Kiran Balakrishna

Here's the story of how I was introduced to Nolen Gur, a Bengali sweet treat. Here it goes:

Us blokes down south aren't very familiar with Bengali sweets. My palate for Bengali sweets was limited to Rasgolla and chum chum. However, my taste buds were recently introduced to this exotic fare called Nolen Gur, by a colleague of mine from Kolkata, a winter confection whose fame is spread far and wide in Bengal and Bengali households.
Thanks to him, the only Nolen I knew until then was Christopher Nolan and my blighted head didn't even known that Gur ( jaggery) can even be made of Date palms 🌴 and not just sugarcane.

So, our program head who visits Bangalore every month from Kolkata promised us that he would get a Bengali specialty the next time he is around. As promised, he got us this thing called Nolen Gur which none of us were familiar with. He kept the sweets on my desk and asked the entire team to walk by and help themselves.
Our chums were seeing it for the very first time, it was like the Chimps seeing the monolith moment for us, straight out of 2001: A space Odyssey. 😀

We all looked at the sweet, very curious and inquisitive, like the bushmen looking at a bottle for the very first time, took a very small bite, gaping at each other, unsure of how to react, and all walked away to their seats. A few moments later, each one came back to my desk, in the pretext of conversing with me, took a larger bite of the sweet and walked away. Yet again some time later, they all came back to my desk one by one, this time each one was taking an entire piece of the sweet, and now they were not even pretending to talk to me.

This whole thing started getting into my nerves and now I started fearing I wouldn't be spared any of my Nolen. I immediately gobbled up a few and started drifting in the sweet and succulent juicy center of the Nolen.

By now there was a cold war brewing on the floor. The final nail in the coffin was laid by another bloke, who spared no time in running by, grabbed the entire box of sweets in a jiffy and disappeared. I had to be content with the handful of sweets that I managed to gobble up my throat.

The last I saw of that sweetbox was in the dustbin, emptied to the core, not even a small speck or dust of the sweet spared to be seen!

This was my Nolen Gur story! 😂