One thing struck me on the way to Thrissur last Sunday: these Malyalis love their food. Every other shop is a food joint. A tea shop, a pakoda shop, a banana chips shop, a small hotel, a big hotel...
alas, their choice of food is bland.
Tea is hot water poured in a strainer containing days-old tea leaves with a spot of diluted milk. Snacks are ripe banana slices deep fried in rancid oil. Fish curry rice is a heap of boiled rice with watery curry with tiny bits of sardines and fried fish is a tiny morsel of deep fried fish of nameless origin. Masala dosa is a thick dosa with mashed potatoes with a hint of chili powder and chutney is tasteless syrup of coconut gratings. Idli is soft and the sambar tasteless.
Three days of this fare sounded like a famine so ended up eating delicious food in a hi-fi hotel at our organisers cost. Fried rice and manchurian and salad and butter chicken with tandoor roti. The hotel had a swimming pool but the lawns were overgrown with weeds, the lobby was bright and nice but the garage had a thatched roof and lot of old stuff dumped at one end.
Choice of fruits included banana, banana, and banana. Having no choice even between bananas, I settle for the only choice in bananas. Yetch! The ripest banana tasted of an unripe one...
All houses looked neat and tidy, but the country side littered. The drains choked.
Public gardens full of weeds, and benches scattered with bodies in strategically wrapped lungis loafing with their feet in air...
Book stalls with a hundred different magazines and news papers in Malayalam, and a single edition in English ("The Week", what else?). The most literate State in India is literate in Malayalam.
People including beggars reading their daily dose of news in Malayalam, and english is a foreign language.
I speak to the taxi driver in english (I was told that South Indians hate Hindi), but he asks me whether we in Goa don't know hindi!

Comments

  1. walk don't run2:46 AM

    Tamilians hate Hindi. They just don't know Hindi, not even the commonest of words like nahi... jao... aao... But even the autowallahs speak in English.
    Talking of food, living with Bengalis, i have realised that they not just love, brag, tomtom, promote, or beat their chests about their cuisine, but they have a food gene that most of us do not. They don't just love their food, they make sure you agree that they are the best. One race that lives to eat. Recipes are convoluted, everything is mixed with everything else, cut, dried, fried, roasted, sauted, then deep fried, then boiled, then marinated then dipped into sugar syrup. The spread is large, and the apetites mammoth. But all the fuss can really kill your apetite!!

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