One word of advice about Julie and Julia: don’t!
Meryl Streep of course is fantastic. Doesn’t she look much taller than she looked in Mamma Mia? How does she manage it? She is delightful to watch. But Amy Adams is disappointing as the single-minded young woman who cooks 524 recipes in 365 days. Roger Ebert wonders when the couple had time to eat. I wonder how come they did not die of atherosclerosis. My God, so much butter!
I also wonder why the movie got made. I mean, wow, Julie made all those dishes over a year and even wrote about it. But what was the compelling reason to make a movie, which might as well have been a documentary on Julia Child and her obsessive fan?
The movie left me cold. No, to be honest, it left me peck-ish. After seeing dish after dish, I most certainly wanted to eat something, although I had supped earlier in the evening.
We tried to assuage it in Costa at Juhu.
As coffee shops go, I like only two of them. There is this place in Hiranandani called Aromas. It is my kind of coffee shop – a very nice menu, lovely ambience, and what’s more, the place is open until 2:00 am! What more can you ask for?
I am making Costa at Juhu a very poor second, because the food there is middling corrupt. But great ambience, lot of beautiful people walking in, and has the universal brotherhood aura that distinguishes good coffee shops from bad. (For a bad coffee shop, I invite you to visit Mocha at Galleria, Hiranandani – it looks and feels like the parlor of Adams’ Family! Brr!)
So we hung out there, sipping iced tea, playing with a toddler from the next table, and desultorily discussing mankind’s puzzling penchant for hatred while love was an option; in other words, typical late night coffee shop conversation. By 12:00 a.m., the hunger pangs couldn’t be kept at bay anymore. It was more like a craving – for hot steaming noodles.
M assured that Tian next door is just the place. The restaurant was of course closed, so we went up to the pub. Have you ever walked into a pub which is desperately struggling to be cool and failing miserably? You can tell that by that depressing guy with a baseball cap on his head, dancing alone to the beats of some Hindi song remix, totally ignored by all of six other people huddled in various corners. And noodles? Hahahahahhah!
We did an about turn, walked out and came to the streets. I was damned if I was not going to eat something. I turned to M and put up this proposal: how about hopping in a taxi and swinging by to Taj Shamiana? That is a 24-hr coffee shop isn’t it?
As we sped along empty roads to the old land’s end (or the beginning, provided which side of the Gateway you stood at), I resolved that henceforth, I will try to fit all my road traveling in Mumbai between 12:00 midnight and 5:00 am. Do you realize how fantastic the express highway is really?
I have a theory that everybody has a Taj story of the happy variety. Mine involves my initiation into the ways of the city. As a naïve, fresh off the boat immigrant, it all looked terribly grand to me then. Meetings and midnight snacks and 4:00 am breakfasts… I remember my first visit to the Sea Lounge was so momentous that I called home.
I was happy to see that much of the lobby is unchanged. So is Shamiana. We had pasta and biriyani at 2:00 am in the morning. I decided that having come this far, we should look at the Gateway at the crack of dawn. So we hung back, drinking cups of tea and talking about—oh gosh, who remembers what we talked about? I’m sure vital secrets were exchanged.
Somebody must’ve told me about birds and bees and sunrise timings.
Dammit, we are averaging 6:38 a.m. these days! No wonder then, when we walked out at 5:15 a.m., it was dark outside--very. All-night revelers at the Taj were still leaving, with one very drunk guy stumbling from car to car trying to find his.
We walked to the Gateway, with me muttering, “Wasn’t there a garden here? I am positive there was a garden here!” over and over again. Was there or wasn’t there a garden where now there is only a vast expanse of cobbled stones? It was just us, myriad of lights, and garbage, garbage, garbage everywhere, left behind by the previous evening’s visitors. But despite that (call me clichéd) there is a special thrill standing at the Gateway, looking back at the Taj and wondering what King George saw when he landed on December 2nd, all those years ago.
Thanks to 26/11, the place is lit up like a Christmas tree, with a few searchlights trained into the waters for a good measure. We started walking down the promenade, encountering a hardy old couple out for their morning walk. Silent boats and barges were bobbing quietly in the water, a few strings of light strewn here and there in the horizon. It is true – the city does sleep sometimes!
We decided it was time to go home. Did I tell you that the city sleeps sometimes? Well, not in the burbs, where the real life of Mumbai is now. At the Khar subway, at 6:00 a.m. in the morning, a group of at least 30 women, dressed in their sparkling fineries, were walking by, singing some song. They didn’t seem they had slept through the night. Chhath puja apparently!
The bloody sun rose when I reached Powai lake. I bowed my head to its superior whimsicality, over the heads of at least 200 women still doing their pujas, and went home.
Meryl Streep of course is fantastic. Doesn’t she look much taller than she looked in Mamma Mia? How does she manage it? She is delightful to watch. But Amy Adams is disappointing as the single-minded young woman who cooks 524 recipes in 365 days. Roger Ebert wonders when the couple had time to eat. I wonder how come they did not die of atherosclerosis. My God, so much butter!
I also wonder why the movie got made. I mean, wow, Julie made all those dishes over a year and even wrote about it. But what was the compelling reason to make a movie, which might as well have been a documentary on Julia Child and her obsessive fan?
The movie left me cold. No, to be honest, it left me peck-ish. After seeing dish after dish, I most certainly wanted to eat something, although I had supped earlier in the evening.
We tried to assuage it in Costa at Juhu.
As coffee shops go, I like only two of them. There is this place in Hiranandani called Aromas. It is my kind of coffee shop – a very nice menu, lovely ambience, and what’s more, the place is open until 2:00 am! What more can you ask for?
I am making Costa at Juhu a very poor second, because the food there is middling corrupt. But great ambience, lot of beautiful people walking in, and has the universal brotherhood aura that distinguishes good coffee shops from bad. (For a bad coffee shop, I invite you to visit Mocha at Galleria, Hiranandani – it looks and feels like the parlor of Adams’ Family! Brr!)
So we hung out there, sipping iced tea, playing with a toddler from the next table, and desultorily discussing mankind’s puzzling penchant for hatred while love was an option; in other words, typical late night coffee shop conversation. By 12:00 a.m., the hunger pangs couldn’t be kept at bay anymore. It was more like a craving – for hot steaming noodles.
M assured that Tian next door is just the place. The restaurant was of course closed, so we went up to the pub. Have you ever walked into a pub which is desperately struggling to be cool and failing miserably? You can tell that by that depressing guy with a baseball cap on his head, dancing alone to the beats of some Hindi song remix, totally ignored by all of six other people huddled in various corners. And noodles? Hahahahahhah!
We did an about turn, walked out and came to the streets. I was damned if I was not going to eat something. I turned to M and put up this proposal: how about hopping in a taxi and swinging by to Taj Shamiana? That is a 24-hr coffee shop isn’t it?
As we sped along empty roads to the old land’s end (or the beginning, provided which side of the Gateway you stood at), I resolved that henceforth, I will try to fit all my road traveling in Mumbai between 12:00 midnight and 5:00 am. Do you realize how fantastic the express highway is really?
I have a theory that everybody has a Taj story of the happy variety. Mine involves my initiation into the ways of the city. As a naïve, fresh off the boat immigrant, it all looked terribly grand to me then. Meetings and midnight snacks and 4:00 am breakfasts… I remember my first visit to the Sea Lounge was so momentous that I called home.
I was happy to see that much of the lobby is unchanged. So is Shamiana. We had pasta and biriyani at 2:00 am in the morning. I decided that having come this far, we should look at the Gateway at the crack of dawn. So we hung back, drinking cups of tea and talking about—oh gosh, who remembers what we talked about? I’m sure vital secrets were exchanged.
Somebody must’ve told me about birds and bees and sunrise timings.
Dammit, we are averaging 6:38 a.m. these days! No wonder then, when we walked out at 5:15 a.m., it was dark outside--very. All-night revelers at the Taj were still leaving, with one very drunk guy stumbling from car to car trying to find his.
We walked to the Gateway, with me muttering, “Wasn’t there a garden here? I am positive there was a garden here!” over and over again. Was there or wasn’t there a garden where now there is only a vast expanse of cobbled stones? It was just us, myriad of lights, and garbage, garbage, garbage everywhere, left behind by the previous evening’s visitors. But despite that (call me clichéd) there is a special thrill standing at the Gateway, looking back at the Taj and wondering what King George saw when he landed on December 2nd, all those years ago.
Thanks to 26/11, the place is lit up like a Christmas tree, with a few searchlights trained into the waters for a good measure. We started walking down the promenade, encountering a hardy old couple out for their morning walk. Silent boats and barges were bobbing quietly in the water, a few strings of light strewn here and there in the horizon. It is true – the city does sleep sometimes!
We decided it was time to go home. Did I tell you that the city sleeps sometimes? Well, not in the burbs, where the real life of Mumbai is now. At the Khar subway, at 6:00 a.m. in the morning, a group of at least 30 women, dressed in their sparkling fineries, were walking by, singing some song. They didn’t seem they had slept through the night. Chhath puja apparently!
The bloody sun rose when I reached Powai lake. I bowed my head to its superior whimsicality, over the heads of at least 200 women still doing their pujas, and went home.
Comments
The "madness" bit, though, was a tad overstating it, wasn't it?
Take a line through all the "orgasmic" (your description) experiences you have had.