Table of Contents
I came across this question on social media from an account named @hustlerani, and that was basically
The only condition is you are limited to eight people apart from you. This got me thinking because selecting 8 out of 8 billion people is a very small subset.
I spent some time thinking on it crossing and adding a few names. Finally, this is what my list looks like:
- Anne Hathaway
- Dua Lipa
- Elon Musk
- Fredrik Backman
- Linus Torvalds
- Lisa Neigut
- Ramya Ramapriya
- Virat Kohli
This blog is about why I would want to share a meal with these people. The key thing I am optimizing for is how interesting the conversation over dinner would be and it should be time well spent for everyone.
Anne Hathaway
The reason for Anne Hathaway is I’m just amazed by how that woman has just defied time. It doesn’t seem like she’s growing old anytime soon. I just want to discuss with her the secret of eternal youth and her skin care routine of course.
At the same time, I also look up to her because she seems like a really nice person whenever she is talking to anybody.
Her movies are a cinematic experience. Maybe it has to do with the fact that Dark Knight is my all time favorite that I adore her so much.
She usually does the girl next door kind of roles like in the The Princess Diaries but can pick on anything like she is doing with The Odyssey, coming soon.
Special Dish: I will make sure to bring in some cupcakes so that we can see her do the thing which whole world is copying now iykyk!
Dua Lipa
I have played Dua Lipa’s songs on repeat for a whole year every morning, my roommate at that time, Shubhanshu, could vouch for it.
I missed my chance at meeting her when she was in Jaipur. I was also in Jaipur at the same time, but I was off social media during that time. So it was too late when I got to know, otherwise I would have gone to meet her definitely!
When she came for the concert, I didn’t go because I didn’t have the right set of people to go with at that time. Maybe next time when she comes I might even go solo because her concerts are riddled with bustling energy.
She faced a lot of backlash for her pencil sharpener move but she turned that around and her concerts are lit!
She met her fiance while reading a book and they were on literally the same page. My friend Akanksha and I have talked about it so many times, that this is the kind of thing we would want to happen with us someday.
Special Dish: She said she likes Rajasthan a lot, so maybe “Gatte ki sabzi” would be there and no water of course :P
Fredrik Backman
Fredrik Backman is my favorite author. I have felt very good and felt a new thing inside of me after every book.
I think I started reading with The Answer Is No, then I read then I read A Man Called Ove and finally Anxious People.
All of these books are really funny, filled with satire and they touch human emotions at an exceptionally intimate level.
The focus of his books is very much on the growth arc of characters rather than story itself. The way he brings about his characters, who all have very different colors and personalities while all being equally humane.
I would really like to have him at the dining table because a person like that has a lot of perspective on humans and life in general. The number of people he must have met in life must be huge with quite some variations.
Special Dish: Swedish cuisine is very famous for meatballs I have tried them out in Ikea Hyderabad they are amazing. An Indian dish which is very similar to meatballs is Malai Kofta so that would be it for him.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk, is just a crazy rich man, and I remember this quote that
Whatever people may call him, womanizer, jerk, controversial, right wing (I don’t mind this), but he is just an exceptional creator, entrepreneur and engineer. He is a nerd at core who was looked down and bullied in school.
After his acquisition of Twitter and laying off 80% of the task force, to everyone’s surprise the platform is still running.
All his companies PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, etc. build very innovative products that people actually keep coming back to, so I am curious about
I read somewhere that in your life you can only have so many of these burners on, for him it was turning on career and health while he turned off family and relationships.
I try to lead life not entirely but in some ways opposite of his way, for me career comes after family and relationships. I would like to see things from his point of view though.
Special Dish: He said in one interview if he could eat something for lifetime it would be cheese burgers. Something that might resemble a burger would be Dabeli, filled with cheese of course.
Linus Torvalds
How can I not, right? Linus Torvalds is the guy I have looked up to since I have joined college and got to know about open source and Linux.
He’s the creator of the most widely used operating system kernel in this whole world. He also created git to cater to the requirements of remote collaboration.
He’s very rigid in his ways. He seems a bit like the character Ove in A Man Called Ove, so I think he will like Fredrik’s company quite a bit.
It’s a bit messed up these days because people are just vibe-coding things without paying respect to other people’s carefully crafted projects. I don’t feel there’s substance to vibe coding if you are doing it without putting in any thought.
I would like to take his view on the shift of open source, how he’s working with the Linux kernel these days, how he’s protecting the Linux kernel from these vibe coders.
He never really got into the corporate world and became a manager. He doesn’t orchestrate people but definitely guides them like a lead. I would want to understand how he went about choosing paths in his career.
Special Dish: He seems to like chinese and hot Indian food. For him something spicy it is so we would be going with Paneer Tikka Masala.
Lisa Neigut
I don’t think a lot of people might be aware of her because she is primarily famous in the tech community surrounding Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.
She goes as @niftynei on X and other social media handles.
She leads quite some communities and organizes bitcoin conferences around the globe. She is very respected in the technical forums and is one of the women in tech I look up to.
She is very humble for someone so smart. I didn’t see a single shred of arrogance in my brief interactions with her when I went for BTC++ Austin, 2024.
It would definitely be nice to have someone who is working on fostering an economic shift for the future and is a true cyberpunk at heart.
Special Dish: She is from Austin, Texas and everyone loves Barbecue over there but we aren’t having steak. So the alternative would be well cooked mutton something like Laal Maas.
Ria Chopra
Ria is one of those rare intellectual nerds you can find on Instagram. She still makes long form content which might not please the 10sec doom scrolling crowd but is very enriching to listen or watch.
Her content has substance and intent unlike what I can say for most creators on internet. She shares interesting facts she found out about, talks about her interesting experiences and lores.
She recently wrote her first book Never Logged Out: How the Internet Created India’s Gen Z, I still have to read it but she connects with our generation because she belongs to it and has gone through the shift we did.
I don’t follow any Instagram celebrity because I treat it as social media was meant to be “to interact with my friends”, but from time to time I stumble upon her content and intentionally visit it also.
The tenant at my home read my blog on happiness and asked me when would I be writing my first book? I was flattered beyond imagination and am thinking about it. I remember Shriyanshi also told me to write a book sometime back. So, it would definitely be interesting to discuss writing a book with her.
Fredrik has also shared his inability to reason about our generation’s working maybe these two will have some interesting discussions.
Special Dish: TODO
Virat Kohli
We have people from all industries tech, movies, music, books, etc. except sports. When you think of sports, the names that dash through your brain would likely be people from cricket, right?
I don’t know how people in industry meet their right partner, but he seems to have a very loving wife, who is always there supporting him in all of his crucial moments and vice versa too. He transitioned from an angry young man, to the not so angry anymore father with two young kids.
He is someone who holds the heartbeats of so many Indians, when he doesn’t score a hundred, rage erupts around the whole country.
He has seen a fair share of backlash when his captaincy wasn’t going well, when his performance wasn’t going strong, and he came back stronger every time.
He recently moved to London, United Kingdom for a better lifestyle and a more private life. I would like to talk more with him about what went into his decision because this is something that frequently comes up in my mind as well.
Special Dish: We know he is a Delhi guy, so for him we’ll have Rajma Chawal.
Final Notes
I did this activity because it is stimulating to think about and filter down to just a few people and explain the basis of that decision. Also maybe a few years down the line I would have a different list and would look back on this one to see what changed?
I feel the answer to this question can also help us gauge the person we are interacting with at a much more granular level. Maybe it’s worth creating a dating app on this question itself that matches people based on it xD.
Try it out yourself and maybe you can share your answers with me, I would love to hear it! Also take care in this scorching summer, don’t forget to have some water and apply sunscreen.
Cover Photo by Stefan Vladimirov