Adhi Potoba

This is the story of how yours truly was involved in an incident that almost closed down Residency Club. In the summer of 93 I started what was my first job, an internship at an industrial design firm in our building. One of the assignments I was working on was to build a permanent Mandap for Residency Club. Back then; Residency club was a newer, cheaper alternative to Poona Club and the Royal Connaught Boat Club . Mr. Tanna, the owner of Residency Club had solicited the help of Blueprint Design to build a permanent Mandap over a courtyard that was surrounded by rooms for club guests, so that he could rent the courtyard for functions even during monsoons. Blueprint design had delivered a highly futuristic concept for a Mandap using a tensile structure . Tensile structures are made of strong sheets of synthetic fibers stretched and held together with tension wires. Blueprint design had come up with a design that worked really well in theory. If all went well, this would cover an area o...

In 1996 the owner of Hotel Vaishali , Jagannath B.Shetty, decided it was time to renovate. This was mostly to tackle the problem of vagabonds that occupied tables for long periods of time by ordering just coffee or tea and spent that time ogling at the honeys from nearby colleges. The brilliant solution to this problem was creating a small smoking section where the lallygagging, leering, permanent fixture like customers would be reassigned. Actual paying customers could then use the rest of the busy hotel. As a result, Mr. Shetty closed Vaishali for 3 months. People like myself and the rest of the collegiate crowd found themselves completely lost and had to find a place to park themselves for those meaningful hours between breakfast and lunch. Or what is known in college as the first four classes. Anyone who has gone to college in India knows that while it is essential to be enrolled in a top-notch college, attending classes is for losers. In desperation we turned to the few accepta...

Once upon a time Pune was a small town with cute little houses. The traffic was manageable. The air was breathable air. And roads had no dividers. Fergusson college road was a beautiful street lined with Banyan trees and pretty much everything else was hunky dory. Much unlike the awful shit storm that FC Road has become today. A few things however have remained unchanged there. One of them, much to my delight, is a restaurant called Amrapli. As far back as I can remember, Amrapali was the place to go to for vegetarian fare. It is located off Fergusson College Road at the end of an access road right behind Hotel Roopali. It is very easy to miss as the only indication is a beaten up cantilevered neon sign, which must’ve worked at some point in time. A bicycle repair shop on one side and a scooter garage on the other guard the entrance to the access road. The entrance also featured a Lambretta , which I guess no one had claimed for decades, rusted and sunk half way into the ground. The le...

Recently, I visited one of my favourite Thai restaurants, Pongsri , in New York. One of our mutual friends found two items on the menu that looked exactly the same with similar ingredients. The only difference was that one was sautéed and the other one was stir-fried. She asked me what the difference was and it was something I had never thought about. Does anyone know?

Appa is a word for father in many Indian languages. But for a true Punekar, there is only one ‘Appa’ and he owns the canteen that is part of the Deccan Gymnkhana, nestled snugly in a tiny lane between the cricket ground and the tennis courts, at the Eastern end of the long billiards hall. Appa’s canteen needs no introduction as it has been in the same spot since days of the Raj. A humble place made up of one small room divided into two tiny sections, the dining area and the kitchen. There is usually a machine making some sort of batter in the door between the kitchen and dining area. The dining area seats 8 people at a time. As a result most of Appa’s goodies are consumed out on the street on the back seat of a scooter or car. Appa’s canteen boasts a minimal menu of 3-4 dishes a day and menu items are set by the day of the week. Only a true Puneri can recite the menu by what day it is. If it’s Sunday, this must be idli-sambar. Some of the most famous items on this menu are idli sambar...

On returning to New York as a married couple, our ‘gruha pravesh’ involved pushing huge suitcases packed to the maximum allowable baggage allowance across the threshold. The only way a true desi travels and something I just can’t explain to my wife. I’m still on a high from all the pampering a prodigal son gets on his brief, infrequent visits home. The trick however is the leave before the novelty wears off. Now back in my apartment, as I was having my Sunday morning chai, I looked at my Nice biscuits (my favourite biscuits), which has turned limp from moisture as they were pretty old. Quite a contrast to the Sunday mornings back home. When I lived in Pune, the family of one of the boys that worked for us lived in Tulsibaug. Although he lived with us all week, he would visit his family every weekend, leaving on Friday evening and returning early morning on Sunday. One of his most important duties (at least according to me) was to go to Hindustan Bakery on the way back and pick up a Kg ...

So my girlfriend and I finally tied the knot with a small ceremony in Pune last week and flew straight to Jaipur for our honeymoon. My wife wanted to live in a small place with lots of character so anything with the name Taj, Oberoi or Sheraton was out. We found this small hotel, Hotel Palms that must’ve been someone’s residence at one point. It was one of those hotels where the owners lost interest in running it just as soon as they acquired it, giving it the right amount of character and ample scope for comic relief that we were looking for. It came with notable amenities such as mosquitoes, an internet café that was open only between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., a utilities shop that never opened the entire time that I was there and more staff than there were rooms none of whom were of any real help. On my first morning there, I woke up and ordered some tea. The tea came in a stained thermos with a jar of sugar cubes. The jar of sugar cubes had ants crawling all over the sugar. When I pointe...