Desire with Prudence- my love for parathas!

 

It intrigued me to no end and often marvelled at the ability of my Punjabi friends to make absolutely delicious, mouth-watering, amazingly soft parathas. I used to wait for my delectable lunch time and would not trade for anything to get a taste of parathas! (leave along the royal crown 🙂. Coming from a typical south Indian family, our cooking was almost oil free and devoid of masalas. The idea of making paratha was to sprinkle a… bit of ghee like the holy water.

I remember once in Rawatbhatha (a beautiful place where I spend most of my childhood), we got invited to a picnic that our north Indian family friends were organising. It was a potluck and we were to bring poori and alloo sabzi. I was in my early teens and loved to help my mother in rolling chappities as I had mastered the art of making thin and soft chapaties. So here was an opportunity to showcase my skills to the outside world and I jumped in and offered my mom to take the responsibilites of making poories. With all my skills and intricacy at display, I rolled out thin and round poories. Drowned in my own pride, I was anxious to see the reaction of our family friends on my inordinately awesome abilities. To my dismay and despair, the poories turned out to be extremely brittle and flat. What I thought would be my moment of triumph turned out to be an extremely embarrassing and excruciating experience for an otherwise beaming teen.:))

That seismic event remained dormant in my deep consciences only to resurface now. After a lot of trial and error, it is only now that I finally experienced my ‘eureka’ moment as I learned to match my skills to that of a Punjabi and can churn out all sorts of delicious and soft parathas that really melts in your mouth. It is a great way to serenely console my wandering soul and provides comfort to my nervous wricked self. Don’t ask me how many pounds I gained in this process. Now that I perfected the art of making parathas, I have to deal with the trauma of carving out a leaner self to keep up with the trend, in what seems to be a ‘slim look’ fibril, the world is in the grip off. Heed to the advice of elders, desire with prudence, is what I always hear but never learn to follow.