namma mejura

The parotta we have in south is distinctly different from north Indian. And if you go for ‘Roti’ & ‘Naan’, even upscale restaurants doesn’t come half as close as in north India.

Here is a place to taste the real ‘Roti, naan & paratha‘ varieties in Madurai. It is more of a dhaba style than a restaurant, so if you look of ambience and mood this may not be the right place.

But in keeping with the Madurai style, where finding good food at roadside idli shops is the norm, the real ‘roti’ is also available in a cheap, utilitarian style ‘Punjabi restaurant’.

It is less than 2 years old, but have quite a good following among the resident & visiting north Indians. Sometimes we were the only locals amid a mix of people from north, mumbai & kolkata in this restaurant.

It has a tiny entrance on West Masi Street facing Town hall road. Between Meenakshi Amman temple and Madurai Railway Junction, there are quite a few north Indian food joints catering to the visiting pilgrims. But they are primarily serving ‘thali‘ meals.

All the north Indian eateries in Madurai were characterized by tiny entrance, dark dining hall & cramped seating arrangements. This one is (comparatively) better.

When the bridge next to Periyar (central) bus stand was closed for rebuilding, the vital link to Arasaradi & beyond were cut-off.

As a result, the detour from periyar bus stand to aarapalayam bus stand is a little long by city standards (about 3 kms). And there are two completely different routes from periyar to aarapalayam. Thus circular bus routes (like gandhipark-to-gandhipark route in Coimbatore) became a reality.

The bus routes are numbered C1 & C2 (unlike using routine numbers as in Coimbatore) ply from Aarapalayam to Aarapalayam in opposite directions. They soon became quite popular. One of the reason is, it crosses through the new shopping area, the wide bye-pass road. The bye-pass road which traditionally devoid of city bus traffic suddenly bestowed with a convenient mode of transport. A welcome relief is that the buses are new, distinctly coloured (to differenciate from regular buses) and neat!

Buoyed by the success, two new circular routes from maatu thavani bus stand to periyar bus stand were introduced as C3 & C4. These buses have a different colour scheme from C1-C2. It seems to be a bigger success.

These buses are curiously named as ‘Vatta Perunthu’ (circular bus or literally – ’round bus!’). Madurai does have a unique way in creating tamil words for english terms. Credit cards are mentioned in shop adverts as ‘Kadan Attaigal’ (literally – loan cards) which is perhaps more apt than positively sounding ‘credit cards’.

We were out of station yesterday and coming back to Madurai by afternoon. We are entering into Madurai from south (via Tirupparankundram) and all seemed normal. We were cautioned by relatives (via mobile) that splash news on TVs talk about attacks all over Madurai.

But we couldn’t find any thing abnormal. All the town buses and mofussil buses continue to ply from Madurai as usual. When we reached home, neighbours said that cable TV went off the air from 11 a.m. onwards.

I gathered the news from Dinamalar’s website. All actions seem to be on the northern fringe of city. Dinakaran’s (Sun network) new office building is at Uthangudi, some 3 kms away from city. It used to be a Mitsubishi (Lancer) car showroom. The Madurai bench of Madras High Court is still further away on that (NH47 – towards Trichy, Chennai) road.

Later we came to know that some buses in Aarapalayam bus stand were also damaged in stone pelting. All local cables got their feeds from SCV, a Sun network company that seems to have their vital equipment in the same campus, and hence the entire city went cable-less, except for those who had DishTV or TataSKY. Cable TVs resumed today and viewed all the details on Sun News which keeps on repeating it.

That’s about it. It’s very sad that computer operators and a private security were killed. It’s a power play within a dynasty and innocent chaps get killed in the crossfire. So much for their intention to serve the public.