The Taste of India

Ok friends, I have just come back from my home after diwali celebrations... and a few lines come to my mind that look very appropriate here:

"Adharo.n par ho koi bhi ras, jihva ko lagti haala;

Bhaajan ho koi haatho.n me.n, lagta thaama hai pyaala;

Har soorat saaki ki soorat, me.n parivartit ho jaati hai;

Aankho.n ke aage ho kutch bhi, aankho.n me.n hai madhushaala" :)

I am still dreaming about delicacies. The only thing that I can think of right now is food; mouth watering garma garam kachorian, sooran ki sabji, mithayian, agra ke pethe and so much more. And yes above all, my mom's speciality dahi bade which I would have certainly got patented had product patent been allowed on foodstuffs.

I have decided to make way for my taste buds this time. This is a catalogue of their experiences as they travelled all over India. Some of the experiences have been sweet and some have been sour, but each one of them has added a lot of spice to my life. I hope you too would get a taste of India in the process. And remember, my taste buds are pretty opinionated, so you are going to get a lot of advices too.

Let me start from the place which started it all, which pushed me into this wonderful activity of searching out speciality dishes on railway stations. Orai, a small station on Kanpur jhansi route is famous for its gulaab jaamuns. And they are really really good. At times I have even put alarm so that I can wake up, brush up and be ready in time. But beware friends, when you reach there, you would find atleast a dozen hawkers moving all over the platform selling gulaab jaamuns. Most of them are fake. Just walk past them right to the end of the platform and you will find the stall that really deserves the credit for good name. And once there, ensure that you get only fresh and hot gulaab jaamuns, because without that half the taste is lost. Just one more little thing...keep a keen eye on your train and pray to God its departure gets delayed. Two minutes are just not enough to wade through the crowd at the shop. Half of the times I have ended up running behind the train :)

Orai by the way is not the only small station that treats you to its own culinary ideosyncracy. Take for example Pratapnagar station, the one I had mentioned about, in "The encroachers". It has a tea stall, and you get a few things to eat too. The shop opens only in the morning and its customer base is not really the passengers, for there are very few passengers here, but rather those who come to work near that place. Me and one of my friends once happened to be near that place at breakfast time. pav bhaji was the only eatable item available and we ordered for two plates. The shopkeeper asked whether we would like it "jyada teekha" or "kam teekha". Though both of us are not averse to spicy stuff, still we asked for "kam teekha"...

What finally materialized before us in the name of bhaaji was a small quantity of peas floating in a huge mess of oil, with some sev added on top...probably that was his idea of garnishing. "Whatever it was", we thought "atleast it would give company to the pav". But the very first byte told us it was not to be. His kam teekha bhaaji was enough for both of us to start fuming from the eyes nose and ears. To finish off that one pav, the two of us together finished off more than a litre of water, and even then, after we were through, the bhaaji looked like it had not even been touched. That day onwards, both of us are trying to beguile somebody into tasting this person's pav bhaaji with jyada teekha :)

Contrary to small stations however, and very surprisingly, many of the big ones show a definite lack of innovation. All you get is a standard IRCTC canteen menu, and the same boring packaged stuff. New Delhi is a case in point. But worse are the places where you get nothing good to eat even outside the railway stations. Recently I descended upon bangalore for a short half day trip. I reached there in the afternoon and had two hours to myself before I got on with my work. So, I decided not to fill myself up with kurkure or tasteless thali at IRCTC, but rather try something outside. As I came out of the station, two roads emerged. And as is very logical and usual to do, I took the one more travelled by. I walked ahead, along the boundry of DRM office, under the Rail over bridge and across the wide, well tarred roads of Bangalore, so full of traffic that one has to wait 15 minutes to cross it. I walked and walked for 45 minutes and found nothing more than fruit stalls. A famished person, made to walk in a hot afternoon, you can very well imagine my position.

Anyway, finally I did manage to find a dhaba kind of thing. After all this ordeal I could easily have eaten three masala dosas, indeed I intended to do so. But I was clever enough not to make myself look like a chronically deprived and a depraved person. So I ordered only one dosa to begin with. ...Clever or not, I was certainly lucky. For the dosa was so stale, and the sambar so... yuck...that with all my hunger, I had to leave it unfinished. I came out, had a glass of musambi juice, one frooti, cursed my luck for choosing the wrong path and came back to guest house. In the evening, my work took me to the other road from the station.... It was worse.

Moral of the story; whenever you come to bangalore, fill yourself up with kurkure or the tasteless thali at IRCTC canteen :)

At some other places its just the opposite. You are in a fix not because of lack but rather a surfeit of choices. Or should I say counterfeit choices. At Ambala, when you come out of the station you find "Bhaiyya ji ka dhaaba". Not one but many of them. Ranging from "Naya Bhaiyya ji ka dhaaba" to " Bhaiyya ji ka naya dhaaba" and also " Wahi purana Bhaiyya ji ka dhaaba". There are atleast 10 of them there, right beside each other, and whenever they see a customer, they come out in full strength, all cooks and waiters included, seemingly to abduct you. If you try to ask them which is the real Bhaiyyaji ka dhaaba, most of them say that their's is the original one. A few ofcourse are more honest and say that the original one has been closed down, and they are the true descendants :).

We were there at ambala for a day, and tried at two different Bhaiyya ji ka dhaabas. Neither of them tasted anywhere near what is expected of a dhaaba that has established itself as a brand and has inspired so many copycats. a few more still remain, so I am hopeful that someday, I would be able to find out the original one...

Talking of branding, a recent addition on the face of Railway stations has been Comesum. Even under the seemingly uniform brand image and the equally striking dresses of employees at all the joints, you will find an amazing variety in the food that is served at Comesum. I am not talking here about the thali etc, which are just as standard as the IRCTC thali, but rather other small items that add the local touch. At Kolkata, for example, u get "mishti dohi" (sweet curd) that is unmatched in taste. At nagpur, you get pastries which are so very soft and just right in terms of taste and smoothness. At Secunderabad station, the joint serves sambhar vada. It is good no doubt, but what makes it interesting is the size of vadas... Humongous I must say. Two vadas would be enough for a well rounded meal.

There are so many such peculiar goodies strewn all over. India is really a feast. There is something new, something exhilerating at every corner. My taste buds are not finished yet. But thats too much of food stuff for a day. Anymore would certainly cause indigestion. So, for now, savour this much, and wait for The taste of India-II :)

The Encroachers

This one was probably the shortest of my journeys on railway; a round trip aggregating just a little over a kilometer. And this time, I didn't board a train either... I walked! From a small station named Pratapnagar to the nearest home signal on track, and back. Too short; too insignificant; but enough for a story :)


Pratapnagar is one of those non-descript railway stations that see only two or three trains a day. A quiet heaven where there are neither engines to reverberate the whole place with their groans nor crowds to give competition to these engines. Where the tracks can be spared for us to play with, for some time atleast, and station staff can be spared to explain to us the nitty gritties of operations. So, when it was time to take probationers for familiarization with signalling system on stations, Pratapnagar was an obvious choice...


To understand the signalling systems, obviously, we had to see the signals. So we started off along the track towards the home signal. In the beginning, railway land was pretty clean and reasonably well maintained on both sides of the track, and we thought that it was going to be a short and sweet trip. But just a few dozen paces and we were able to sniff the troubles ahead :)... The tell tale marks of Naipaul's India were omnipresent...and not just as a distant horror that could, at the most, cause anxiety and nausea. The danger was immediate, right there on the track!... had we not been extra careful, our shoes would have made us remember this trip much longer than anybody would like to. Horrible...It couldn't get any worse than this.

Or probably, it could... We only had to wait till we crossed the overbridge enroute. There onwards, the railway land did not exist at all! The only thing we could find was the railway track, the signals... and the slums.

The whole place was littered with polythene bags, some well set in large heaps and others flying around. To the smell of night soil, was now added, the aroma of rotten vegetables and of the ubiquitous slimes and moulds, that could survive on anything.
And then, the whole place was littered with children too, running amok all over the place. In stark contrast to the station which, like a polished English gentleman, adorned a graceful and ordered demeanour, here u found the cacophonous chaos so typical of an Indian. Filth, stagnant water, diseases, howls of children, grunts of grown ups...and amidst all this... people lived here. It seemed these people too, like slimes and moulds, could survive with just about anything.

So, these were the encroachers we have often been told about. "Despicable fellows, who have illegally gobbled up our land, and who, by their political clout in this great democracy of ours, continue to flout all rules unabashedly without any fear of punishment". And I remembered that as a representative of the Railways, it was our bounden duty to purge the place of all these evils; to throw off all the plastic sheets and the people who lived inside them...

...But, I could not help observing the slum more closely and reflecting about it. It occured to me, "The slum-dwellers are also humans". An obvious fact? Yes...it is a fact, but one that is conveniently forgotten while making policies in our office, a fact that everyone knows but none has really internalized. Only at times like this, when we make a rendezvous with the reality, do we realize the import of this fact. And for this short period our perspective changes...mine certainly did.

These were fellow humans, who were living in the most pitiable of conditions. Forget terraces, forget bedrooms, forget even toilets...they did not have even a proper roof. What was a ten by ten plastic sheet for me was a home for them, their only protection from the vagaries of sun and rain... and there too, some unfortunate ones had to grapple with holes in their roof, covering them with whatever they could arrange out of the big heap of waste plastic. Without fail, there were no walls, no partitions. The family lived outside, cooked outside, slept outside, the "home" being primarily meant for storing things. And then there were the mosquitoes to grapple with too. A few richer ones had been able to buy mosquito nets for themselves. But the poor ones ofcourse could not afford even that. In this generally inhospitable surrounding, the railway track, thankfully, provided the much needed open space for the locality, and it was put to maximum use. As a playground by the children, as a place to cook meals...and also as the place for daily ablutions.

And even with the inhuman life that these people are leading, we are not ready to let them be. We want to oust them. And we take the fact that they have not been removed to imply that these people use political influence for their illegitimate gains. Do you think such deprived men could ever have a political clout? Far from it. The political noises we hear are made by others who have the capacity to be vociferous on issues. These slum-dwellers, unfortunately, are doomed to a silent existence. They are not hard stones that can injure you if you try to hit them. They are mere sponges that simply acquiesce...that succumb to the slightest of pressures. Hundreds of times there have been anti-encroachment drives by railway staff. Do these people raise voices? No. They simply pack everything and move to a nearby footpath lest even the puny possessions of theirs may get destroyed in the whirlwind of official farman. And there they wait patiently, till the pressure is withdrawn when they can again, silently, slip back to their original dwelling.

These people have broken many laws, but that does not mean they do it without fear. Infact, they have a morbid fear of even the most humble of government employees and would never do anything that has even a remote chance of angering the railway staff. One person had piled in bamboo just by the side of the signal post to tie the washing line. It required extra cost, but the poor chap could not dare to tie the rope to the signal post for the fear that it may cause any sort of inconvinience to the signal inspector which would almost certainly have meant another anti-encroachment drive. You and me know that tying a rope to signal post is nothing when compared to an offence like capturing government land...but for them, it was a change from status quo... a possible cause for the obliteration for their meagre belongings...a huge risk to their survival.

Yes, they might be living in highly deplorable conditions. Yes, they might have broken a hundred laws. But then... do they have any choice either? Afterall, as long as they live, they do need a place to sit, to cook, to play, to sleep....to exist. Where will they go if they are ousted from here? Will they be provided any support by the society? Yes, they have encroached upon the government land but by trying to throw them off are we not encroaching upon their basic right to life...

But wait a minute; why was I thinking of all that? Why was I excessively worrying about them? I remembered again; It was the duty of railway employees to remove all such encroachments and we should not deviate from our duty. I asked one of the station staff who had accompanied us, whether any action was planned against these slums. He just said one thing..."are sir inko yahan se hata diya to ye kahan jayenge".

Hmmm... probably I would have got the same answer if I had asked other station staff or the station master. I looked at my colleagues, who were going to be officers very soon; irrespective of what they may do in their official capacity, it was obvious from their grim faces that at that particular moment, removing slums was the last thing on their mind. Perhaps the higher authorities too feel the same way whenever they come here. And leave all of them, if u like, for they are not directly inconvinienced by the slum... Think of the khalasi who has to regularly clean the night soil on track, who has to bear all the filth of this "illegitimate settlement". Even he has not filed a complaint till now. Why?

because... " yahan se hata diya to kahan jayenge "

It was not just me...everybody in railways thought the same way. In between our rigid rule based working, and our so called high handedness with the public at large, we have still not lost our touch with humanity.

For a moment...just for a short, fleeting moment, I felt proud of the fact, that railwaymen do not discharge their duties properly :)