Every Vada Pav has its Day

The ubiquitous Vada Pav celebrates its own day today and the small piece of non-nutritious oily vada, full of trans-fat, crushed between two halves of a pav, coated with green chutney, accompanied by a fried green chilly and sometimes hot red chilly powder with a garlic flavour is in many ways emblematic of the city which has made it famous. All through my years in Mumbai and ever since, I have always wondered why Mumbaikars vouch by the not-so-special Vada Pav. The reasons I’ve got is that it is a poor man’s food (costs anywhere between three to five rupees), it symbolises the unity in diversity of Mumbai, that it is a wholesome (read stomach-filling) food etc. I do agree that it is a cheap snack but if Mumbaikars are filling their stomachs by eating Vada Pavs for lunch and dinner, we are looking at a catastrophical case of mass malnutrition.

The vada pav, though a tasty snack at times, never appealed to me in comparison with its “more affluent” cousins, the Missal Pav and the Pav Bhaji. Though they rate the same as the vada pav on the nutrition scale, if not worse, they make a more substantial meal and provide more pleasure to the taste-buds. Time and again, in Mumbai, I’ve heard how the Pav of Portuguese-origin is made mostly by Muslims in a Parsi or Irani bakery (and to think it is the Christians who are called Pav-wallas) to be consumed by a Hindu majority. Despite the fact that this makes for a nice analogy to the cultural divergence of the people who have made Mumbai what it is today, it still is a sad reminder of what Mumbai is today – a overblown population, most of them living in the hundreds of slums that dot the city, struggling to make ends meet in an unforgiving and an expensive city which is pretty much the same case in any major Indian city, but is more conspicuous in Mumbai.

Though the "Vada Pav Day" is just another marketing gimmick by some clever enterprising restaurant, it brings about memories of my days in Mumbai, when a Vada Pav was a daily indulgence along with a cutting chai either under an umbrella in the pouring monsoon rain or sweating in the october heat. I am happy that I've finally gotten out of Mumbai and I hope that I would never have anything to do with that despicable city anymore.