IT'S ALL ABOUT THE CHUTNEY.

By 21, I knew that:
1)You mortgaged the first 20 years of your life to your parents and leased out the the next 20 to your boss.
2)Coffee was a must for survival. Then came air and water.
3)A sexy watch was never worn to tell the time.
4)Newspapers carried out printing errors on purpose so that a regret note could be published the following day showcasing their humble 'after all-we-are-human' side.
5)There was no reason to live if you hadn't watched Schindler's List and The Shawshank Redemption.
6)People 'forgot' to remove their airline baggage tags.
7)Tax planning and tax evasion weren't necessarily different.
8)The letters in 'Mother-in-law' could be rearranged to give 'Woman Hitler' and,
9)It was all about the chutney.

A road down the temple side entrance of the famed Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, led to a little yet well known shop on Margosa road, Malleswaram. The place was well known to make lip-smacking idly-vada. Like everyone else who lived within a 3 kms radius of this little store, I too had stood on the footpath eating off the small stainless steel plate on many occasions. With passage of time, it dawned on me that it was all about the chutney. The soft, white idly and the crisp hole-in-the-middle vada by themselves could do little to tingle the taste buds. But the chutney (which was incapable of independent listing) was the sole reason why this little store's idly-vada was listed on the NASDAQ.
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I held the tiny little kaapi lota between my fingers and sipped on the coffee. Hordes of two and four wheelers, buses, auto-rickshaws with state of the art electronic meters, cycles and pedestrians seemed to be in a hurry to get to work. Just then, there was a slight tap on my shoulder. I turned to look. It was Raghv a.k.a Raga, an old neighbour. We had grown up playing cricket in kulla park. He was here with another older looking man.

to be continued...