To munch on

Last evening, I was browsing through Lokhandwala market with a friend. I was in the mood to eat something -and frankly, when am I not? At one place, a small eatery near a Natural ice-cream outlet seemed to be a magnet for a hungry crowd. All of them were adult shoppers. It was a dabheli store, and the cook was a magician with a knife and a spoon. He was slicing up paavs and smearing spoons of mashed masala and toasting them in butter with such seamless precision and speed that his hands were a blur. If you watched them in action long enough, you’d just keep gazing in some sort of stupor.

Meanwhile a lady with a little girl happened to approach us from a distance. The lady stopped in front of the stall and looked longingly at the zsizzling on the tava. Her daughter, meanwhile, had rushed inside the Naturals ice cream parlour.

My friend remarked how street food, like dabhelis or vada pavs, was now in the province of the older generation. Kids don’t take this stuff at all. She mentioned that it’s a matter of time before something like this becomes extinct. After all, nowadays, if something doesn’t cater to the young, it may as well be gone.

I had never thought of street food from a demographic angle, but it’s definitely something to think about.