Ripples on the brain

I visited the famous Devon Avenue when I was in Chicago a couple of months ago. The street is known for its Indian restaurants and all kinds of Indian stores - electronics, groceries, meat shops, etc. - apart from the Pakistani, Arabic and Israeli shops. I was very excited to walk along that avenue and look at the honorary names given to it at different points, after Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Mother Teresa et all.

Though the street looked Indian in every respect (including the way in which people stopped their cars right on the middle of the single lane road to let their family alight !), I somehow felt the shops/restaurants didn’t live up to the expectations. We went to a famous restaurant and ordered for masala dosas. The dosas were expensive as well as poorly cooked; they tasted worse than the frozen dosas you get here. We then went to one of the stores that sold “unlocked” cell phones run by a guy from Bombay. We looked at a model with a price tag of $399. “Don’t go by the tag”, the shopkeeper warned me even as I pointed the model out to him. “How much does it cost then?”. “$275″, he said after some thought. I looked at the features of the model and was trying to recall the price of a similar phone in India. “Theek hai, boss. I’ll give it you for $200″, he said. “I think we get these phones cheaper in India now”, I said, still failing to recollect its exact price in rupees. I was still contemplating when he finally said, “Closing time boss, I’ll give it to you for $150″!. I was totally taken aback by the way in which the price of the phone dropped within minutes and decided it was safe not to get one there. Overall, we felt that the shops generally fleeced customers with poor quality stuff.

While I was recounting my experience with Devon Avenue to a friend, he told me about a similar place in New Jersey that is even better than Devon Avenue. The moment I heard that, I longed to visit that place in NJ. Exactly two months later, I arrived this evening to Woodbridge on a business trip for a couple of days and guess what, Oak Tree Road, Edison, the very place that my friend mentioned, is a stone’s throw from where I stay!

Moments after we landed here, we immediately drove to that place to check out the Saravan Bhavan that was opened sometime last year. Though most of the reviews rated the restaurant from average to poor, we couldn’t miss this opportunity. As luck would have it, the restaurant was closed today (it has weekly off on Mondays). So, we went around that place and dined at a North Indian restaurant. The restaurant served authentic dishes and wasn’t very expensive too.

Unless one is told, any person walking along the road could clearly mistake the place to be in India. So many Indian restaurants, Patel stores selling anything and everything, electronic shops, subzi mandis, groceries, Indian video rentals and jewelry stores to name a few. I just felt like walking along the road over and over again!

So, Saravana Bhavan tomorrow…