Pakoda Eaters

I love pakodas.  My tryst with pakodas began when I joined the erstwhile Sawan Public School, Delhi (RIP) as a teacher nearly two decades back.  Most important staff meetings ended with delicious pakodas prepared by the resident cooks of the school. Onion pakodas, chilly pakodas, cauliflower pakodas, paneer pakodas… Oh boy, were they delicious!

Sawan was shut down in 2015 by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) which razed the entire lot of structures – the school, hostels, staff quarters and hospital – to the ground in order to make parking space for the Baba’s affluent devotees (for the aam devotees, there was ample parking space at a little distance from the ashram).  I migrated to Kerala, to my native place, and missed Sawan’s pakodas along with quite a few other things.

Image from The Wire

One day, as I was returning home from the school where I work now, I saw a man selling pakodas on the roadside.  Nostalgia is a dominant sensation in me, like in many romantically inclined people.  Pakodas, called bhajis here, stirred my fervent sensation of nostalgia.  I guess Tamil people introduced pakodas to Kerala and hence the Tamil name, bhaji, stuck. I bought some bhajis, with nostalgia for Sawan welling up very loyally in my romantic heart, and went home.  But the bhajis didn’t taste like Sawan’s pakodas at all though it was more or less the same stuff.  I never bought bhajis after that.

Now our visionary Prime Minister ploughed up my buried nostalgia for pakodas when he advised the young men of the country to beat unemployment by making pakodas.  I don’t know if life will spring me a surprise by bringing one of those Sawan cooks to my village patriotically following the PM’s advice to make pakodas for the country.  According to available, reliable estimates there are 30-35 lakh migrant labourers in Kerala and many of them had started selling pakodas on roadsides even before the PM exhorted them to do so.

Pakoda should be declared the national snack, since khichdi has already been elevated to the stature of the national food by our Union minister of food.  Pakoda has already penetrated the hymens of the erstwhile unvanquished states.  I think we are on the way to becoming a nation of pakoda eaters who will obsequiously obey our loquacious Prime Minister’s grand unifying vision for the nation.  

My humble suggestion is that the state directorates of education should make it mandatory for schools to distribute pakodas to students while they listen to the PM’s Mann ki Baat.