Back in the good old days, when I had more hair on my head than growing out of my ears, there was a girl I dated briefly. She was on a quest to find the perfect coffee. Every weekend, she would visit a different café across Dubai , choose a Cappuccino and pen down her observations in her journal.
I had no such interest. Going
out to a café became a thing in Mumbai roughly in 1996, when ‘Barista’ started
popping up as a trendy chain of outlets across the city. Or maybe that was when
I first began venturing out of my sheltered little pod because it was my first
year of college. Until then, I hadn’t seen much of the city except a square
kilometre around my house in Juhu which included my school, the doctor, the
pharmacist, two churches and a graveyard. Basically, everything I might ever
need was in that space and I had never ventured outside it.
But now, I was in Bandra – the cooler,
more hep cousin of all the other suburbs with shorter skirts, tastier food and a
lot more entertainment options guaranteed to appeal to everyone. Like the
McDonalds -first in the city that had opened there. Or, as I’ve just mentioned
- a coffee shop.
Except, coffee, funnily enough,
held no appeal to me. The best coffee I had ever tasted was a cold version of
it available at Churchgate. Sadly, that had shut down. A very close second was
Bru instant coffee made at home. With milk and sugar. Coffees in these cafes
were expensive. And tasted horrible.
A decade had passed since I
discovered coffee shop and they hadn’t died out. Instead, they had multiplied.
Which is why, this girl was occupied every week.
It got me thinking – what could
I pursue with single minded passion and chronicle for myself.
I settled on Gajar halwa.
See, I have a massive sweet
tooth. And of all the sweets I have ever eaten, this one is my favourite. It’s
yummy and if you ignore the sugar, has some health benefits. This would be a
pleasurable pursuit. One that I could continue with until I was old and diabetic.
People told me that carrots
improving our eyesight is a myth. They were wrong. In one single year, I had to
change my glasses twice. The number for my spectacles dropped twice by 0.25 in
each eye. I was eating boxloads of it and my eyesight kept improving. There
were no other changes in my lifestyle or reading habits in that year.
Eventually, I cut down. My waist
kept widening and I really didn’t want to spend on new glasses every six
months. My wife also found it annoying. She tries to eat right with a salad for
each meal, minimal sugar and oil in her food etc and here I was causing a
carrot shortage in Singapore.
There is perhaps one footnote I
should add here – which is about my pursuit of another wonderful Indian sweet –
the gulab jamun. But I am going to save that tale for another day.
Comments
Post a Comment