scoop
- Post author By Vishal
- Post date January 25, 2005
- Tags Dubai, iLevel.Blogspot, Photographs
Tag: Dubai
Mahdah is a little bit of Oman you can reach from Dubai without crossing any borders (in fact, if you wanted to get here from Muscat, you’d need a permit to cross the UAE-Oman border at Hatta).
It’s a pretty place; a bit flatter than what one is used to in Muscat, but compared to Dubai it’s like another world. As someone who grew up in a landscape like the ones represented below, and then moved to a city where ‘vertical elevation’ meant a skyscraper and nothing else, it was like coming home. Not quite the spectacular scenery you find, say, on the way to Yitti via the long route from Rustaq, or even the river-beds at Nakhl or Wadi Hoquain, but still worth the trip.
Plus the day was gorgeous, partly cloudy, partly sunny, partly magical.
(note: click on the individual pics to see larger versions)
To complete a triptych of food-related photos, the other day I popped down to the local Malayalee sandwich juice guy and ordered, among other things, a chicken fillet sandwich. Upon getting home, I was happy to see that they had labelled the boxes so I didn’t have to open them up and test them.
Of course, what he had written on the box did strike me as a little disconcerting at first:
There’s no accounting for taste.
Speaking of Malayalees and food, yesterday I was at the airport seeing someone off, when who should walk by but that uber-star of Malayalee cinema (not counting Shakeela, of course!), the media magnate of the meeshe and mundu, Mohanlal.
I had half a mind to shout, “Hey, your restaurant sucks!” but seeing as I was surrounded by literally hundreds of my more southern Malabar-coast cousins, all of whom swarmed towards the star the nanosecond they caught sight of him, I decided against it. I wouldn’t have lasted more than three seconds anyway. This was not the time to be going toe-to-toe with the (rather hefty) Mohanlal on the matter of how the prawn curry was inconsistent (not to mention the fact that his restaurant is called “Mohanlal’s Taste Buds” — I mean, what da fug?).
The Bangalorean parts of my genes told me that the proper thing to do was to write to the Deccan Herald, in a prolix letter that must begin, “Sir, Esteemed Yourself is being hailed by Humble Myself to bring to kind attention of All-Selves the matter of…etc, etc.”
The Mangalorean parts of me wanted to forget such trivial matters, and to discuss the price of gold in a lengthy inner monologue.
The Mumbaikar part of me told both of them to shut up.
This reminds me of the time I saw Nikhil Advani in Oxford Bookstore, Mumbai. I didn’t recognise him at the time (“Hmm, that guy looks familiar.” “Of course he does, he looks like Droopy!” “No, I mean, besides that…”), but I’m pretty sure I would have wanted to say, “Couldn’t you have just killed Shah Rukh quick and saved us all from a bitch of a migraine?”
Today in the supermarket I passed the condiments aisle, and legions of little Mohanlals grin at me from their branded pickle bottles, the contents of which could probably eat through steel in less time than it takes to toss an appam.
He may have millions of fans, and a restaurant, and his own brand of pickles, but I have Chicken Fellate Sandwich.
And on a final note, I drove by Simran’s Appa Kadai, and tell me, why on earth would I want to go to a restaurant that serves some Punjabi girl’s father kadai-style?
I’ve been designing the new site, hence the fewer updates to iLevel. Right now, after many, many revisions, I’ve come up with a main page design that I’m happy with. It was pretty tough because of the way I want the site laid out, less like a blog, but still run by a blog-like CMS. Samir has been hunting down any and all possible CMS candidates, and all the good ones require MySQL and PHP (which I know nothing about), but the list has been narrowed down to a couple.
I still have to see if my main page design actually works (it’s just a sketch wight now). It is theoretically possible, but will require some work, especially on the CMS’s end. Thankfully, with CSS, I have no fears about the main page being visually possible. If this was a few years ago and I had to do it, the only option would be Flash, which I want to stay as far away from as possible.
Due to the rather extensive overhaul I need to do, the redesign will be at least a month or two away. I’ll still post here to the 1.6 blog, and some of the content here will be making it over to the site version (2.0), but how much is uncertain. I don’t really want to have a lot of semi-good photos on the site; I’ll weed out everything but AAA content.
The 1.7 intermediate redesign has been scrapped; it would have a been substantial amount of work, so I decided I might as well spend that time on a more permanent solution. Also, these banner ads my free host has put in are a bit annoying, and I don’t want to have to design around them. When 2.0 comes up I’ll spring for hosting anyway, and then the only ads will be of my own 🙂
So, this thing you’re surfing will hopefully be the last ‘blog’ I ever have, and I’m quite happy that — 5 year too late — I’m actually working on a site.
Vishal
