TREADMILL

ALL ABOUT OSTEOARTHRITIS

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BOOKEND

There I was, in a military hotel-thus named because the first of the kind emerged to cater to the carnivorous needs of Tamils that had enlisted in the army and were back home on furlough, in what was then primarily herbivore territory (a status that has since changed; Tamil Nadu boasts the highest per capita consumption of fish, among all states, in India)-engaged in the complex tossing up required to decide between fried rabbit and roast quail (I eventually went with the safe option, both) when I heard a group that had just come in, and occupied the next table, place its order.

"Rendu fish fry, rendu gobi manchurian ......" (Two fried fish, two gobi manchurian)

Now, gobi manchurian (we will come to what exactly this exotic sounding dish is in a while) is not exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a military hotel, or a Chettinad (specialising in the fiery cuisine of the Chettiars, a Tamil sub-community) restaurant. Yet, over the course of a week in December, the only time of the year Chennai is inhabitable- reasons for: the weather, which is balmy, a Carnatic music and dance festival, some 3,000 concerts in the span of a month; reasons against: hordes of descending non-resident Indians, which means crowds everywhere -that is exactly what I found. Chennai is no longer about filter-coffee and mysore pak (a sweetmeat made from flour, dollops of clarified butter and a healthy helping of sugar); it is about gobi manchurian, a fixture in menus of restaurants across the city, even in those that largely subscribe to the idli-dosa ideology.

Gobi manchurian is nothing but cauliflower, slathered with spices, deep fried, then served dry or in a gravy (see How To Make Gobi Manchurian). It emerged on the culinary firmament sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, in Bangalore. The first restaurants to offer this were the Kamath-types, restaurants whose owners could trace back (within a couple of generations, that is), their roots to the staunchly-Brahmin and staunchly-vegetarian region of Udipi, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Karnataka's South-West, adjoining the Arabian Sea. Dakshin Canara, as the region is still popularly known, also boasts a traditional non-vegetarian cuisine, but that is another story. In Udipi, for instance, there aren't too many restaurants that serve meat of any kind (this writer's memory from a decade-old trip is that there is none).

The Bangalore of the late 1980s/early 1990s was a happening place. The pub-culture was old enough for women, even single women, to brave venturing into watering holes for a pitcher of draught, yet new enough for people to still be excited about pubs (and for the pubs themselves to retain their freshness). The tech-boom was some time away, but very much in sight. And, in a city that liked to eat out, traditional cuisine, facing the onslaught of a slew of eateries offering every kind of cuisine, was ready for a make-over. In many ways, gobi manchurian symbolised that makeover. It is a wholly original dish, not South Indian, not North Indian, and definitely not Chinese in origin. The typical vegetarian family in Bangalore would order soup (strictly of the South Indian variety), gobi manchurian (served with toothpicks for easy consumption), and either an unlimited South Indian meal or rotis and a few North Indian dishes cooked the South Indian way. Pubs started offering gobi manchurian as a starter for their vegetarian patrons.

From Bangalore, the dish has travelled to other parts of Karnataka, to Chennai and other cities in Tamil Nadu, even Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, although the last two have escaped its stranglehold over menus to some extent. I'd like to view the dish less as a culinary eyesore (it tastes like a highly-spiced fried vegetable that desperately wants to be highly-spiced meat) than an indication of the cultural transformation of certain parts of South India, especially (and coincidentally) those that have benefitted from the it boom. Both, for instance, are highly unnatural. Then, some old-school-types may consider civilisation itself unnatural. Forget the philosophising and bring on the gobi manchurian.

PS: An opportunistic spice-marketer has launched gobi manchurian mixes that are all the rage in supermarkets across Chennai and Bangalore.

The Science Of Gymming

Sherlekar: Now we know why he has two hands Your posture is all wrong and so are the shoes," says Virendra Sherlekar, Managing Partner at Talwalkars, arguably India's oldest branded fitness center which has just come to Delhi. The man is a mechanical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and he has actually designed some of the equipment at the 35 branches (across 12 cities) of the fitness chain, so I decide to be a little more careful in the use of my high-heeled bone-coloured court shoes (I make a note never to wear it to any meetings I may have with fitness gurus in the future). That, a fitness guru, albeit a science-minded one, is what Sherlekar is. For 18 years after his graduation from IIT, Sherlekar lived in the US, working for Honeywell for some time, earning a PhD in operations research (and a black-belt in taekwondo), and living the great Indian-American dream. Then, inspired by Jane Fonda's fitness videos which turned him into an aerobics-fanatic, Sherlekar and wife Asha returned to India, met with Madhukar Talwalkar whose father Vishnu had founded the chain as an akhada (training camp for wrestlers) in 1932, and started offering aerobics lessons at one Talwalkars centre. The association has lasted (growing into a partnership) and Sherlekar even trains 150 personal trainers every year at the company's fitness academy in Pune. "The time for serious exercising is between the ages of 35 and 50," says the 59-year-old who still exercises for six hours a week. There's still enough time left for me. -Amanpreet Singh