Skip to main content

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.


Comments

  1. Kala RaviFebruary 23, 2018 at 5:14 PM

    Reminds me it's ages since I had some! Samosa or pakoda for national snack? Maybe in compliance with khichdi, it will be something as bland, maybe idli?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 23, 2018 at 5:36 PM

    Idli would be a good option for national breakfast. But will the nation agree? I doubt very much.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Saurabh ChawlaFebruary 24, 2018 at 11:04 AM

    Its a good snack but on the health side, its not too healthy. I too love eating pakodas in the winter season!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 24, 2018 at 11:07 AM

      When our PM recommends it to the nation, its health must be as good as Nirav Modi :)

      Delete
  4. CifarFebruary 26, 2018 at 11:00 AM

    Pakoda should be declared nation dish and pakoda sellers as true nationalist because they are giving PM's dream a reality

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
9 comments
Read more