Palate Poopers

Picture life without Maggi. No midnight snacking in hostels, no fun sleepovers, no comfort binging post-break up, simply no food on a rainy day when Mum8217;s sick. Life without the two-minute feast is worse than sitting through Ram Gopal Verma8217;s Aag agree Maggi maniacs. But what happened when Maggi decided to go for a makeover, once going sweet and sour, once all chocolatey and once chatpata? 8220;Sweet 038; Sour was almost scared me away from Maggi, but Chatpata surely killed it. I mean, how much ever I loved Maggi, it couldn8217;t get used to it tasting like bhel, very soggy bhel at that,8221; laughs Tanusree Nandan, a lawyer based in the city. And if you could eat a tandoori chicken flavoured black forest yes, you8217;re reading right then you could have a shot at the chocolate version too!

Preposterous Paan

If there was ever anything as tempting as a sip from Dad8217;s glass of whisky as a kid, it would be a bit of a paan torn from one corner. And among the best things about growing up, the liberty to chew on an extravagantly stuffed mitha paan, figures among the top few. But that is not license enough to mess around with the contents. 8220;I had a chocolate paan, which has a spoon of chocolate sauce instead of gulkand in it outside the Priya shopping mall in Delhi. It was terrible,8221; says Ankit Saraf, a student based in Delhi. Chocolate and paan are not meant for each other at all it seems. 8220;I had a paan dipped in white chocolate and then frozen in a posh Salt Lake eatery. I wondered if there were worse ways to spoil a good meal,8221; says Rituparna Bandyopadhyay, a media professional. Add to that the notorious paan flavoured Centre Fresh and some other chewing gums, paan had quite a few bad taste-fellows.

Mishti Mayhem

What do you get when you marry two of the greatest desserts of the world? If chocogolla, a hybrid of chocolate and rosogolla is anything to go by, then the result is nothing less than a disaster. It makes little sense to overwhelm syrupy rosogollas with rich chocolate sauce, but try and explain that to the pioneering sweet shop of the city which came up with this turkey. 8220;I thought it was a good idea until I had my first chocogolla. Needless to say I haven8217;t had one ever since,8221; says Riya Sengupta, an employee of Star India. Yet, that didn8217;t deter people from meddling with other iconic Bengali sweets like sandesh. 8220;I remember this South Kolkata sweetshop came up with something called carrot sandesh. It tasted awful as it looked,8221; says Anirban Ghosh, a student of Mass Communications with St Xavier8217;s College. Even the humble mishti doi wasn8217;t spared. Synthetic cousins like 8220;chocolate mishti doi8221; and 8220;pineapple mishti doi8221; were imposed on her. 8220;The pineapple mishti doi tastes very funny. It8217;s neither pineapple-y nor is it anything like mishti doi,8221; says Patralika Chatterjee, a housewife from Park Circus.

Drinks that drowned

Can one really blame soft drinks giants? All colas taste the same. So what they do for variety? They try and play around with the way the colas look of course. Which is why you have had your friendly neighbourhood panwalla handing you bottles of what looked like kerosene and suspicious-looking pale yellow liquid. Now some scientist in the Cola lab in Florida must have thought that it is a great idea to make a drink look like, lets say it, pee, but we were certainly not buying. Then there was vanilla Coke. 8220;It was like tasting sweetened vanilla essence,8221; fumes Chitralekha Chatterjee, an airhostess with a private airline. Then of course there were weird experiments with health drinks. 8220;Have you ever tried butterscotch Complan. It8217;s so tasteless that it8217;s not funny,8221; says Madhurima Mukherjee, a teacher with the Cambridge School. The synthetic-y flavour of Rasna Khus Khus has invited a lot of flak too. 8220;It is like having talcum powder dissolved in water,8221; says Sushmit Chowdhury, an employee of a software firm.

Dosa Disasters

Now one thing we must realize, the South Indian delicacy dosa, is not crepe. It may look like it, it may have the same basic ingredients but there is one basic difference between the two. As a savoury snack, dosa doesn8217;t lend itself well to dessert recipes. So it8217;s not really a good idea to stuff your dosa with chocolates, strawberries or pineapple. 8220;I once tasted pineapple dosa in an eatery in Central Kolkata, and I hated it,8221; says Pranaadhika Dev Burman, who is associated with a popular city-based NGO. Another no-no, mixing dosa with meat. 8220;In a five-star hotel in Delhi they presented a special kind of dosa which had meat fillings. I didn8217;t like the nbsp;taste of it, maybe because the fact that we think of dosa as a vegetarian snack,8221; says Sonal Gupta, a student with XLRI, Jamshedpur.

Chipped Chips

Now it8217;s useless to start on the importance of potato chips and popcorn in our lives, because we simply can8217;t live without them. And film producers would probably go bankrupt without them, but that8217;s not reason enough to feel especially kind to some like the chatkila nimboo something from a chips company. Or the chocolate popcorn for that matter. 8220;It actually tastes funny. I8217;m sure there are better ways to enjoy chocolate or popcorn,8221; says Gargi Banerjee, a media professional based in Delhi.