The other day, I was invited to dinner at the home of a dear acquaintance in Delhi. Alongside an assortment of Marwari dishes on the table sat a bowl of lauki ke lachche. Out of curiosity, I asked where they’d come from. “From Allahabad,” came the reply. “From Matadeen’s.”

Where in Delhi, after all, are you to find sweets with that kind of flavour? And no, not that Matadeen — not the one from (Harishankar) Parsai nor the one from Prayagraj. For generations now, the taste of their ghevar, ghiya ke lachche and gajak has lingered on the tongues of Allahabadis; the city itself only recently became Prayagraj. At their old establishment in Loknath, sweets are still wrapped in newspaper and tied up with cotton string.

I bring up that evening because the very next day the newspapers announced that the UP government, in its wisdom to promote ‘native flavours’, had released a list under its ‘One District One Cuisine’ scheme. The list apparently has 208 entries. The first bewildering thing about the news was that UP has only 75 districts; by the logic of one per district, there ought to have been 75. But you know these babus and their aides.

Meanwhile, social media was on fire because kababs and biryanis didn’t make it to the list. The trouble with these social media warriors — always diving headfirst into shallow pools with oceans of self-confidence — is that they do not read bus panels. Those who have travelled in UP’s state buses may remember that the old slogan once painted across them, ‘Tu sachcha tera naam sachcha’, has long been replaced by the more uplifting ‘Show kindness to animals’.

In the race to manufacture outrage, everyone forgot the UNESCO tag bestowed upon the city of Lucknow, which honours everything from galawat ke kabab to sheermal.

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© National Herald