we have decided that we will not move out of the bay area and stay here with Scaligent!

As it is said “The Third Time is the Charm” and it was the Jainwals turn to pick a restaurant for the third meeting of gravy gurus. We picked ‘The Dosa Republic’. This is a new restaurant by the famous food truck owners of Curry up now, Akash and Rana Kapoor.

I picked this one up from the “hot new business” section on yelp. I was pretty sure from the start that the food would be good since I have heard great reviews on the curry up now truck.

The food is like south Indian street food with some different cultural flairs to it. The portion sizes are large. Two people could comfortably share a dosa and a starter. We ordered all the starters on their menu.

I liked the manchurian idlis and the uttapam nachos. I did not care for the Panko Crusted Bharwan (Stuffed) Anaheim Chili but really liked the kale wada sambhar and their samosa bits.
After liberally splurging on starters, we ordered main course. Everyone ordered different items. The orders were as follows:

1. Priyendra: Mysorean Masala
2. Priyanshi: Sinhala with Paneer
3. Atashi: Mumbaiyya
4. Vishal: Mumbaiyya
5. Arthi: Paisano
6. Chirag: Vegetarian Tangra
7. Deeksha: Purani Dilli
8. Asim:Chilli Chicken and noodles.
9. Aishwarya:Chennai onion masala
10. Saumil: Purani Dilli

We had sweet dosas for dessert but the gulab jamun was unparalleled.
Almost all had fun eating the different kind of dosas but I thought Mumbaiyya was the best.

The decor of the place a little rustic with wooden tables and the menu on the chalk board somehow reminded me of Roma burgers in San Francisco. I think they also have their menu written on one.

Wish we had taken pictures of all the dosas. The only one picture that Aish took was :

.

The reservation was under my name and somehow the lady on the phone heard my name  “Apishi”

Do you wish for something you never had and before you grow old, you want to fulfill this wish of yours. Motorcycle was one such thing for Priyendra. He has been wanting to ride a bike since times immemorial, it was a great bike and he ran in a couple of accidents, but luckily he got legal help to explain who’s held responsible for a motorcycle accident so he can defend himself.

It has been a couple of months with Lalli now and we have been having loads of fun and of course we got a lawyer from the site https://valientemott.com/practice-areas/motorcycle-accidents/ online, so we are covered in case of an accident. We rode it twice to the city (San Francisco) and a couple of times in the South Bay. Priyendra rides it to Google most of the days.

Few more pictures :
while we were at the dealer and other one when Lalli was parked in the garage

I get quite frustrated by bad journalism. As a amateur hobbyist on matters writing related, I care deeply about how people report things. In this post when I say bad journalism, I am not talking about the choice of subject matter (which is frequently and worthily criticized) but the quality of the reporting. At times I am led to believe that no one ever proof-reads the trash that routinely gets written. Here are a few examples.

Anand also signed autographs for his fans during play.

After the session he was engaged in a question-answer session with the participants.

The media was told not ask any questions.

This is taken from here (Rediff). Apart from being grammatically incorrect, the above excerpt also seems stupid. What use is a question answer session when you can’t answer questions? I am sure what it means is that the session was moderated and only pre-selected questions were allowed, but Mr. Reporter would you mind saying so? This in fact, is not even the most egregious example of its kind and such cases are quite bountiful.

Another example is this article here (The Hindu). This article talks about a letter that the President of FICCI wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, arguing for the removal of clauses 17(a) and 17(b) from the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill. While the article does a reasonable job of summarizing the arguments contained in the letter, it fails to answer the most basic follow-up question that any reader would have. What do those clauses say? If you read the full article, you can with some effort, piece together a hazy picture of those clauses. But isn’t it much better to just tell us about them directly?

I suspect that some of these practices are left-overs from the print era. There used to be a time when newspaper real-estate was costly and every word had to be chosen with care. In the online world, articles ought to be more detailed. News sites should make full use of the riches that the WWW offers and hyperlink content together in a way that curious readers can jump right into the middle of an issue and understand it without having to rewind.