TVUM-The You in Utopia

"Recycling and speed limits are bullshit,” Tyler said. “They’re like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.”    It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.  “You justify anarchy,” Tyler says. “You figure it out.”  Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can, make something better out of the world."

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

In the book, Fight Club, Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt in the movie rendition) says these words as he is divulging his plan to save the world from itself through a set of actions that can loosely be termed as anarchic. As soon as I read it, in the first breaths of a morning, I was taken back to that fateful Tuesday night spent in the company of Praful Chandawarkar (Owner, Malaka Spice) and Dr. Uday Potdar, where conversation flowed like the Mula river might have, in an earlier time far removed from the vexations of flowing through a city that grows obese with possibilities and people. It is here that I realized, after 5 hours or so, of conversation, that Praful, and to a lesser but no less potent extent, Uday, quite like the pair of Tyler Durden and the un-named protagonist want to, quite simply, destroy the world as we know it.

Allow this to sink in.

Allow this to stop the Instagramming of your every ridiculous triviality to understand that there is a plan afoot by some highly performing members of society to turn some clocks back to a life that is less plastic, less convoluted with artificiality and more in touch with the realization that we are, slowly but surely, cannibalizing ourselves as a society in the way we consume our resources.

In essence, this among a plethora of other things, is what Tvum is all about. Tvum is Project Mayhem. Except it does not involve acts of terrorism, eco or otherwise, to reboot the world. Tvum, is more focused in its aspiration at Utopias, wherein it is merely attempting to blow up all of the chicanery around Indian food to take back Indian food to its most distilled form by a means that is as explosive as the use of soap in the book.

"With enough soap,” Tyler says, "you could blow up the whole world.”

Unlike Fight Club, the weapon of choice at Tvum to save the world, is not soap. Rather, what they employ are cousins of the fat (from which the best soaps are made) which are Desi Ghee and Loni. Loni or white butter is made by churning and separating the fat from Buttermilk. It is a kind of unclarified butter arrived at through the metamorphosis and the culling of all the annoying aspects of curd. There is also a third ingredient that completes the holy trinity of ingredients at Tvum, which is Indrayani rice. It is a gritty, local, short grain unpolished rice grown somewhere around Lonavala named so because of the Indrayani river flowing through. It forms a part of the trinity with a view to be consumed quickly, not processed and packaged into a bag with, say a pretty photo of the Taj Mahal on it (I’ve wondered why there was a photo of the Taj Mahal on a packet of rice because it is not as if the white stuff in the Taj Mahal was actually rice, right?). As rice goes, it is not as well-known as the Honey Singh-ish Basmati rice, but like most yet to be discovered stars, it has mad skills in the fact that it is high in fibre and Vitamin B, and if cooked in the way Tvum does, where the water is never discarded, it has a lower Glycemic Index which makes it cool to eat for diabetics. If you are at this point, wondering how I managed such big words which require a dictionary (because everyone knows that isn’t the way, I roll), I might like to intercede that almost all of this paragraph is the careful rendering of the good fat from Dr. Uday Potdar’s multitudinous memory of just some of the things Tvum tries and succeeds at, with its ingredients.

The other carrier of saturated and unsaturated fats that Tvum plays around with, in their machinations in resetting the default settings of Indian food are the cooking oils. They cycle through a multitude of oils with a view to maximizing the benefits of employing each because each oil has it's own “gunn” in terms of nutrition. The oils used are extracted in the old ways using wooden churners which help to retain nutrients in a manner befitting their end use in curries and other stuff. The oils used are coconut, groundnut, sunflower, rice bran, mustard, sesame and baby. Okay, the last one isn’t used but have you ever wondered what the hell baby oil really is?

"The First Rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions...The Second Rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions...."

Now, if Tvum is Project Mayhem, then one might be tempted to ask the question, and never mind the stupid rules, as to what, beyond the Fight Club metaphors, Tvum actually is?

The first answer, the one that they put on the catalog, their website, their everything, is that Tvum is a place that serves “gracious Indian cuisine” but that would be simply like taking an ice-pick and going all Basic Instinct on the massive iceberg that is Tvum.

Indian Cuisine.

What a pair of words they are. So nonchalant and innocent-seeming, in all of the history and the geography they encompass. Indian food, or rather the Indian-ness of food, was a topic of hot discussion for a good 15-30 minutes of that conversation that night because Indian food like India, is an amalgamation and a celebration of all that India has endured, embraced and evolved into. Tvum knows this. Tvum is a champion of this, and so, quite ambitiously if I might add, seeks to capture the length and breadth of a country’s romance with food through its menu. Thus they have Thenga Manga Pattani Sundal from the beaches of Chennai, to the unapologetically Rajasthani Laal Maas, to the Nalli Nihari which I am, like some nerdy virgin saving myself and the PEO card for.

At some point, just before visiting Tvum and while reading up on it in a laughable attempt at research, I was wondering about what the graciousness in their tag line refers to, but I wondered no more after speaking to Uday and Praful where they bared their love and child-like fondness for all things concerning Indian food. And thus, Tvum as I imagined it, in the post Tvum, post everything, wakefulness of that night, was a child on a beach, maybe that beach in Chennai where you get Thenga Manga Pattani Sundal (I’m going to learn to say this like a Chennai-ite, I swear) running into the ocean that is Indian cuisine, with arms spread trying to embrace the enormity of his enterprise with the glee and ridiculous bravado of the fearlessness of the very young. That child will be knocked down, nearly every time, by the waves and he will try again, and again, because of the graciousness of being in a position to do so, and gosh, just that, is what makes Tvum as a concept, so heart achingly beautiful.

The other thing, and I am venturing into the underbelly of people and their emotions here, is that Tvum is, one man’s tour de force or it just might be his monument to his monumental loss. This is because, Tvum, like most things in life, including revolutions, started with a death. The death was that of Praful Chandwarkar's wife Cheeru Chandwarkar, the co-founder extraordinaire of Malaka Spice, due to cancer.

Cheeru was, for most practical purposes, one of the first celebrity chefs of Pune, and every one I've met, who knew her, has spoken of her, not in the hushed, sedate tones of someone who has passed away but rather with an excitement and fondness. She was a celebrity not in the age of the internet, but in an age where people had to actually get out of bed to make friends and influence people. I think I'd have liked to meet her, maybe over a drink at Malaka, where she'd be in her element, all fire and tossed woks. And I think I'd smile at the raw pleasure of bearing witness to the benison of a woman empowered in ways that weren't just lip service as she went about the business of building a legacy that still stands today.

It is in the honor of that legacy that I return to the revelation that Tvum exists today because fundamental questions were asked by Praful of the role of food and of nutrition in the occurrence or the non-occurrence, the acceleration or the deceleration of Cheeru’s Cancer. To understand this, you should know that on a long enough timeline everyone will get cancer in some form. Some will get it earlier and some later, and everything you eat or don't eat and lifestyle choices will play a role in how a person is consumed by cancer. 

"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

Some foods actively fight the development of cancer, as do some preparations, but a majority of modern developments with regards to how foods are consumed by humanity are now being thought of, as being directly responsible for the rapid onset of a lot of deadly diseases like obesity, heart problems and even cancer. The modern developments that I speak off, could be something as incongruous as microwaving, or as nefarious as steroids in every fucking thing we consume, so as to decrease time for those involved, increase production and in general, make things more profitable. Modernization made our Maa ke haath ka khaana into something not to be held dear because even our Mothers sold out to the needs of the hour, in terms of shortcuts and quick fixes of processed food to provide us a meal that was never designed to be quick fixed.

Which is why Tvum as a restaurant is so so important because it goes backwards in time over ages through the diligence of research of Dr. Potdar, to unlearn the things we learnt somewhere along the way, in our mad rush for profit, for development and for our acche din. It is important as a restaurant and as an idea because it is rooted in the experience that somewhere along the way someone lost their beloved and decided that beloveds should not be lost to the malingering of our new ways in the pursuit of quality of life, quality of food and yes, quality of time spent at a restaurant ordering our favourite Indian food.

In conclusion, I have to repeat that Tvum IS Project Mayhem, and Dr. Uday Potdar and Praful ARE seeking to destroy everything we know and maybe love about Indian food but I implore you to stand by them and stand by their nearly insane venture that Tvum is, because God knows we need a little destruction of our paradigms to set us right.

Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

P. S. Since world changing concepts can be quite a daunting thing to consume by themselves, we will talk about the food we had that night in another article to be followed shortly.