Okay Mr.Maggi, I am trying to conceal my happiness at your return but I am really sorry, if a few tears(the tears of happiness), run down my cheek as I heard about your comeback. But how could anyone do this to us? Didn’t they understand how many emotions were attached to this yellow packet of happiness, curled up inside it? We don’t care if they had lead but luckily it proved to be clean. We all have grown up eating this stuff and probably by now immune to all the contained lead provided that we have consumed almost a thousand packets of Maggi in our lifetime. (No offence meant to the courts and FSSAI; it’s just that I can’t control my emotions!).
When I was a toddler my parents who were both working, my nanny used to feed me Maggi once a week. That’s how I was introduced to the yellow packet of happiness. To be honest, I don’t remember anything about how Maggi tasted then, but I do have a gut feeling that it tasted Yumm!! I was smiling a lot in all my childhood pictures that had Maggi in them. One of the blurred photo even has a inverted bowl of Maggi over my head, and my mother rushing towards me to clean it up. See? Each of us must have had some of our childhood memories attached to Maggi.
My next Maggi memory was when my parents shifted to Delhi with me. I am a Bengali, so the Hindi spoken in Delhi was a new experience to me. Somehow I made friends with the sisters, who stayed next door. The youngest of them was around 3-4 years elder to me was a Maggi expert. She could cook a variety of Maggi, the watery Maggi was her special. It was cooked over a small gas stove in a small room. The steam from the excess water used to curl around in the room with two of us sitting in the room and chatting endlessly, while eating our favorite snack. I still remember competing in making the slurpy noises while sucking the noodles in. See? My first idea of romance was linked with you, Maggi. (By the way, she was really gorgeous)
During one of the hot summer holidays one of my cousins came to visit us in Delhi. My mom used to prepare breakfast and leave for work. My cousin and I were quite adventurous and explored our cooking venture as we kind of hated the same old boring stuff in breakfast (Though mom is an excellent cook, its just that I get bored very easily) We did quite a few experiments with the Maggi Masala, which became my favorite. We used to make scrambled egg with Maggi masala and trust me it tastes heavenly! Another one, a much simpler quickie. My mom makes really tasty Rotis, we used to put some cheese inside and a lot Maggi masala and roll it up. We used to microwave the roll for about 2 minutes so that the cheese just starts to melt. Mmmmm! Another taste that I will never forget. I know it is kind of hard to believe but my mouth is literally watering by the mere thought of dripping cheese and all that Maggi masala in that tasty roti.
Okay now I am starting to get a bit sentimental. We knew that Maggi was the only way to survive the harsh college food and imagine the cruelty that Maggi was banned just before I started college, it was as if one of the most important part of our engineering life has just been jailed.
I am becoming happy just thinking that how awesome that first bite is going to be when I finally have the venerated yellow packet of happiness again in my hands. See? Maggi, we really missed you and now that you have released from prison it is high time that you just jump from the factory and storage shelves where you are stocked to our cooking pots and from that cooking pot to my stomach.
I missed you Maggi yaar. We all did. Thanks for making it through the harsh times!!