Red light vendetta

There was this peanut back in school. He was and still is a really, really nice person. Well respected, highly educated and all that sort of thing.

He was also talented and was one of a few pioneers from our school to be selected to represent the school... abroad! Now that was a big thing back in the day.

These days going abroad is just slightly easier than making an infant sleep through the night. OK, I admit, I was lying there...its a lot easier.

However, when this happened, it was really, really tough. Only film stars on shoots and cricketers went abroad for work. So, our man went to OZ land representing the school. So with all the hero worship and fanfare, he set off for a 3 week trip to the land of the unknown, also known as Australia. At a time when email and IM did not exist for the layman, we heard nary a peep from him while abroad.

One fine day, he returned. I say 'twas a fine day, but it actually was a pretty sucky day, raining and all. The full wrath of monsoon was unleashed upon Ooty.

As was the convention back then, the conquering hero and a couple of other teachers gathered in our house to discuss important matters such as the state of the nation. On this particular evening, the flavour of the day was about Australia. I was, as usual, 'accidentally' overhearing the conversation while [pretending to] study(ing).

The much travelled man was regaling the audience with tales of Aussie Awesomeness. Roads you could eat off of, the smooth roads that didn't have a single pothole, the way traffic moved in perfect harmony, no honking, cleanliness and all the lovely, paved sidewalks on which only people and pets walked. I mean I was surprised there weren't even any cows on the road. It had my pre-teen mind in a whirl wondering where they kept all their cows.

Of the many tales that were told, one stuck to my head. I'm not sure why or what made it stick, but it stuck. He mentioned that there was this super advanced traffic light that was controlled by the pedestrians. Push a button, traffic stops, you safely cross the road, the light turns green again. At the time, it was cutting edge, the stuff of science fiction. Indulge me, while I explain why. Drivers in India love playing whack-a-mole. You know, the funky game where around 8 or 9 moles randomly pop up and you take a hammer and whack 'em on their heads to win a point? Road users in India love playing this game, except for one major issue. While you can find cows, donkeys, buffalo, elephants, goats, dogs, humans and all members of the animal kingdom on the road, I honestly think you cannot find moles on Indian roads. There may well be places where moles roam freely on the road, but I haven't seen one. So, our eager drivers settle for the next best thing, humans.

If you cross the road in India, expect to be run over. Setting this expectation is vital to survive as you can then get your survival instinct to kick in and cross safely by deftly sidestepping the lorry hurtling towards you.

So with this being the road crossing experience I had, hearing about automated pedestrian operated traffic lights was epic. Unbelievable even. Hearing that traffic actually stops when the light turned red made it even more fairy tale like. In fact, being the teacher that he was, he said he tested the system to check if the vehicles stop every time by pressing the button a few times without actually crossing the road. Apparently, they did stop and nobody jumped the light or honked at the Indian guy pushing the button and standing by the side looking very amused.

Fast forward a couple of decades and here I am. England. England, as you know, loves its pedestrians. In fact, councils here go out of their way to ensure pedestrians rule the road. So much so, the average high street in England would not look very different from the diagram below:

There is always a sea of red because of the pedestrian traffic lights. The lights are red, so all the vehicles in front of you brake, so all their red brake lights are flashing at you. It often feels like a blood bath. And, yes, they are all pedestrian controlled.

Getting stuck at the bottom of a wall of traffic on Wembley high street the other day, this story came back to me. It was no fairy tale, it was a nightmare! I imagined our man trying out all lights, starting with light #1 and running to #2 and so on, ensuring all lights stayed red! All of a sudden, whack-a-mole looked like a promising game to play...

Tea, coffee, chai, vada...

I usually don't eat a lot. I'm happy for people who know me to disagree, but that's besides the point. I'm more than happy with my 3 sq. meals a day, sometimes even 2 are more than sufficient. However, I become a different animal altogether when I travel.

I'm not quite sure what harmone travel ticks off, but the moment I hit the road, sea or air, I start eating. It's almost like my stomach sends a petition to the brain. I think I've even figured out what the petition says:

                                              Memo for internal use only

Issuing department: Stomach and surrounding areas in collaboration with Tongue and Co.

Intended recipient: Brain

Dear Brain,

We note with a great amount concern that our ecosystem, i.e., the human we inhabit, is showing signs of increased movement. This, to us indicates that the human is travelling. As you are, no doubt, aware, travelling results in a great deal of action and involvement of other organs. To give you a few examples, the eyes are flooded with new information and sights, the ears are treated to new sounds and the skin, overall, senses new things such as weather, clothing etc., we, the stomach and surrounding areas in collaboration with Tongue and Co. (hereinafter referred to as "the petitioners") do not get any action at all until the destination is reached. Even there, depending on the human, we are sometimes provided with the same old food to process.

This results in daily taunts and bullying of the petitioners by the rest of the body. Unable to tolerate this anymore, we hereby humbly request you to issue an order to make the human feel like eating during travel.

Thanking you,

Yours sincerely

The Petitioners

Having received this petition, the brain, which happened to be in a particularly good mood, what with all the new sights and sounds of travel that it was suddenly reminded of, issued an order. A standing order, no less. The order stated simply: Granted. Human to feel like eating at all times during travel.

Whether that is the sequence of events, I will never be sure, however, it is pretty close to it, that I'm positive.

Ever since I can remember, I've always felt the urge to eat DURING travel. Whether it was during trips around the Nilgiris with my father on the old Avanti Kelivinator, or annual holidays to some place in India, travel became associated with eating. My father would take care of that. He would buy more or less anything and everything vegetarian to eat and he would buy it often.

Back then, the best trip I could think of would be on a train with a pantry car. That automatically ensured a steady supply of food. With a huge variety of food dished out by the IRCTC (the catering arm of the Indian Railways), the whole trip was filled with vadais, masala vadais, samosas, bread omelette (all time favourite, more on this below), all variety of dosas, idli (not very often, as it was not my favourite food), puris, tea and coffee (the coffee used to taste really bad, but we'd drink one anyway). Every major station would vastly improve the list to include parottas (also a fav.), biryani, varieties and varieties of rice.

The ideal trip was by Inter-City Express from Coimbatore to Chennai or Bangalore. This particular train had a very good pantry and the journey was only 6-8 hours long, which meant you could eat all of the above in 20-30 min intervals and not have to repeat the process till the return journey starts, a few days later. Besides, the cost was also sustainable as a whole day of eating would typically set us back around Rs. 150, this level of spending couldn't be sustained on longer journeys. Longer journeys meant the first day or two were covered by food from home, typically puries and my favourite type of potato curry, which we've helpfully named picnic curry, followed by biryani, puli sadam and thayir sadam which my mother would have packed and kept ready. These journeys were all about family time, with such a lot of food to be polished off!

Later on, as I grew older, the tendency to eat while travelling did not wane. Any road trip I took would be interrupted by food stops roughly every hour and a half. I remember one particularly adventurous journey from Coimbatore to Chennai (a distance of around 525km). I had managed to evade parental radar and travel by motorcycle. I left home at 5 a.m.

With the initial adrenalin kick of taking such a long trip on two wheels and the fact that I wanted to put enough distance between myself and Coimbatore before what I had done was discovered, thereby rendering an order to ask me come back to base and take the train futile, I made it non-stop to Salem, a distance of 150km in 3 hours, which, for the state of roads at the time, was faster than taking a bus and just half an hour slower than the train. As I entered Salem, I had to take the ring road to continue along the highway towards Chennai. Around 10km into the ring road, stomach and its henchman decided enough was enough. They had put up with me and kept quiet up until that point simply because of the control adrenalin had over them. With Salem breached, there was no way a return to base order would come now. They decided to erupt in protest and I became despertately hungry. Helpfully, there was a Saravanaa Bhavan in the vicinity and I started my first pitstop. Turned out to be a longish one since it took me the best part of an hour to start the bike up again.

Satisfied, I hit the road again and from then on, I would stop at every town that had more than a tea shop. Remember, I mentioned that at Salem, I was faster than a bus? Going by that logic, I should have reached Chennai around 3pm that afternoon. When I actually pulled into Chennai, it was well past 7pm, closer to 8, in fact. Around an hour of that delay could be reliably attributed to enjoying nature. The rest is all food.

The love of food during travel did not end when I left the shores of India to start my first job at Dubai either. Needless to say, I munched my way through most of the first flight of my life. Once there, I fell in love with discrete little tea shops that dot the highways of the middle east. These are all, invariably, run by a bloke from Kerala. These guys have the knack of making the best every omelette sandwich.

At this point, I feel obligated to differentiate the famous bread omelette of the Indian Railways and Gelf omelette sandwich. Please indulge me here. The bread omelette, is made up of 2 thickish slices of the softest white bread I have eaten in India. For some reason, I have not been able to find bread of comparable softness outside the railway. I do not, for the life of me, know why. Anyway, between these slices, there would be some ketchup and a perfectly spiced omlette made from 2 eggs with very finely chopped onion, tomato and green chilli. That is it. Nothing else. The Gelf omelette sandwich on the other hand was not exactly a sandwich. It consisted of a piece of malabar parotta, the layered, fluffy one, which would be made into a roll. The stuffing was a perfectly spiced omlette made from 2 eggs with very finely chopped onion, tomato and green chilli. That's right, the omlette was the same taste, not complaining though!

On the average trip of 200km in the UAE, I would make around 2.5 stops. Bear in mind that my average driving speed then was 100kmh, so that's 2.5 stops in 2 hours...just saying.

The UK is no different, the only difference being there is no one food that I can look forward to. Every 20 miles on the motorway, there is either a Burger King, starbucks, Costa or some such equally bland choice of food, but I still hit the brake every 2 service stations!

Moral of the story... this is an appeal to any enterprising Malayalee reading this post, my request is, the UK sorely needs an omelette sandwich and chai shop. Please invest!