Went to a Trinidadian icon in NYC - Singh's Roti Shop & Bar in Ozone Park near Kennedy for some doubles, roti, shrimp, aloo pie, dhalpuri, and off course Caribbean rum. Place was packed on a pleasant sunny Sunday afternoon. Lines almost out the door.

The bar was memorable...
Every Caribbean bar in NYC has some regulars who are usually retired well-off social butterfly men and women who have been in the city for a few decades. And this is there little slice of the islands.

Today we met Richie Fernandez, a Guyanese charmer full of stories & jokes.
Richie is in his own words "an Indian-African-Portuguese hybrid"b who grew up in Guyana, friends with Clive Lloyd and family friends with Gary Sobers. So obviously I grabbed a seat next to him after mutual confirmation of boosted status. Two hours of fun raconteuring followed.
He was telling @k_rupal the story of how a top Bollywood filmstar in the 70s was about to marry an actress but then he introduced her to the great Gary Sobers & she was so besotted, she left the actor. "I forgot her name" says he.
"Anju Mahendru" says I.
He smiles and hugs me!!
I said, hehe, even I would have left Rajesh Khanna for Gary Sobers and I'm straight. Richie was so amused to find someone who got a lot of his references that he paid our whole bill!! And told us many stories of Sobers, Lloyd, Kanhai, Kalicharan, Sunny, Viv, Imran, Dharmendra!
Apparently he made a lot of money in London and on wall street. Lives on the upper east side, "You will not believe, 40 years ago, many Gujaratis lived near Gracie Mansion! Many of them! The mayor and NYPD and landlords pushed them out."
Comes to Singh's almost everyday.
That's his life. Retired, chilled out, great health, divorced. Takes a cab from Manhattan to his old Queens haunts. Hangs out with old friends, eating Trini food and drinking Guyanese booze. "Trini people open restaurants, Guyanese open bars." Later goes back home.
Extremely well read and brilliant man. The range of topics he had an encyclopedic memory on was astounding! Total polymath, charmer, and a self-described ladies man. His younger girlfriend joined us soon. So much fun!

New York is so full of people with amazing life stories!
Going to any Trini place in Queens is like walking directly into some place in Trinidad. Some regulars "liming" (Trini for just chilling out and drinking). They hear my accent and something primal in their blood from their 200 year old ancestors brings them to me.
And then when I mention that I've been all over Trinidad and that too for a test match and so has Rupal and yes, we went all over South Trinidad too. After that we always get so much love & warmth. "Not too many people goin to Trini or Guyana for tourism you know".
We exchanged numbers. Imma return to hear more of his stories.
Rockaway Beach at sunset. Pic by @k_rupal.

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More from @gauravsabnis

Feb 14
If there is one country where a gap year will lead to immense increase in overall national happiness as well as productivity, it is India. Currently, our gallop to colleges is too hectic and our college structure too rigid too early.

If you can afford one, take a gap year.
In India, it is not impossible to change your mind about your career after 18, but it certainly starts you off with a disadvantage at multiple levels. Whereas in the US system, also extremely competitive, you get flexibility all through college and even after to switch lanes.
I barely got a moment to breathe from 10th grade till the end of MBA and then new high paying high pressure job till 30. Whereas Rupal went to the US system, got a way more well rounded education, tried different jobs through her 20s before picking optometry school at age 30.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 14
Vikram Sampath revealed to be a plagiarist, that too about Savarkar, is the most shocking SHOCKING revelation of all time since the discovery of gambling occurring at Rick's Cafe Americaine.
I said then only that this guy seems as much a historian as Arindam Chaudhary is a professor and Vijay Mallya a doctor. 🤭🤭🤭

Copy pasting favorable bits to further your propaganda makes you a hack not a historian.
Honest people who have a real keen interest and worthy knowledge about a field despite not being formally trained in it go out of their way to humbly remind us they are NOT professionals or experts, just enthusiasts. Like a Bill Bryson or Michael Lewis or our own @krishashok.
Read 19 tweets
Feb 13
Tonight I'll be tweeting about the #SuperBowl a lot, using the hashtag #BT403 for the benefit of my students. There will be a LOT of tweets even by my standards lol. Feel free to follow along, participate, or of course, mute if you aren't interested in this very Murcan thing.
There's going to be a lot of crypto related tweets cos, well, check out this 🧵. I'm a skeptic of this ad buy strategy and also of crypto in general. If you're one of those almost religiously into crypto, mute me and avoid getting senti lol.

All my #SuperBowl tweets tonight, including the #BT403 related ad tweets will be in this thread. So you can bookmark or mute the thread it as you please.

My students have a 10% weightage assignment analyzing tonight's ads that they will make presentations about in 2 weeks.
Read 27 tweets
Feb 13
Wait, so unlike US, where anyone can pass the exams and become a CPA (about half do) in India, there is a pass percentage set by artificially restricting the supply? That's cartelizing kinda. For an essential service. What a scam!
No country has as much of a variety of certification and licensing exams like the United States. I'm trying to think if there's any profession where the certification body artificially restricts the supply! Usually it's an objective bar, not relative grading. From law to med.
Damn, maybe I've become too Americanized but that would get struck down in courts here so hard!

Read 8 tweets
Feb 13
Was talking Albuquerque with a friend as a reunion destination and had a flashback to my childhood friend Deepak Rao in Pune. He lived next to my grandparents. He was the best friend a 9 y.o. could have cos his family was both well-off and nice! He had swag! Much swag!
He belonged to that once rare and much envied breed of kids in India - someone with an uncle or aunt in USA who visited often and expressed love in toys and comic books and pretty much anything a 9 year old boy wants. Visiting his house was such a bliss! I spent entire summers!
That's where I first played G.I. Joe and Clue and Scotland Yard and a bunch of different board games that kept us busy, with comic book reading breaks in between as his mom filled us with food.

One of the games I still remember vividly was a Monopoly. I was most fascinated!
Read 7 tweets
Feb 13
It's #SuperBowl Sunday! While much of Twitter will be recycling the same old jokes of "lol that is handegg" & "lol 'world' champions?" and noticing opportunities for Modi vs Mamata jokes with Rams v Bengals, the will also be talk of how this is #CryptoBowl.
A 🧵
Something like a fifth of all ads in this #SuperBowl have been bought by crypto exchanges or allied services. Pushing ad rates to historic highs of $7mn in 30 seconds. Up from $5.2mn in 2019. A 35% jump in a period that including pandemic caused economic woes. That's crazy.
The previous such comparable jump was about 20 years ago. When SB ad rates jumped from $1.5mn in 1998 to $2mn at the next one, dubbed the #DotcomBowl because dotcommers flush with cash pumped money to get people to take them seriously.

Many are drawing parallels. You can see why
Read 27 tweets

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