dhabha diary

You are in Pondicherry. Turn north at Pattanikadai junction and you are on West Boulevard. Maybe 50 meters down the road, on the left side of the street, there used to be a movie theater called Navina (I think). Close to it was this little hotel. Don't remember the name. Small frontage, but deep. Remember the hotels of small town Tamil Nadu in the 70s and 80s? Green neon light at the entrance. Also, the large tava upon which the master (the cook) would make podi mash (scrambled eggs), expertly beating out a ringing tattoo with two metal spatulas.Like Pavlov's dog, your digestive juices should be flowing now.

This hotel made the best parotta/mutton kurma that I have tasted. The parottas were small, only a little bigger than iddlis. Soft and redolent with ghee, they would melt in the mouth. The kurma was thick and spicy, with perfectly cooked soft chunks mutton.

for heaven's sake

Some years back I had occasion to trek through Ponmudi as part of a team conducting a survey among tribals. The jeep left us at the edge of the forest, where the tarred road came to an end, and we set out in search of tribal hamlets. The ‘road’ narrowed progressively and then began to climb, and soon we were pushing our way, single file, through shoulder-high grass. After an hour or so of this, we stopped to rest. Everyone was too out of breath to speak and it was then that we became conscious of the stillness. So accustomed were we to the sounds of city life that it came almost as a shock to us – this absence of noise. And yet I recognized it; it reminded me of something, I’m not sure what. Of time spent in the womb, perhaps. Or my childhood days in small-town Oddissa; a time when cell phones had not yet been invented, when 24-hour music and news channels were just fanciful thoughts, when the few cars on the road did not make irritating PIP-PIP-PIP sounds in reverse gear, and when the neighbor’s teenage son did not have a 5000-Watt music system to fool around with on a hot Sunday afternoon.

There must be only a few havens like Ponmudi left in this jangling world. That is why I was so pained to see G. Madhavan Nair insist upon—and get—Ponmudi as the site for the prestigious IIST. Another bit of paradise gone! Imagine if, instead, he had asked the government to give him the worst, most useless, piece of land in Kerala and if he had then proceeded to use all the cutting-edge technology at his command to convert the wasteland into something that would rival Ponmudi. That would have been an achievement to be proud of. Much better than sending a rocket to the moon half a century after the Russians and Americans had done so.