Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Five questions. We just want to ask you five questions — or, rather, get five recommendations of things to read, listen to, watch, eat and buy from people who live, work or otherwise spend time in Cambridge. Here are some from Swati Tiwari, who moved to Prospect Street from Southern California.

Read: The smartphone spell-check technology that has users pleading “please stop helping me” has a repository at damnyouautocorrect.com, and Tiwari visits every day to see how “citrus sangria” gets “corrected” on the fly to “uterus sangria” and how the mother of a 6-month-old winds up telling her own mom she got baby Hayley crotchless panties when she was trying to type “camo pants.” (“I was about to disown you,” the grandmother says.) Tiwari got the habit of reading the site from her roommate, whom she overheard reading it in their Somerville apartment. “She was cracking up all night,” Tiwari says.

Listen to: “I really wanted to listen to an all-India station from India. This is a fake one,” says Tiwari, who is from Pune, an Indian city. Despite her surprise at finding that All India Radio on the Pandora online music service is a total misnomer, she finds herself listening to it daily. “It’s weird music,” she says, often including just random noises, “but it helps me work.”

Watch: “Frida,” the 2002 biopic directed by Julie Taymor. “I love the characters in this movie. None of them are overdone. They blend in perfectly with each other. It’s a fun movie that also inspired me to live in the present. It made me appreciate the fact that one must experience pain in order to truly appreciate happiness,” Tiwari says. “I know it sounds corny, but oh well.”

“Oh, and I love Salma Hayek.”

Eat: Upon moving to Cambridge from the West Coast, Tiwari explored her new home and found Inman Square’s Punjabi Dhabi — “my happy place.” The food is cheap and delicious — the only authentic Indian street food in Cambridge Tiwari has found — but there’s another lure: “There was a guy there with a huge beard and a huge turban, and I had a huge crush on him. And that’s why I went there. He was hot.”

Do: Tiwari recommends people go dancing, but not nightclub style: Extreme Dancesport style, meaning stopping by the 288 Norfolk St. studio for some instruction in the first hour and free dance afterward, when participants can dance with any partner in the style of the night they choose. Tiwari goes every couple of weeks for Latin or ballroom dance. “They have good teachers and a good facility,” Tiwari says.

Send us your own five recommendations and your best big photo at [email protected].