The Well-Fed Bong

Its always a good idea to cultivate marriageable Mallu friends, or at least friends willing to be married to Mallus. The last time this yielded dividends was at Anjali’s wedding – Chennai, but a wonderful, payasam-loaded affair – and it took half a decade to find another candidate. And so I landed in Thrissur, home to temple, elephants, tons of big fat jewelers and the ridiculously named Lulu Garden Hotel (35 rooms and a helipad) working off my work obligations before jumping into the revelry. I checked in late, only a dull ‘working’ lunch in my belly, but with sleep deprivation and little appetite for adventure decided to eat in (hotel kitchens are usually dull, I thought, but rarely fatal). Two hours later, I was weeping and sniffling like a baby. The food was, much to my surprise, excellent. It was also blazingly, killingly, blazingly (have I already said that?) spicy - even the raita given to cool things off had pieces of chilly. The mutton olathiyathu sang with flavour, the p...

One hardly ever comes across anything worth talking about that has not already been talked about. Mumbai's bloggers are quite an active lot, usually out-writing me with ease. It was with some satisfaction, therefore, that I discovered hidden gold in the heart of Girgaum. Of course, being entirely undiscovered was too much to ask. A MumbaiBoss column by Roshni Bajaj Singhvi first made me aware of Golden, but what really intrigued me was that no one else seemed to have even so much as mentioned it anywhere else. Stalwarts like Zomato and Burrp were silent, and every other mention on the great big cloud were rehashings of the same aforementioned column. All other search results spent their time insisting that Sharma Bhelpuri or some such other was better. This Golden, it seemed, was hidden even from Google. Back on my bicycle last week, I headed straight to Girgaum. The directions in the article were a bit sketchy so a bit of asking around led me to Sicka Nagar (yes, that is in...