Come Durga Puja and Bengali associations in Bangalore gear up to celebrate the festival in huge fanfare. Apart from offering puja to Goddess Durga, the most interesting part of the puja is the food. Both commercial outlets and Bengali families come out with their trademark dishes during the festivity.
Bengali specialties like sandesh, mishti doi, hirer Chop, kheer kwamola (citrus kheer), payesh, langcha and roshogullas will be in abundance in and around the puja pandals. The Bengali commercial outlets like Best Of Bengal, Taste of Bengal, Babumoshai among others try to create as much publicity as they can during such festivities. Biswas, an employee at Best Of Bengal says, “Our restaurants will be closed for four days and during those days we open our stall at Jayamahal. For seven years, we have been displaying our stall here and the response has been amazing. People like to munch on our fish fries, fish curry and fish cutlets.”
Homemade delicacies like dhoka dalna, narikel mocha, phulkopir vada, luci puri are some of the dishes that every Bengali in Bangalore waits for. Vidyat, a software engineer says, “I wait for the homemade luchi puri especially. Also the regular bhog after pushpanjali and prasadam.” Achintya Lal Roy, who was an ex-president of a Bengali association in Bangalore and related to Tagore Cultural centre says, “For us, Durga puja is not only about religion. It is more than religion. In fact, it is a socio-cultural event. We love food and culture.”