Maharani

Voluptuous Kachoris are haunting me. Blame it on the FB post that, besides making me drool in sleep, set the untiring treasure-hunter on 'The Kachori’ yet again, landing him on the other side of the teeming city seeking immediate consummation. Now I am at ‘Maharani’ on Lansdowne Road mooting on the ways to begin my Kachori-binge. The ones I hold are consistent, freshly fried, tanned, round, indulgent, soft and coming with the quintessential 'Alu'r torkari’ to complement. What the priceless mole on upper lip did to Rekha’s face for years, the Green Chilli Pickle does exactly that to the Kachoris – enhance – turning the experience surreal.

For the uninitiated, Maharani is one of the Kachori Trinity - the rest two being The ‘Maharaja’ on Hungerford Street and ‘Potlada’r Kochuri’ on Bagbazar Street.

lately I discern, being essentially a part of the whole experience, a passivity in cinematic language in India...with contemporary directors using this medium not to pamphleteer, be it for good or bad, or articulate but to share experiences allowing absolute cognitive liberty to viewers. This space was long needed...now the viewers leave the cinema not with a moral but with a thought, a seed, a beginning...

Besides being particularly fond of people who are elegantly clumsy in their bearing while eating, I preserve a perverse habit of associating fine-dining with charlatans. The music in the ‘Talking while eating’ is always more appealing and preferred to the moronic tinkling of cutlery. In many of the new run of fine-dining restaurants of the city, where attitude is preferred to love-for-food, I feel terribly displaced. Surprisingly most of the celebrated eateries of the world I’ve had the opportunity of visiting, particularly in Europe, conspicuously promoted silence. [And definitely as inborn gastronomes Bengalis have always trusted their tongues more than Michelin’s.]

This hidden penchant for disorder has made Bengalis irrevocably vulnerable to dishes as profane yet profound as Phuchka, Tarka or the Roll...

I might not have read them all with same reckless unvarying love yet I knew them all. Though even to dislike I had to read them - to add some legitimacy to my disfavour...

The element of deliberateness implicit in the act of surrender vanishes giving way to the beautiful arising of awareness - the blossoming of a flower. The moment dawns when the illusion of 'Action' yields to the reality of 'Happening'...god smiles.

Mystery never abandons its name and lovers...and its mysteriousness!

Amar saathe cholcho o megh
Amar saathei bolcho
Amar motoi chaicho o megh
Amar motoi jhorcho.

Kothaye harai
Kothaye palai
Kothaye je jai bol
Meghbalika amar saathe arektu dur chol.

Boddo gorom boddo bheja 'boddo' sob'er majhe
Ojana sob bhalolaaga notun kore baje.

Toiri ami? Ta jani na
Hoyeto ba bhan kori
Tai to hothath nil akashe
Tomar khoj'ei pori.