Madras Woodlands Dinner

Yesterday at about 2pm when I was driving home, Dhinakaran, the owner of Madras Woodlands restaurant called and asked if I would be free to have dinner at his restaurant. He was meeting some friends and he wanted me to drop by.

I haven’t seen Dino in a while and since I was free, I said I would be there.

Fortunately I managed to get parking right in front of the restaurant and as I walked in, I noticed that the restaurant has undergone some renovations. It looked cleaner and brighter. Good for them. It was looking rather dated recently. Later Dino proudly told me that he got the renovations done in about 15 days without closing the restaurant.

Soon the invitees started arriving. The key guest was Graham Mayer, the Deputy Chief of Mission of the US Embassy. Dino had invited me but the rest of the group was assembled by a Mr Renganathan, who apparently had just flown in and knew everyone. The others there were the GM of Indian Bank, TT Durai and Mustaq the owner of Mustafa.

The food was good. Dinner started with a spinach soup, then a vadai, thosai, poori with vegetables and finally an appam. I ended up eating much more than I normally would.

The conversation was varied and I ended up speaking to Graham most. We talked about the current situation in the US re the scourge of drugs, immigration and their courts. We talked quite a bit about China and Singapore and the huge online presence of Chinese interest groups and their influence worldwide, including Singapore.

I did tell him the US has not been effective in presenting their message and with hardly any soft power and they need to do much more. I have said the same things to the previous Ambassador. Let’s see if anything changes.