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.