An Ode to India’s Most Favorite Two-Minute Pastime

Once upon a time (and that’s a very long time ago), when I was just an 8 year old, dreamy-eyed boy, studying in the second standard of a primary school, my hometown in Eastern India witnessed a silent revolution. It came in the form of a small, yellow plastic pack of semi-cooked, instant noodles, with a rather strange name and a choice of three flavors.

Kolkata was no stranger to noodles in those days. Popularly referred to as ‘chow’ (shortened from chow-mein, meaning ‘fried noodles’), they were already a frighteningly common sight across the length and breadth of the city. From roadside food stalls and birthday parties, to the occasional culinary indulgences of the average Bengali household in exotic eateries, to the tiffin-boxes of school kids and mid-level executives alike – the sticky white strands from hell were everywhere!

And now, we had more of them, and how!

Enter Maggi^® ready-to-cook noodles! And the best part was that we could now have them in an ‘instant’ (or in 2 minutes, to be precise!)

Ladies and gentlemen, there's a new hero in our midst...

Things were really looking up for the average noodle lover. Now, one could forget all about the hassles of cooking ‘chow’ the regular way.
I mean, all the usual chores like chopping the vegetables, boiling the noodles and frying them afterwards, not forgetting to add salt, vinegar, soya sauce and other condiments, and having to wait through the entire process patiently which would typically last for 20 to 25 minutes – they were all gone in the blink of an eye. All it took now was a mere couple of minutes to treat yourself to a steaming dish of hot, savory noodles.

The Maggi^® magic had begun and you could love or hate it, but never avoid it!

As we look back, we know that the ‘2-minute’ hook was what really got us then. It was a different matter that the noodles actually required close to five minutes of cooking to be done ‘right’, and any premature termination of the cooking process would have resulted in the noodles remaining rather raw and insipid. We safely chose to overlook this tiny caveat. After all, there’s little harm in having to wait for 3 minutes more than the advertised time-required-to-cook as long as you don’t have to stretch it to the 25 minute ordeal of cooking regular noodles. (And you see, in those pre-Internet days, we bothered ourselves a lot less about misleading advertisements.)

What’s more, the yellow pack came with a nifty little sachet of condiment that was all one needed to cook the noodles. Oh, so convenient and so clever! It also had a fancy mouthful of a name – Tastemaker^®. All you had to do was add water.

So, that was it!

The time was an autumn in the early 80’s and a revolution had started to sweep across the kitchens of Kolkata. If you wanted a quick bite, trust Maggi^® 2 Minute Noodles to rise to the occasion. In fact, if you wanted to stall the pangs of hunger anytime and anywhere, the little yellow packet was your best bet!

Mothers everywhere knew that these noodles were good for the whole family (oh, what irony!) and would reach out for them whenever they could.

Fathers everywhere knew that they were easy on the pockets and would often agree to entire meals being made with them (oh, what a brilliant pricing strategy by Nestle!)

In those days, it seemed, everybody loved Lucy and Maggi^®, and about the former, I’m not sure!

Back in those days, everybody loved Lucy,... and Maggi!

The years went by.

In the meantime, governments collapsed, politicians (along with innocent men & women) were blown away by bombs, mosques were demolished and temples erected, Red turned into Green (and White & Blue), thousands of crores of rupees swindled, my parents died and I became a father of two lovely kids.

And Maggi^® stayed on.

Unchanged, unapologetic, unabashed and almost like an immortal! (Yes, much like the Kashmir crisis.)

The yellow pack had entered the national consciousness and had come to be taken for granted. With frequent full-page magazine spreads, catchy jingles on television, celebrity endorsements by the dozen and newer flavors to try – Maggi^® 2 Minute Noodles were hard-wired into our lives like few things else. It was referred to in cinema and literature. It was finding its way into the menu of an increasing number of 5-star hotels. And it was getting to be the Google of cheap snacking across the land.

Only cooking Maggi is faster, as Rajatava Dutta confessed in the 2000 Bengali film "Y2K"

But all good things must come to an end. And even Gods fall sometimes.

India’s favorite 2-minute indulgence has recently been accused of foul play. Traces of lead and monosodium glutamate have been found in the celebrated Nestle product and it faces a nationwide ban.

The future looks grim for the little yellow packet. It’s vanishing fast from the racks of thousands of stores across the land. Some old faithful are still clinging on to its last remaining vestiges. Most others are voicing their anger, shunning it like plague and ready to pelt stones at it at a public marketplace.

It’s indeed a shame to see how after years of loyally serving the nation during the best and the worst of times, the celebrated hero has suddenly been turned into the hated villain. Will Nestle be able to save the day? Will the little yellow hero of India rise again like the Phoenix? Or is it the end of a journey that began more than 30 years ago? Only time will tell.

Till then, keep the pot simmering India. Keep your fingers crossed and don’t be hasty in your judgment. Perhaps it will all be over in… well, 2 minutes! And if the worst come to the worst, may God give us all the strength to give up on such a long hard habit.