Hardik Rajgor

W hen one of the first  McDonald’s  outlets opened in Mumbai in the ’90s, there was a lot of excitement in our middle-class home. And though today we feel stupid like those guys who were excited about Google Plus, back in the day, all my sister and I wanted was to get hold of the toys –  Toy Story  was a rage then – and have a burger. We had no idea what it tasted like, we’d just seen Americans eating a lot of it in the movies. Fast food was a concept alien to my roti and daal-chawal-eating family and we have never set foot inside a eatery that did not have pure veg plastered outside its entrance in a tacky font.   Taking a leap of voluntary faith into the world of cancer-causing food, we set aside an evening to have dinner at McDonald’s – the place where teenagers now go when they run out of pocket money. While I was enjoying the novelty of the  Pizza  McPuff (it looked more appetitising than a McAloo Tikki), all it took my mom was a bite of one f...

E very  Gujarati  wedding menu has two kinds of dal; there’s “normal” dal and then there’s meethi dal .  The first bland and boring version is for the six people at the wedding who are fitness conscious and are obviously not Gujarati, and the latter is for the rest of us who will die of diabetes. Then there’s sweet kadhi ,  sev tameta nu shaak, and basundi – all this even before you reach the dessert counter – for the sugar rush we need to dance to  “Sanedo”  later. They say some stereotypes exist because they are true, and this is certainly true for us Gujaratis. We love sweet food, truly madly deeply.   You could say Gujjus are as obsessed with sweet food as paps and admins of dank meme pages are with  Taimur Ali Khan . In a Gujarati household, the sugar jar is placed right next to the salt jar, and used as liberally as  Virat Kohli  uses expletives on the field. We can live without water but not sugar and jaggery, especially in ...