Best of the South in Central Mumbai

Café Madras is a tricky destination if you don’t know your way around Kings Circle, Sion. Everytime we end up doing atleast 2 chakkars before we zero in on its location. This time around, I found a landmark – an eatery which has its name on a bright blue neon board with Reliance Communication written on it is where one takes the left.

Waiting before you get a table seems to be an accepted norm here. The young man at the door smiles sweetly & confirms that we should be seated in the next twenty minutes, which you so want to believe. Breakfast is easier to catch I guess, with less of a wait, depending on when you arrive.

Etched on the stone walls at the entrance are the words, Café Madras, open since 1940. Timings: 7am – 2:30 pm, 4pm – 11pm. It also says the establishment is shut on Mondays.

Fifty minutes later, out of which about forty eight were spent with my sister & I staring at the young man, came our table. Thoughts on ambience etc. etc. should all be discarded before you enter. The staff is extremely friendly, including the gentleman at the door. I liked the fact that they recommend stuff, rather than routinely take one’s order down.

Move over all you Udipi-style restaurants. The food is out of the world, and since I was brought up in Chennai, you can definitely take my word for it. This is probably the only place in Mumbai which serves authentic mulagapodi (commonly referred to as gun powder by most North Indians). We had a Raagi Rava Dosa, which makes it a tad healthier than the regular version made out of maida. The servings are not big, but enough to fill a normal appetite as most of the items are made with ghee.

We skipped desert, but ended the meal with lovely filter coffee, excessively sweet, but heavenly. Aaah!

The bill for four of us was Rs. 255/- and the following was what we had:

· 1 plate upma
· 1 plate rasam vada
· 3 rava dosas (one of them ragi)
· 2 ghee dosas
· 1 ginger lemon cooler & soft drink
· 2 filter coffees.

Only drawbacks:
· You guessed it, the waaaaait…
· The parking, our vehicle was at the other end of the world. If in a group, its best that atleast one gets off to get their name on the list, while the rest look for parking.

Overall the experience, as a true Chennai’ite would say, voray soopera!

Gee-wiz-dumb!

Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana. In my wisdomless days it took me a while to comprehend, and then…it was all hahahaha!! And now in all my wisdom..no longer funny. (GEE)

(Another of Groucho Marx’s to add to the hahas:
“Q: What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?A: Someone who stays up all night wondering if there is a Dog.”
Hahahaha!! )

Speaking of wisdom, have wisdom teeth graced any of you? Trivia: the absence of wisdom teeth is referred to as hypodontia. Generally they are referred to as wisdom teeth because they appear in one’s mid twenties or so. Now, I was destined to be wise too, but my dentist uncle was most eager to snatch all my wisdom away claiming my teeth were ‘impacted’. At 23, I was sans 2 wisdom teeth. It was not until my late 20s (OMG!) that the tooth fairy decided to bestow upon me some more wisdom. It’s been six months and there are still little bits of wisdom sprouting out in some corner of my poor gum. (WIZ)

Sadly, not so wise were some dumb flies who managed to find their way into my home. To describe my bedroom, two cupboards (with mirrors) face the large sliding windows that adorn the opposite wall. With the windows open, the reflection of the view is obviously what you see in the mirror. Now there were these two flies, somewhat bored with their current surroundings – who decided to explore. (DUMB)

Adventurous maybe, harebrained (or flybrained) they definitely were –repeatedly flying into the reflection, banging into the mirror every 10 seconds, in an attempt to fly out of the room! In the process, one of them eventually killed itself..I wonder why but I laughed out loud, albeit I did feel sorry for the dead fly. Wonder if there is someone huge being out there watching us all tiny creatures as well...

Speaking of great big people, the head of our business the other day was in the mood to distribute gyaan. One to talk and talk and talk, he goes on about how one should see the picture, from 30,000 feet and blah. At the end of the discussion, on coming out of the cabin, a colleague goes “haan haan pehle tees hazaar feet ka view dikhake, phir vahan se ek bada dhakka”

Conversations other than those from 30,000 feet in Mumbai over the months of June, July, August and maybe September even usually have one common topic. The rains, or this year the lack of them. In a way it unites all of Mumbaikars, especially after the debacle in 2005.

Year 2008 seems to have reversed the above situation. According to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) “the six lakes from which Mumbai gets its supply of water could sustain the city’s need for another 100 days at the most”. What alarmed was this statement – “Mumbai uses 3,350 million litres of water daily”
(Source: DNA)

To end this, I read somewhere that Sonu Sood (who? pseud?) requested a rain-sequence in an upcoming film to be shot with mineral water and not the normal water usually used. Why? Because, he found his hair completely ruined when ‘normal’ water is used.