I was at a five-star restaurant in Kochi recently. On the menu was Pazhakanji, Kerala’s well-known fermented leftover rice gruel. The price point was too heavy. After all I was inside a climate-controlled place and ordering it is to think about how much we pay to pretend we are poor.

It used to be that if you pedaled a cycle and ate leftover rice gruel, you were just poor. Today you’re a sustainable, probiotic-fueled food influencer.

As kids back in Kerala, fermented rice gruel was just what you ate. The one and only pazhankanji. As kids from outside Kerala, we did not respect it. It was the food of the old, the tired, and the thrifty. Then, at some point, someone decided it made you fat, so we stopped eating it. Fast food moved in. Now, decades later, the wheel has turned. You can walk into a five-star hotel and pay the equivalent of a monthly water bill for a clay pot of that exact same leftover rice. They call it rustic.

I took a trip back home a month ago from Kochi and pulled over at a roadside tea stall. The glass display case was a monument to deep-fried gram flour. There was dal vada, onion vada, egg vada, cabbage vada. If a vegetable grew in the ground, someone had chopped it, battered it, and thrown it into boiling oil. The snacks were served on a square of old newspaper. By the time you finished eating, you had consumed an equal ratio of cooking oil and local news.

The men running the cart were from out of state. Everything cost ten rupees. I asked the man for a traditional sweet green gram snack. A sukhiyan. He gave me a blank stare.

An older man standing next to me chimed in. Give him a Jameela, he said.

I asked him what a Jameela was. He looked at me like I was slow. A few years ago in the state assembly, an MLA named Jameela literally bit another politician during a fight. In Malayalam, the word for a snack is kadi. The word for a bite is also kadi. So, the local tea shops simply renamed the snack after her. The beautiful part was that the guy frying the dough, a migrant worker from Darbanga, Bihar, nodded in agreement. He must be reading the local Malayalam papers. He looks to fully appreciate the political satire.

You see signs for authentic meals everywhere in towns now. Food wrapped in banana leaves, meals served in clay pots. But they never taste right for me because you cannot buy my grandmother’s hands.

My grandparents were masters of zero waste long before it was a lifestyle brand. Large families meant lots of mouths and limited funds. Nothing was thrown away. Leftover rice sat in water overnight. In the morning, you mixed it with tapioca, buttermilk, small onions, crushed green chilies, and whatever fish curry was left from the day before. We would sit on the veranda, lips burning from the spice, leaning against my grandfather’s long wooden chair.

We hated the rice gruel. Absolutely, categorically. Our grandparents knew this, of course. So they’d arrive prepared — Palaharams, they called it. Snacks. Little peace offerings to stop us from making faces at the kanji. We accepted the snacks and rejected the gruel with great satisfaction, not knowing that forty years later we would be the ones searching for that exact taste. Haunting restaurants. Asking aunts for the recipe. Describing it to people who’ve never had it, hoping someone can reproduce what we so cheerfully threw away. That’s the trick childhood plays on you. It hides the good stuff inside the things you refuse.

The summer vacation itself ran on a kind of leased economy. A month, sometimes two. The mission, unstated but universally understood, was to cover as many homes of Uncles and Aunts as possible. This was not tourism. It was a circuit. A pilgrimage with luggage.

Each house on the circuit was expected to feed us. Some of them managed it with ease. Others, I could see, were stretching. I was young but not blind — I noticed my mother quietly slipping some money into certain hands as we left. We weren’t great in resources ourselves at the time. But you went anyway. You fed people and got fed. That was the contract.

Because if you didn’t visit, they’d feel bad. Not hurt, exactly. Something more specific than that — the quiet Kerala variety of wound that comes from being skipped on the circuit. No explanation would be sufficient. The only currency that worked was showing up.

And when you weren’t visiting someone, you were packing food to bring back home.

The corrugated box was the first order of business. Not the packing — finding the box. The ones shopkeepers threw out after use. We’d source them, bring them home, and pack them tight. Then came the coir — wound around the outside with the seriousness of someone securing a national treasure. One box, sometimes two, sometimes three. Banana chips, achappam, murukku, unniyappam. Things that travel. Things that we keep.

You’d reach the railway station — this was always a train journey — and look down the platform and see it immediately. Every family. Same box. Same coir. Same approximate dimensions. Same contents. You could have swapped bags with a complete stranger and arrived at your destination with no detectable difference. The banana chips in their box tasted identical to the banana chips in yours. The murukku had the same diameter. Nobody found this strange. It made perfect sense.

When it was time to leave after a vacation, my grandmother would wake up before dawn to wilt broad green banana leaves over an open fire so they would not tear. She piled rice in the center, surrounded it with fried sardines, beef roast, pickles, and coconut chutney, and tied it shut with a thin fiber stripped from a banana tree. My only job was to write names on the packages.

Hours later, sitting on the upper berth of a train moving away from home, we would untie the fiber. You would pour a little cooked yellow moru curry made of buttermilk over the rice right there on the leaf. Swallowing that last ball of rice meant the holiday was over for another year.

The fields we used to walk through are mostly gone now. They are buried under massive, multi-story concrete houses. But back then, walking through the tall grass meant answering to the whole village. Strangers would interrogate you. Are you Joy’s son? You live in Hyderabad? No, Ahmedabad. Same thing, they would say.

Those fields held their own logic. Once, I had a terrible cough that would not leave. Medicine did nothing. My grandfather told me the cure was a large field frog. He took us out into the pitch-black fields before dawn with a cloth bag. He tracked the massive frogs entirely by sound, reaching into the dark and dropping them in the bag. He told us to stay quiet while we stood there coughing. Inside the field with knee deep mud. Today I would not dare to get into such a field.

By noon, the frogs were cleaned, chopped, and fried with heavy black pepper. We were hesitant. He told us it was medicine. We took a bite. It tasted better than chicken. We ate everything in sight. Two days later, the cough was completely gone. Years later, when a biology teacher handed me a scalpel and a frog on a wax tray, all I felt was hungry.

There used to be a stream near those fields, too. It flooded during the rains. I was thirteen and terrified of the water because I could not swim. My grandmother used to go down there to wash clothes, and we would follow her. Small fish would nibble at our ankles in the shallows.

One afternoon, the water was high after two or three days of heavy rains. A local boy, trying to show off, jumped from the bridge. My little brother, who was twelve, clapped for him. The boy swam over and asked if my brother wanted to go out deep. I said no. My brother said yes. We both had the experience of standing only knee-deep water. The boy dragged him out to where the water went over their heads, let go, and told my brother to swim back.

My brother started swallowing water and thrashing on the water and slowly going down. I started screaming.

My grandmother looked up. She did not hesitate. She was an old woman wearing a traditional white blouse and a thick cotton wrap. She jumped straight into the heavy current, fully clothed. She reached him in a few strokes, grabbed him by the arm, and casually towed him back to the bank. That is how we learned the woman who made our rice gruel was a tactical rescue swimmer.

I really wanted to hit that local boy. But the age gap was too big. He also happened to be the son of my teacher who taught me briefly while I was in my kindergartens.

How many of you actually lose consciousness at the sight of blood? How many can stand there and calmly watch the aftermath of a road accident? I certainly cannot.

Consider this a confession. When you look back at your life and share field notes, you have to put all your cards on the table. Today, I am emptying my pockets. One at a time.

It started back in my college days. I was sitting at the Gujarat Vidyapith bus stand on Ashram Road at Ahmedabad. Back then, buying a motorcycle was entirely out of the question for me. I relied on the bus. I was just sitting there, minding my own business, when an accident happened right in front of me. A guy on a bike ended up under a municipal bus №72. I saw that much. Then, the world went dark.

I woke up half an hour later. The accident had happened out on the road, but I had safely passed out in the bus stand, a good distance away. The people standing over me were whispering. I learned later that the young man on the bike did not make it. Because it was a busy area, an ambulance had arrived quickly and taken him to nearby VS Hospital, but they couldn’t save him.

Meanwhile, a deeply concerned crowd had formed a tight circle around me. Everyone shared the same urgent question: How did this guy survive without a single scratch?

When people ran over to help, they did not realize I had nothing to do with the crash.

Looking up at all those faces, I felt like I was going to pass out all over again. They were looking at the blood on the road, and then looking at me, completely dry and unbothered. They thought I was a walking miracle. A local rickshaw driver even stepped up, offering to rush me to safety. People love a good spectacle. If you ever want to test this, just go stand on a bridge and stare intently at the water below. Do not move. Watch how fast a crowd gathers to stare at absolutely nothing with you.

I had to disappoint my audience. I admitted I did not even know the victim. I just saw blood and my brain shut down. My friends eventually arrived; I went home, slept it off, and woke up the next day as if nothing had happened.

But the anxiety stayed. A few months later, I learned a harder truth: I did not even need to see blood. Just hearing about it was enough to turn the lights out.

I was living in Naroda at the time. We had a vibrant Malayali community there — people of all backgrounds just existing together. We would attend prayer meetings across different Christian denominations without thinking twice about the specific theology. My neighbor and close friend, Abey, asked me to join him for a Pentecostal prayer meeting at a local house. His mother was a deeply devout woman who looked at us and saw the Lord’s lost sheep. We were just regular, flawed guys, but she was determined to get us on the right path.

We arrived around eight in the evening. A visiting pastor from Kerala was giving the sermon. He used to work in Bharuch at the Narmada scooter factory. If you do not remember the Narmada scooter, it was the Gujarat government’s brave, doomed attempt to take on Bajaj. It was a terrible design that you had to physically tilt just to start — copying its opponent’s behaviour point by point, with additional weight. The factory eventually died a quiet death, much like my dignity that night.

The pastor had apparently survived a severe illness, and we were there to hear his testimony. It started with a thirty-minute prayer. This was normal for me; I grew up right next to a Pentecostal church back home, and my best friend’s father was a pastor who had left a very comfortable government job to preach. I respected the calling.

But this testimony was a first for me. Pastors often use personal anecdotes to keep the crowd engaged. It is a necessary skill. Before the internet handed everyone endless, unverified stories to forward, you had to actually read books or have a very colorful life to hold a room’s attention.

The pastor began talking about a wound he had developed on his leg. It was getting late, around nine-thirty, but I figured I could sit through it and just go to sleep after dinner.

Then, he got into the details.

The wound on his leg had festered. The infection spread to his knee. A doctor told him amputation was the only option. He resigned from his job and went back to Kerala. The infection grew worse. Then, the pus started to drain.

He told us he would sit outside, resting his leg over a bucket. The pus would just flow. When the bucket filled up, he would carry it over and pour it at the base of a coconut tree. Then he would start again.

Bucket. Coconut tree. Bucket. Coconut tree. Bucket. Coconut tree.

I was gone.

When I finally opened my eyes ten minutes later, my head was resting in Abey’s lap. Unlike the bus stand, I knew every single person staring down at me. For a split second, I forgot where I was. The pastor had his hand firmly on my head, praying loudly, commanding the spirit to “Go! Go!”

Someone in the back whispered that a demon had entered me. At the bus stand, I was the tragic brother of a crash victim; here, I was possessed. I scrambled to my feet, my face burning with embarrassment. In a community like that, news travels fast. I grabbed Abey, walked straight out the door, and went home.

Abey later told me that after I hit the floor, the pastor just kept going. More buckets, more coconut trees. My fainting spell was just treated as a routine spiritual hazard. I never went to another testimony after that.

You would think I would grow out of this. I did not.

Skip ahead to 2013. My wife was having her gallbladder removed. It was a minor, keyhole surgery. The doctor, assuming I possessed a normal human constitution, invited me into the operating theatre to show me the procedure. I walked in with total false confidence. They had inserted tubes into her stomach and attached a camera to one of them. The doctor told me to watch the screen.

I lasted maybe ten minutes. The room started spinning. I quietly stepped out, walked to a room, and lay down on a bed my wife is supposed to occupy after the surgery. When the surgery was over, the doctor came to check on me. To the same bed his patient was supposed to be transported. He looked concerned not at the thought of not getting additional charges as a operate one get another free attitude, but at my plight. “Is everything alright?” he asked.

“Don’t worry, doctor,” I replied from my back. “This is just what I am. Fainting is my part time hobby.”

Here is the ultimate irony. I lived through the devastating 2001 earthquake. I was on the ground reporting during the brutal 2002 Gujarat riots. I saw things that were genuinely horrific, things that made my stomach turn and my throat close up. I will not describe them here.

But I never fainted once.

Maybe the human brain knows exactly when it is allowed to check out. During those disasters, I knew that if I hit the ground, the only person there to carry me was none other then me — or perhaps my driver. So, I stayed on my feet.

I am not sure if my habit of passing out comes from a soft heart or just a weak stomach. I have friends who willingly walk into the darkest, grimmest situations to help others, doing the heavy lifting most of us run away from. Their mental strength is something I will never possess. I have nothing but respect for them.

This is not a story of courage, empowerment, or inspiration. This is a mere recollection of a train trip.

I was on a mission to Delhi to secure an RNI title for a magazine we were about to launch. As it happened, a close friend was heading to the exact same destination. Not as a passenger, but on duty. He worked as a Train Ticket Examiner with Indian Railways and was assigned to the Rajdhani Express. Naturally, I booked a waitlisted ticket and decided to tag along.

Our boarding point was Kalupur, the main junction in Ahmedabad. We agreed to meet a safe thirty minutes before departure. But plans changed to Sabarmati station for convenience. Sabarmati was old territory for me. Back when I served the government, I made daily trips from there. Fueled by this misplaced confidence, I arrived at Sabarmati, walked onto the platform, and found myself entirely alone. I asked a deeply bored vendor if I was in the right place. He gave me a resounding no. I was waiting at the meter-gauge lines. The broad-gauge station was elsewhere. How I missed this remains a mystery. Let us call it a bureaucratic hallucination. I sprinted to the correct platform and found Babubhai. I was finally ready to board.

The Rajdhani majestically chugged in. Like a swarm of bees, a group of young men in well-ironed suits and ties spilled out of the pantry car. Their shoes, however, staged a rebellion against their wardrobes. They all wore chunky sports shoes and spoke thick Haryanvi, starting every sentence with “Bhaisaab.” I learned later they were international-level athletes representing India, now employed as ticket examiners. I wondered if the Railways expected them to sprint alongside the train, but I kept the thought to myself.

How the name “Babubhai” attached itself to my friend is another mystery. It sounds like a man in his eighties. The reality is the exact opposite. This is a man who combs his hair and moustache every hour, maintains his physique at all costs, and refuses to stress. You would assume he carried a battery-powered iron just to fight wrinkles. The name did not fit him. But to protect the guilty, we will leave it unchanged.

The train left Sabarmati. I abandoned my seat to sit with the enthusiastic ticket examiners in the pantry car. I was offered soup — strangely, the only options on a moving train were tomato or hot-and-sour — and some snacks. The journey would end thirteen hours later in New Delhi.

Indian train passengers love to unfold their beds at 7 PM, entirely ruining the evening for anyone who prefers to sit. They will not get up until forced. My night, however, stretched to 2 AM. The ticket collectors have to stay awake until Jaipur. That is the major station where a bulk of passengers leave and new ones board. Once those tickets are checked, the staff gets the unofficial right to sleep. Since I was part of the crew, we sat in the empty pantry eating leftover snacks just to keep our eyes open.

But Babubhai decided my presence in the pantry car warranted special treatment. He announced, with absolute casualness, that we would be eating fish.

Now, expecting fresh seafood while rumbling through the dry, landlocked plains of Gujarat requires a dangerous level of optimism. The nearest coastline was decades away. But Babubhai operated on a different logistical tier than the rest of the country. He made a brief phone call to some unseen contact and assured me our dinner would intercept us at Palanpur.

Sure enough, as we pulled into the station, the delivery arrived. It was a mountain of fried fish large enough to sway a local election. It was also dangerously hot, leading me to believe the deep-frying had occurred in the sidecar of whatever vehicle brought it to the platform. We immediately shoved the tragic railway soup aside and yes, you guessed it right.

When the train pulled into New Delhi, I woke up. Babubhai appeared soon after in a perfectly crisp shirt and pants. I assumed he slept standing up. On the platform, he gave me a choice: check into a nearby hotel, or go with him to the railway rest room. I bought into his second idea. I wanted the real experience.

A wave of guys in black blazers and white shirts walked in with sleep-heavy faces, while another wave walked out looking entirely fresh to start their shift. I stepped into the large room and immediately questioned my life choices. I thought the Railways took care of their own. I had seen the rest rooms down south in Trivandrum, and they were spotless. This was a different universe.

The floors looked recently swept. Everything else had been untouched since 1947. Decades of dust turned the white walls a solid gray. The cots were rusted and broken. Half of them were held up by loose bricks — the kind of structural repair we proudly call “jugaad” right up until the roof collapses, usually celebrated on a billionaire’s Twitter feed as Indian innovation. The bedsheets looked like they had missed the laundry cycle for a fiscal year. Babubhai’s bedsheet, however, smelled strongly of fresh washing powder. He came prepared.

He offered me an out. “You still want to freshen up here? We can go to a hotel.”

I was stubborn. I wanted to see how the other half lived. Some of the men I traveled with dropped their bags and went straight out for an hour-long jog in the Delhi smog. They would return, skip breakfast, and sleep until noon.

Babubhai asked again if I was sure. By 9 AM, my need to find a bathroom had reached a critical level.

“Do you really need to go now?” Babubhai asked. “I normally go around 10:30.”

I thought he was just making excuses to get me to a hotel. I could not wait another two hours. I had a meeting at 11. So, I walked into the bathroom.

My respect for the ticket examining tribe died on that wet floor. It was a scene of historic decay. How could a hundred men use a toilet and never flush? Then I looked closer. There was no flush. The cement pipes leaked so badly that a thick layer of mildew had claimed the walls. I stood there, staring at the ruin, mourning the hotel room I had turned down.

I walked back out and found a cleaner. I asked him if there was a cleaner toilet. He slowly shook his head side to side. Not quite judging me, but impressed I still had the hope to ask.

“Can you clean one of these?” I asked.

He nodded. All it took was a little water and effort. It made me wonder why government buildings in the north sit in such casual ruin when the fix is so cheap. Down south, the retiring rooms were as clean as a decent hotel. But up here, decay was just part of the furniture.

When I finally returned to the main room, Babubhai was waiting. He looked at me with the quiet, devastating triumph of a politician who just survived a scandal.

“This,” he smiled, looking perfectly crisp in the dirty room, “is why I use it after 10:30.”

When our leaders go abroad, a strange panic sets in. They suddenly feel the overwhelming urge to speak English. They usually fail. And back home, we wait eagerly to mock their accents.

We are obsessed with accents. To understand this, one must realise India is not a country but an audio festival. Every state takes the English language, breaks it apart, and rebuilds it to suit local weather and sweat conditions. A Punjabi speaker turns English into a contact sport, hitting every consonant with extreme force. A Bengali softens the vowels, making the language sound like it was soaked in sugar syrup overnight. A Malayali treats English sentences like they are running late for a train, packing all the words tightly together. It is a beautiful mess. Yet, we treat these regional flavors like crimes.

I was scrolling through a video by Akshay Chandra Madhav recently, and it hit me how true his point was. Not knowing perfect English is not an insult. We have millions of people who can speak it fluently but cannot write a single clear sentence. That means South Asians out of them are juggling three or four languages, never quite mastering any of them.

This is exactly what the Madhav pointed out. An accent just means you know more than one language. It means your tongue has spent years learning different rhythms and different sounds. It means your brain had to build entirely new pathways just to hold a second or third system of meaning. That is not a flaw. That is a heavy-duty skill. If you meet a person with a flawlessly neutral English accent, you are probably just looking at a one-language guy.

I remember sitting across from a Kashmiri Pandit journalist years ago. I pronounced the word “data” as “daata.” She immediately stopped me and corrected it. “It is actually spoken as deta,” she said.

I smiled and thanked her. I knew both pronunciations were technically correct. But there was no need to bruise an ego over a vowel.

We love to laugh at people who speak broken English. Our own top politicians, including the prime minister, are constantly shamed for it. But let us be honest. English is not what drives governance other than official communications. English is not his first language, or his second nor third. When a leader struggles with English, he is just trying to make the foreign dignitary across the table feel comfortable. Making a grammatical mistake in your fifth language is not a national embarrassment. It just means you are trying.

Honestly, we should take it a step further. Politicians should strictly speak the language they actually know. Leave the heavy lifting to the translators.

There is a quiet, authoritative power in speaking your mother tongue confidently while a room full of foreign delegates scrambles for their earpieces. It brings far more respect and dignity to the office than sweating through a broken English sentence just to impress a visiting diplomat.

When I went reporting in the rural pockets of Gujarat, I quickly discovered that the polished Gujarati my city friends praised was completely useless. To the villagers, I might as well have been speaking alien code. And whatever version of Gujarati they were speaking was an absolute mystery to me. So, we did what any two people do to survive a conversation: we both aggressively lowered our standards. We brought the language down to its absolute base level, and it worked perfectly.

I was already raised juggling Hindi, Gujarati, English, and Malayalam just to navigate the different spheres of my life. But I came dangerously close to adding a fifth language to that list.

My closest friend, Aji Nair — who, absurdly, was also a Malayali — spoke fluent Sindhi. Most of my schoolmates were Sindhis too. And much like Malayalis, Sindhis possess a very specific superpower. They can talk to each other from Gandhidham to Bhatinda without a telephone, speaking strictly in their own language, happily ignoring every other Indian standing in the districts in between. This constant, overwhelming Sindhi audio invasion in my daily life almost forced me to learn the language just as a basic survival tactic.

I have another Malayali friend who was born and raised in Bhavnagar. When he speaks English, it is an absolute mystery. You cannot tell if it is English, Gujarati, or Malayalam. It is entirely delivered in a rapid Kathiawadi style. And it works perfectly. Language does not need a purity test. It is a vehicle for communication. If the other person understands you, your language has done its job. An accent is just your geography and your history showing up to say hello.

When I first started doing radio work, my accent was a problem for Western audiences. They simply could not catch the words. But I was not asked to scrub my accent away. Instead, I went for a voice modulation training with the famous All India Radio newsreader, Sushil Zaveri.

He never told me to change how I sounded. He just taught me the mechanics. He asked me to change where my tongue hit the roof of my mouth for certain words. It was not about hiding my background; it was just about adjusting the volume.

So, do not be afraid to speak just because someone might judge your syntax or your accent. If you mispronounce a word, as Madhav pointed out, it often means you learned it by reading a book in silence, not by hearing it on television. If your English feels broken, it just means you are brave enough to risk making a mistake in public.

You are already miles ahead of the single-language crowd. You are holding multiple worlds in your mouth at the same time. Be proud of the noise you make.

We all know what a heart attack is in theory. But when one actually shows up in your living room, the theory goes out the window. We like to think we are prepared. We are not. I have seen this play out three times, and looking back, the sheer absurdity of our survival instincts is something of a medical marvel.

The first time was in Mumbai, back in 2008. A friend of ours — let’s call him James Bond for the sake of anonymity — had scored a company flat in Worli, right opposite the Siddhivinayak Temple. It was cheaper than bleeding money on hotel rooms, plus it came with the holy grail of Mumbai real estate: a dedicated parking spot. He even had a car and a driver, whom we’ll appropriately christen Mark Higgins.

One afternoon, when I was trying for a nap in this flat, Bond complained of a scratchy throat. He figured it was the start of a cold. He was thirsty, but water wasn’t cutting it. Naturally, we decided to pick up the universal, time-tested Indian remedy for a sore throat.

We pulled the car over at the local pharmacy. And by pharmacy, I mean the liquor store.

We bought a half-bottle of brandy. Bond mixed a little in the car, drank it down, and by the time we reached the flat, he felt ready to sleep it off. He told Mark to go home for the day. Mark, as usual, began his hour-long ritual of cleaning and parking the car — a task that requires the precision of a diamond cutter in Mumbai.

Around 4 PM, Bond woke up. The throat pain had quietly migrated to his chest. His brilliant medical intervention? Another dose of the brandy.

Something felt off. I didn’t argue with him. I just quietly called Mark, who was waiting at the bus stand, and told him to get the car back to the gate immediately.

“It’s just chest pain, it’s not a heart attack,” Bond said, annoyed that I was making him get dressed.

“That’s fine,” I told him. “We’ll just go see the chest doctor.”

We lived on the 17th floor. By the time we got down, Mark was ready. We asked him where to go, and he suggested Hinduja Hospital. We drove like absolute maniacs, cutting off traffic, ignoring angry stares, and finally screeching into the emergency bay.

I jumped out of the car and yelled the magic words: “Heart attack! Help!”

A ward boy rushed out with a stretcher. He looked frantically into the back seat, then at front seats. “Where is the patient?” he asked.

I pointed to Bond, who was standing right beside me, looking perfectly normal. “Right here,” I said. “We’ll just walk in.”

The ward boy looked at us with deep disappointment and wheeled his empty stretcher away.

It turned out Bond had a mild attack with three blocks. Because we got there in time, it didn’t become a massive one. Hinduja didn’t have a bed, so they put us in an ambulance with a doctor and a nurse and sent us to Asian Heart Institute. That was the first time I ever saw Mumbai traffic paving way for me. Bond survived. If he had stayed in bed and taken that second dose of brandy, he wouldn’t have woken up for sure.

My second experience was not as lucky. And just so we’re clear, I am using real names from here on. It was five years later. My neighbor, Manish, was staying alone while his wife was back home in Kerala.

One evening, after dinner, my other neighbor, Ajith, called me in a panic from Manish’s flat. I ran over. Manish was on the floor, clutching his chest. I knew instantly what it was. We called the 108 ambulance, but they were taking too long. We called a doctor who lived in the same building, but he was delayed too.

We decided to take him in Ajith’s car. Manish lived on the first floor, but he was a heavy guy. Trying to lift a completely dead weight down a flight of stairs is not something you are prepared for. We finally dragged him to the lift, got him to the ground floor, and by then, the building doctor arrived. He took one look, checked Manish, and gave us a grim look. The body was already cold.

We still put him in the car and drove to Sterling Hospital, but he was gone.

Manish never saw it coming. Earlier that day, he had told his wife his chest felt tight. But Manish loved food, so he assumed it was just gas from a heavy lunch. By the time the pain hit him so hard that he dropped his phone under the sofa after calling Ajith, it was too late.

This is the great tragic flaw in how we handle medical emergencies. The golden hour is wasted. People get a chest pain and they call their family doctor. The family doctor doesn’t pick up at night. Or they drag the patient to a small local clinic that doesn’t have the equipment. What people don’t realize is that in an emergency, you don’t need advice. You need a large hospital. You can figure out the rest later. Nobody teaches us this. We learn it the hard way because, frankly, life is cheap here. We ignore the signs until it’s too late.

A week after Manish died, I had to drop my mother at the railway station. It was 3 AM. On the drive back, I felt a slight pain in my chest.

Normally, I would have blamed the dinner. But I had just helped carry a dead man. I panicked. Halfway home, I turned the car around and drove straight to the emergency gate at Sterling Hospital.

I parked right in the ambulance bay. I jumped out and, channeling my inner Mumbai self, yelled: “Heart attack!”

Two attendants ran out with a stretcher. They peered into the empty back seat of my car. “Where is the patient?”

“Right here,” I said, pointing to my chest.

They gave me the exact same annoyed look the guys at Hinduja did.

They took me inside, put me on a bed, ran an ECG, and checked my blood pressure. Everything was perfectly normal. The doctor looked at me, sighed, and said, “Sir, please go park your car in the visitor lot and come back.”

The whole ordeal cost me 200 rupees. A surprisingly small fee for a certified piece of paper confirming my own existence.

A few days later, I went to see Dr. Dipesh Shah, my actual family doctor. He looked at my perfectly normal ECG and asked, “You helped carry Manish’s body, right?”

I was stunned. “How did you know?”

“Because your neighbor Ajith came in yesterday with the exact same chest pain,” he said. “You both have trauma. It’s a mix of shock, the heavy lifting, and the guilt that you couldn’t save him. There is no medicine for this. You just need to distract your mind.”

It felt like a massive weight was lifted. But just to be entirely sure, a few weeks later, I booked myself for a CT Angio at Zydus Hospital. I walked into the scanning center alone. The staff at the desk looked at me like I had broken a fundamental law of physics.

“Where is your relative?” they asked. “Someone needs to sign the consent form.”

“I came alone,” I said. “I am consenting for myself.”

“That is not possible. You cannot have a heart scan without a relative.”

I had to call my wife to come all the way down just to sign a piece of paper so they could pump warm blue dye into my veins. The scan came back totally clear. Not a single block.

It cost me a bit of money, but it bought me peace of mind. Today, we face much bigger health scares, and these old, chaotic panics feel almost quaint. But the lesson never really changes. We are still just guessing in the dark, hoping we walk into the right hospital at the right time, and hoping we don’t annoy the ward boys too much when we get there.

As the state elections got over this summer in India. a memory that hit me today is about an election reporting trip. April or May, 1999. Gujarat is at its absolute hottest during this time, and the election fever only made it worse.

I was resting after a gruelling week of reporting when my phone rang. It was a reporter from Deepika, a Malayalam daily. He was in Ahmedabad and needed some “help.”

Most people in the circuit knew my friends and I were basically full-time problem solvers. They would call me, Anosh, or Basant (for record — three of us normally were together in almost all the assignments) to ask for everything from a phone number to a politician’s entire life history. Someone had passed my number to this reporter. I don’t even remember his name now. These guys are like One-Time Passwords — you use them once for a specific task, and then they vanish — both ways. Though, to be fair, I did stay in touch with a few of the people I met this way. I’ve ended up visiting their homes later in life, except those homes turned out to be in Paris, Washington, and Italy.

Today, the people who help out visiting reporters are called “fixers,” and they make decent money. But back then, in the Indian media, no such thing existed. Media houses wanted everything for free. I didn’t play it like that. When I went to small towns to report, I’d find the local stringers. They worked for tiny regional papers, but they held more actual information in their heads than anyone else in the district. I would pay them out of my own pocket for their time. Handing a local guy two to five thousand rupees for two hours of work was like handing him three months of his salary. The look on their faces was priceless. For months afterward, they’d call me just to ask, “Sir, do you need anything else?”

But the Deepika reporter didn’t know how the system worked. He had landed in Gujarat, barely spoke Hindi or Gujarati, and had exactly two assignments: interview T.N. Seshan and Shankersinh Vaghela.

For a quick refresher, both were running in 1999. Seshan, the legendary former Election Commissioner, was the Congress candidate running a doomed race against L.K. Advani in Gandhinagar. Vaghela was contesting from Kapadvanj.

Thinking of Election Commissioners brings back another memory: J.M. Lyngdoh. He ran the commission from 2001 to 2004, a deeply complex time in Indian politics. The current Prime Minister was the Chief Minister of Gujarat back then. In 2002, he tried to dissolve the assembly early to hold snap elections and ride the wave of the recent riots. But the riot victims were still in relief camps. Lyngdoh refused to play along. He came down to Gujarat himself.

I remember him standing near the Best Bakery in Baroda, trying to talk to the victims. But the local Collector (not naming him but you will get this news if you search) kept answering for them.

“Are you getting enough food?” Lyngdoh asked the people who had lost their homes.

“Yes, plenty of food is arriving,” the Collector answered smoothly. When the Collector got tired of lying, the Police Commissioner took over.

Lyngdoh kept his cool for a bit. But when a victim finally managed to speak about the violence, and the officials jumped in again to correct him, Lyngdoh lost it. Right there in front of the cameras and the crowd, he gave them the scolding of a lifetime. He delayed the elections. During the later rallies, certain politicians mocked Lyngdoh by his full name, but everyone knows that story.

Back to my Deepika reporter. I have a hard time saying no, so I agreed to help him. We hired a car and set off for Gandhinagar. The car was a Premier 118NE. You don’t see cars like that anymore; back then, if you didn’t get an Ambassador, you got this metal box.

We reached T.N. Seshan’s house at 10:30 in the morning. I had called ahead, so we walked right in. Two chairs were waiting. Since this wasn’t my interview, I nudged the Deepika guy to start.

“Is Malayalam okay?” he whispered in my ear.

“Yes, just ask,” I said.

Nothing happened. He just sat there looking left and right. That’s when it dawned on me: the man had brought exactly zero questions. He started fumbling for words. To save us from the painful silence, I jumped in.

And with my very first question, Seshan lost his temper.

“You are a famous former Election Commissioner,” I asked. “Why are you contesting a seat you are bound to lose?”

“Since when do journalists decide who wins or loses?” Seshan snapped. “Doesn’t the voter decide that? And who are you to tell me where I should contest from?”

I realized I might have poked the bear. “We don’t decide the results,” I replied mildly, “but we do pick the questions.”

Looking back, it took a certain kind of stupid bravery to talk back to him. The man sitting in front of me with a dead-serious face was once the ultimate nightmare for Indian politicians. The Deepika reporter scratched my arm, signalling me to back off.

I moved on. I asked about ten different questions. Seshan answered every single one with either a “Yes” or a “No.” How on earth does a reporter travel 2,000 kilometres from Kerala to file a story based on “yes” and “no”? I scrambled my brain for more questions. Same result. I just stood there, baffled.

“What, are you out of questions?” Seshan asked, openly mocking us.

“Sir, we came for a descriptive interview,” I said. “How do we write a report with just yes and no?”

Seshan smirked. “That is your lookout. Alright then.” He stood up. The meeting was over. We walked out, totally depressed. The Deepika guy put his head in his hands. As we left, Seshan gave us a parting sly smile from his balcony and went inside. A TV crew was waiting to go in next. Later, I called home to check their channel to see if they got anything better. They only had muted visuals. No interview. I knew exactly why.

Next up was Vaghela. We called him, and he said he was leaving for Kapadvanj. If we hurried, we could sit in his car and talk. We rushed to catch him, but missed him by minutes. A guy at his office told us which route he took. I told our driver to race.

We headed to his first public meeting. But our rattling Premier 118NE trying to catch Vaghela’s Pajero was a joke. We reached the first spot just as he was leaving for the next. We chased him through four different villages, missing him every single time.

Finally, at the fifth spot, we caught him. I took the Deepika reporter to the stage and introduced him. Unlike Seshan, Vaghela was a pure politician. He acted like we were old college buddies. He even announced to the crowd that special guests had come all the way from Kerala to see him. After the speech, he told us to get in his Pajero.

I told our driver to follow us. Inside the SUV, I became a human bridge again, translating for a Deepika reporter who didn’t know Hindi and a politician who didn’t speak English. Vaghela, however, had the opposite problem of Seshan: his answers were endless. By the time we reached the next village, the interview was over simply because we couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

We got out. It was evening. Vaghela was staying at a nearby government guest house. We stood there waiting for our driver. We waited two hours. Our driver had no mobile phone. By 10:00 PM, we realized we were stranded in a random village. The nearest bus stand for a night bus was 14 kilometers away.

The locals told us to just sleep there and catch a 6:00 AM vehicle to Ahmedabad. We told them we absolutely had to get back tonight.

Finally, a local farmer offered to drop us at the highway on his tractor. He refused money. He called it “Seva.” God bless him and many such people who helped me at the time of such distress.

We sat right on top of the huge rear tires. It was my first time riding a tractor like that. The roads were a disaster — something we hadn’t noticed while sitting in Vaghela’s plush Pajero. Before we had even covered two kilometers, my backside felt like it had been put through a meat grinder. I tried standing up, but that was worse. “Sir, this is just how tractors are,” the farmer said cheerfully. We still had twelve kilometers to go.

We hit the highway at 1:00 AM. Buses don’t stop there. We tried waving down trucks, but it was pitch black, and the drivers only saw us at the last second. Just as we were losing hope, a jeep pulled over to drop someone off. We asked for a ride, and they let us in.

We walked into our house at 5:00 AM.

I was dead to the world when my phone rang at 8:00 AM. The number looked like it was from some deep corner of rural Gujarat.

“Sir, I am the driver.”

I woke up instantly, furious. “You abandoned us in the middle of nowhere, and now you have the nerve to call?”

“Sir, please!” he cried. “I am at the village you told me to follow you to. I spent the entire night driving around looking for diesel. I just got back here. Where are you ?”

I stared at the wall, wondering why I ever agreed to help anybody, hung up the phone, and went back to sleep to recover my lost dignity.

A few days ago, sitting by a Kochi backwater with Santosh George Kulangara, we got talking about Spain. He noted how it is fast becoming Europe’s top destination. We went on to discuss many things but this remained in the back of my head. I recoiled about an Economist podcast about Spain’s crazy economic comeback.

Ten years ago, Spain was Europe’s broken engine. Banks needed saving. Young people were fleeing. Half-built homes sat empty.

Today, Spain is beating America in job growth. How? They stopped obsessing over factories. They focused entirely on services.

I searched and listened to that podcast again this morning. Listening to it, a funny thought hit me. Spain and Kerala are basically twins separated at birth. We just swapped the sangria for strong tea. I have tried to compare here both the places from what I have listened. All Spain’s economic details are from the podcast while Kerala is what I know all about.

Think about the industry, or rather, the lack of it. Spain gave up on trying to compete with Germany in making cars. They realized heavy factories were not their thing. Kerala figured this out decades ago. We never really bothered with big manufacturing. Between the land shortage, tough terrains and our love for a good labour strike, we just skipped the factory age entirely. Instead, both places threw their weight behind the service sector.

For Spain, that meant a massive tourism boom. They sold their sunny beaches. Now, they are moving up the ladder into tech and business consulting. Kerala does the exact same thing. We sell our green backwaters, misty mountains, Ayurveda, and spicy food to the world. And just like Spain, we lean heavily on our IT parks to keep the local economy humming. Now that Kerala has a shiny new international port, we can finally get back to our favorite state hobby: having endless, highly optimistic meetings about an imaginary industrial revival.

But here is where the twin story takes a wild turn. Spain funds its service boom by pulling in tourist dollars and direct foreign business. Kerala’s service economy survives because a massive chunk of our population lives overseas. Spain has the tourism industry. We have the airport departure lounge. Our state is largely sponsored by good sons and daughters sending money back home from overseas.

Then there are the young people. A decade ago, Spain’s youth were packing their bags because local jobs were nowhere to be found. Every parent in Kerala knows that exact feeling. The ultimate Kerala dream is still a nursing or IT job in a place where it snows nine months a year. But Spain actually flipped the script. Their youth unemployment dropped, and now they are drawing in workers from Latin America to fill the gap.

Kerala is doing a mirror version of this. We send our brightest kids off to build careers in Europe or Canada. Then, to build our actual houses back home, we bring in trains full of hardworking folks from Bengal and Bihar. We are importing and exporting people at the exact same time.

And speaking of houses, the real estate market in both places is pure comedy. Spain is dealing with a crazy housing crisis right now. Too many tourists and new workers mean nobody can afford rent. In Kerala instead of a housing shortage, our lush landscape is dotted with massive, palace-like mansions that sit completely empty. They are built with overseas money just to show the neighbours who is boss, while the owners spend fifty weeks a year in the Middle East.

On the bright side, both places absolutely nail the health and geography test. Spain boasts one of the best public health systems and longest lifespans in Europe. Kerala is the absolute gold standard for health and long life in our part of the world. Plus, we both have endless coastlines, amazing food, and a culture has now learnt the importance of tourism.

Spain proves you just need good services, happy visitors, and a reason for your youth to stick around. Kerala has the first two sorted. If we can just figure out how to keep our kids from running to the airport, we might just become the Spain of South Asia.

If we do not write down the pure agony of early communication, the next generation will never believe us. Young people today complain about weak wifi. They will never grasp the profound trauma of paying twenty-five rupees a minute just to listen to someone else talk on a mobile phone. There is no free lunch. Every piece of convenience we have today was bought with deep financial and emotional pain.

Getting a landline phone used to be an ultimate achievement. You literally needed a quota from a Member of Parliament. One phone serviced hundreds of people. People handed out visiting cards with “PP” printed next to the number. That stood (I presume) for “Particular Person,” which basically meant, “Please call my wealthy neighbor and beg them to shout my name.” If you owned a phone, your house was an involuntary public call center. You spent your evenings fetching people from three streets away, just so they could wait for the machine to ring again. It was an entire parallel economy.

The telecom department became BSNL around 2000, but our shared trauma goes back to the British telegraph. That died completely in 2013. A telegram cost one rupee per word. That was incredibly expensive. So most Malayalis outside Kerala received only four words: COME SOON MOTHER SERIOUS.

Though I did not experience this myself, I could see this all around. It took three days to reach that sender. For three days, you sat on a train scratching your head, wondering exactly how close to death your mother actually was. Usually, she was perfectly fine. Sickness was just the cheapest excuse to force you to come home and get married. The postman would deliver this neatly typed capital-letter panic attack and stare at your face. If you smiled, he assumed you got a government job and waited for a cash tip. He vanishes if your face turns pale. He was the original read receipt.

If you had a phone, you were elite. For the rest of us, there were the yellow STD booths. They sprang up on every corner in the nineties. Unfortunately, this was right around the time the AIDS epidemic made global news. AIDS was commonly referred to as an STD. Foreign journalists visiting me would point at these massive yellow booths on the street and politely ask why India had so many walk-in clinics for sexually transmitted diseases.

Then came the pager in 1995. The West treated pagers as cheap utility devices. In India, it was a high-status fashion accessory you clipped to your belt. It was really just a glorified, electronic telegram. You had to call a busy call center, dictate a message to a stranger, and wait for it to beam to a tiny screen. Then the person had to find a yellow STD booth to call you back. Motorola basically owned the entire country. I had one. Today it belongs in a museum.

In the early 2000s, I finally switched to a mobile. Everyone assumes I had a Nokia. I did not. I bought a Sony Ericsson. Incoming calls cost twenty rupees a minute. So, I just used the mobile exactly like a pager. You gave me a missed call, and I found a cheaper way to call you back. I still have that original AT&T number as a souvenir of my financial anxiety.

Back then, phones did not track your location or steal your data. Someone could physically steal the device, sure, but your privacy was safe. The old Nokia phones were structurally invincible. You could use them as hammers to crack coconuts. You charged it once a month. Now, we walk around tethered to power banks just to survive the afternoon.

Later, the Blackberry became the ultimate symbol of corporate vanity. Having “Sent from my Blackberry” at the bottom of an email meant you were very important. They died because of pure corporate arrogance. They refused to evolve, and Android simply erased them.

The black leather laptop bag was another symbol of elegance. You would see young executives in airports and cafes, furiously staring at their screens. I always wondered what they were doing. The answer was nothing. They were just opening Excel sheets in public to look busy. I tried working on trains and planes. It was miserable. Writing requires quiet, and public transport is just a moving theatre of distractions.

Now, Artificial Intelligence is quietly taking over exactly how the mobile phone did. Everything we are holding right now will be obsolete in a few years. We traded the inconvenience of missed calls for the absolute surrender of our data. You do not read the terms and conditions anymore. You just click accept, because the software is free. But like I said at the start, there is no free lunch. We just pay for it with our privacy instead.

I visited the flagship 7-Eleven in Mumbai during its launch week. My motive wasn’t to shop, but to see my daughter’s digital prototypes brought to life, as she was responsible for the store’s entire design. Yet, as a long-time admirer of this convenience store format, I’ve always wondered why the franchise — by Reliance — remains confined to a tight Mumbai-Pune cluster.

Yet, long before this took shape, every visit to a 7-Eleven in Bangkok sparked a singular vision: translating that exact brand of effortless convenience to Kerala. I was so invested in the idea that I even coined a name for it — Boil and Steam — which eventually became the title of my blog. Yet, the deeper I dug into the logistics, the more I realized this vision might just be a pipe dream. I just could not reach a consensus on the merits of meticulous blend of culinary curation, robust infrastructure, and strategic logistics. Let’s break down the harsh realities of the Indian retail landscape and explore why even a behemoth like Reliance hasn’t been able to crack the code of a DIY model.

Films like The Great Indian Kitchen brilliantly expose a stark societal irony: while the lucrative world of professional chefs is overwhelmingly male, domestic cooking is culturally enforced as the unpaid, exclusive domain of women. Because home-cooked food is deeply entrenched as a free, obligatory duty rather than a monetizable service, it creates a massive, invisible barrier for the ready-to-eat model. It is incredibly difficult for convenience stores like 7-Eleven to sell premium, quick-service meals in a culture that still fundamentally relies on the unpaid labor of women to run its kitchens. It could be your mother, daughter, wife or sister.

On the other hand, concept of the self-serve convenience store dining experience represents a fascinating intersection of fast food and retail, a model that has achieved near-perfection in Southeast Asian and East Asian countries. In nations like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Thailand, establishments like 7-Eleven, CU, and FamilyMart are not merely retail outlets; they are vital social hubs and essential culinary waypoints. The culture of grabbing a highly customized bowl of ramen, utilizing the in-store hot water dispensers or microwaves, and consuming it at a counter is deeply ingrained in the urban lifestyle. This success is built upon a foundation of hyper-efficient supply chains, a societal inclination toward solitary or quick-paced dining, and a regulatory environment that seamlessly supports the import and localized production of diverse, ready-to-eat items.

Translating this highly polished model to the Indian context lies in consumer behaviour and entrenched culinary expectations that I mentioned previously. While the Indian youth demographic possesses a fervent and growing affinity for instant noodles, primarily driven by the ubiquity of Maggi, the cultural expectation leans heavily toward hot, freshly cooked meals prepared by someone else. The transition from being served at a local street-side vendor or cafe to a completely do-it-yourself model requires a significant behavioural shift. I don’t know even if this is marketed as a premium, highly personal, and customizable culinary experience, it will succeed or not.

Furthermore, the logistical and regulatory hurdles in India present a stark contrast to the streamlined systems of Southeast Asia. Importing authentic ramen varieties and, more crucially, dried or processed meats involves navigating the stringent and often complex frameworks of local food safety authorities. Import duties on packaged culinary goods can be prohibitively high, potentially pushing the retail price of a DIY ramen bowl beyond the impulse-purchase threshold of the average student or young professional. The reliance on international supply chains also exposes the business to global market fluctuations and shipping delays — as many have already experience with the war looming over head every single day. May be identifying domestic manufacturers capable of replicating authentic flavour profiles will be a good idea but it needs a regular supply which is not guaranteed with third party temporary models.

Infrastructure also presents a localized challenge. The Southeast Asian model relies on unbroken cold chains, flawless hygiene standards within the stores, and a consistent, uninterrupted power supply for high-capacity water boilers and microwaves. While urban centres in Kerala are rapidly modernizing, ensuring absolute consistency in these utilities requires substantial backup investments. The concept of maintaining pristine DIY counters, where numerous customers are handling hot water, spices, and wet ingredients, demands a rigorous, almost relentless cleaning schedule which increases labour costs in what is theoretically a self-service model. A fundamental barrier to the DIY model in India is the entrenched, once again, in cultural expectation surrounding service and social hierarchy. The ingrained mindset that clearing tables and managing waste is the exclusive domain of hired help makes a self-sustaining, customer-driven operational model profoundly difficult to execute. I am leaving aside the crippling economics of commercial real estate and those exorbitant rents.

Ultimately, I abandoned the grand vision at the blueprint stage and retreated to the only craft I know — ranting. You have successfully reached the end of one such rant. Subscribe for future grievances.

Looking at a world map, I always wondered why Vasco da Gama chose the longest possible route. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 instead of just cutting through the Strait of Hormuz or the Bab-el-Mandeb. Sure, he had the ships and the guns to handle trouble. But when your main goal is getting silk and spices, why waste your best gunpowder on desert sand?

Trading with the southern coast of India isn’t new. People were doing it thousands of years before Jesus was born or Islam was founded. Back then, traders from Europe went through Constantinople, crossed over to Anatolia, and moved through places like modern-day Uzbekistan and Iran to reach China or India. This was the Silk Road — not a single paved street, but a messy web of routes.

Ships would sail to places like Alexandria, then move goods by camel through the Middle East to the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. But after the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople in 1453, the tax man arrived in a big way. The route became so expensive that Europe had to ditch the Mediterranean and look toward the Atlantic.

The number of middlemen in the spice trade was staggering. From the Chinese grower to the Arab sailor, the Turkish gatekeeper, and the Venetian merchant — everyone wanted their cut. By the time pepper and cinnamon reached Lisbon or Madrid, they were basically “black gold,” worth their weight in actual gold. Gama wasn’t sent to find a “nice” alternative; he was sent to find a direct route that cut out the guys in the middle.

He took four ships, sailed deep into the South Atlantic, and made a sharp turn at the Cape of Good Hope. He hit Mozambique, Mombasa, and Malindi before crossing over to Calicut.

But imagine if Gama had sat down in a modern boardroom to plan this. The São Gabriel is ready to go, and the board members decide to head for the Strait of Hormuz instead of South Africa.

His first wall would be Shah Ismail I and the Safavid forces in Persia. But Gama didn’t care about Persia; he wanted to reach the Zamorin of Calicut. Before he could even talk to the Iranians, he’d run into the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Kansuh al-Ghawri. The Sultan was already trying — and failing — to keep European ships out of the Red Sea. A few Portuguese cannons might have ended that argument early.

It’s funny to think that the way Iran handles “tolls” on ships today is basically a copy of the old Portuguese Cartaz system from the 1500s. The Portuguese forced Asian merchants to buy passes and pay duties at their ports. If you didn’t have the paperwork, they’d sink your ship. Today, Iranians are asking for Chinese currency instead of US dollars, but the “pay to play” vibe is exactly the same.

From the deck of his ship, Gama would have worried about the price of cloves and Pepper back home. If he’d acted like a modern “Art of the Deal” politician, he might have started a tariff war with the Ottoman Sultan. You can almost see the carrier pigeon messages instead of Truth Social: “The Sultan of Egypt is a total loser, but I like his style. We’re going to make a great deal on incense.” If he had stayed on that path, the Portuguese empire would have looked a lot more like a giant maritime toll booth.

I didn’t realize how strange the geography in that area was until I started following Hamid Ali Vazhakkad, who is a fantastic geography teacher. He pointed out the “counter-enclave” near Hormuz. It’s a nesting doll of borders: a patch of Oman called Madha is completely inside the UAE. Inside that Omani patch is a tiny village called Nahwa, which belongs back to the UAE. It’s a piece of the UAE, inside Oman, inside the UAE.

Hamid Ali also noted that for India, the Bab-el-Mandeb is just as vital as Hormuz. It’s the “Gate of Tears” between Djibouti and Yemen, currently watched over by the Houthis. Today, that’s the path to the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean.

What if Gama had tried that shortcut? He wouldn’t have found polite trade envoys. He’d have met 15th-century insurgents with fire-arrows and a serious grudge against European ships. In the end, it always comes down to money. Instead of a standard toll, they’d probably demand a “revolutionary tax” on his cinnamon. If you didn’t chant the right slogans, your ship would be headed for “maritime re-education.” Suddenly, sailing all the way around Africa looks like a very reasonable commute.