Adhi Potoba

There are certain things that schools in India guarantee — a good education, lifelong friendships and a peruwala outside every school gate. For those of you who didn’t go to school in India, a peruwala is a guava vendor and there’s one situated outside each school gate with a black Atlas bicycle and flat cane basket tied to the “carrier” over the rear wheel. The basket lined with grass is quartered with rope to separate the guavas by size and price. In my days, 75 paise (roughly 15¢ in 1988) would fetch you the biggest guava on the cart. It was harmless and inexpensive treat that made recess just that much sweeter. Cut into 4 quarters, each guava would then be filled with chili and salt — the thought of which freaks my firang wife out to this day. The guavawalla is a phenomenon I couldn’t quite understand. Why are there only peruwalas outside school? There’s never an apple cart or even an orange cart. Either way, memories of my post-lunch guava with friends are something I cherish t...

Schools in Pune organized “Fancy Fetes” as a means of raising much needed funds. My alma mater would raise more money in 3 days with a fete than it could with the meager alms received through ZP funding in a year. The maths for this was simple. Host a huge fair on the school grounds by asking students to contribute as well as sell raffle tickets and massive corporate sponsorships would fill the void. Parents would be asked to volunteer their services in supervising the student run stalls of games or refreshments. For a college student, the most important part of going to a school fete was the large collection of young women and supporting schools was as far from anyone’s mind as could be. Besides the games including the large central hoopla and the obvious collection of pretty girls, my favourite part of these fetes were the stalls of home made foods run by parents. Delicious home ‘ishtyle’ food was presented in paper plates that were inevitably covered with grass or sand. One year, I ...

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. In Pune, however, breakfast almost seems to be a second thought. It’s something you do between getting dressed for work or school and leaving the house. I for one have been brought up on a steady breakfast of Carbury’s drinking chocolate (the one that came in the blue tin) and Britannia Nice biscuits . (Hello diabetes!) Shoving the biscuits in my mouth and washing it down with chocolate milk hot enough to take the top layer off your gullet. All this mostly while the school bus would stand outside honking the horn and my mother, trying in vain, to ask the driver to wait just one more minute till her son got his shit together. Unfortunately, no matter how old you get or where you go in the world, breakfasts might change, but the chaotic morning scene remains the same. On the weekends however, we try to bring back some sanity to our lives and what better way to start than with a healthy, hearty sit-down breakfast. Ingredients 3 cu...

Scanlynn and I recently paid a visit to a local South Indian eatery here on Curry Hill by the name of Tiffinwallah . It's a charming little place with a homey feel and decorated with 3-tier tiffins. It immediately brought back memories of school and my dabba wallah . As I tried explaining the concept of the Tiffinwallah to Scanlynn, I realized that the Indian tiffin delivery system that I didn’t think twice about was such an elaborate and complicated ordeal. The New York Times recently had a big article about the Tiffinwallahs of Mumbai and their FedEx like precision delivery systems. This article does more justice to it than anything I can ever say about it. And all this fuss just so that people like myself that too lazy to go down during lunch hour can get hot, home cooked lunches at their desks at work (or school). Although my dabba wallah at school operated at a much smaller scale, he did cater to about 100 students. One of my pet peeves about my dabba was getting watery cu...