FOR Delhi University students Dhuv Shah, Anay Trivedi and Megha Sharma, Fridays are sacrosanct. No matter how busy they are with their courses and internships during the week, the three childhood friends make it a point to meet every Friday for their weekly adda.

While the topics of discussion in those ‘talkathons’ are varied, their meeting location — Uncle Tom’s Maggi Point — is usually the same. “We love this place because it’s cheap ... and the different kinds of Maggi noodles they serve are yummy,” Dhruv tells me when I meet the trio at the nondescript eatery in hip and happening Kamla Nagar, a residential and commercial neighbourhood adjacent to the university area.

“But now our comfort food is gone ... hope not forever,” sighed Megha as she sipped her chilled fruit beer. “Maggi is not just a snack, yaar; it has a cult status among the young,” adds Anay.

Know more: Nestle challenges noodles ban in Indian court

There are several joints in Delhi that serve Maggi as their signature dish: the masala that comes with the pack is replaced by other condiments and per plate prices range from Rs25 to Rs250. Recently, a friend told me that one such Maggi point in tony south Delhi has a signature dish called ‘Makhani Maggi’. It is a much creamier version with special spices and herbs and per plate is about Rs250, making it the most expensive Maggi in Delhi.

On June 5, food group Nestle announced that it was withdrawing all variants of the noodles in India due to “an environment of confusion for consumers”. The trouble between Nestle and the food regulator surfaced in April when the Uttar Pradesh Food Safety and Drug Administration said that the noodles contained lead and monosodium glutamate higher than the legal maximum. This announcement triggered a food scare, leading to a ban on the product in several states.

Maggi took India by storm in the mid-80s. While my Maggi-phase got over a long time ago, I have no qualms admitting that I was addicted to it during my school days. In fact, I remember the first time I saw the bright yellow packet. I was in Patna for my summer holidays when one afternoon, my cousin brother mysteriously disappeared. An hour later, he was back, drenched in sweat but really excited.

I was about to chide him when he took out a yellow packet and waved it at me triumphantly. “Come, let’s eat it ... just t-w-o m-i-n-u-t-e-s,” he said.

We sneaked into the kitchen, switched on the gas (an adventure of sorts), put the water on boil, dunked Maggi into it and stood there looking at the pan admiringly. It was pure magic: two minutes later, it was done ‘soup style’ and it tasted just so perfect.

India’s love affair with Chinese — or rather Indian-Chinese food — is well known. Maggi also did not escape that indigenisation trend. My friend Daisy Hasan, a UK-based lecturer and writer, was introduced to Maggi in the 1980s when packets were distributed in schools.

“The first time my mother cooked the noodles, she added potatoes — Maggi-bhaaji style! During my postgraduate years, Maggi noodles, cooked in a badly dented pan over a barely alive electric choolha in a decrepit hostel room in Delhi, became the catalyst for many memorable friendships and conversations,” she told me over the phone. “Until the recent ban, my annual London-bound suitcase would be crammed with healthier versions of the product. In fact when I told my fiancé how much Maggi I had consumed over the years he remarked, ‘I thought you looked like a pencil.’”

The controversy is a hot-selling one on social media and several Maggi jokes are doing the rounds, but I love the one with similar lead reference. The witty tweet went like this: “The amount of Maggi we have eaten ... if all this lead was there ... the men would have become Nataraj and the women Apsaras.” Nataraj is a depiction of Hindu god Shiva and Apsara is a female spirit of the clouds and water in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, and both are names of well-known pencil brands in India.

Some political souls also gave a Modi twist to the whole affair: “Forget minorities, even Maggi is feeling unsafe under the Modi government.” Others used the opportunity to target other corporate groups that had been in similar soup earlier: “Best way to nullify the effect of lead in Maggi is to eat with Coke/Pepsi containing pesticides.”

Back at Uncle Tom’s Maggi Point, owner Sanjay Kataria says the ban on Maggi is forcing him to change his menu and his business tactics. “Of course there has been a fall in the sales, but I have replaced it with other noodles and macaroni ... in any case I too have a secret masala that makes such stuff tasty,” he tells me confidently. “There is no way I will change the name of the eatery now ... that’s a bit of a challenge ... but then people forgive and forget ... so I hope the case won’t affect my business too much.”

There is still a loyal band of supporters who swear by Maggi and there is a healthy demand for it, making it almost a contraband item. One such loyal supporter is Arun Chandok, an NGO activist. “I just can’t understand this brouhaha over Maggi ... people are so bothered ... but what about India’s polluted food chain? How come we don’t protest against that and force our netas to do something about it,” the young bespectacled man with a mop of Maggi-curled hair asks indignantly.

I think Arun’s question is valid and so email it to Sanjay Srivastava, a sociologist who teaches in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Maggi, unlike ‘western’ foods of earlier periods, he tells me, is accessible to large number of people and has an “aspirational” value for many who think they are a part in a ‘global’ culture of eating, buying and being. So when Maggi, Srivastava adds, is discovered to be ‘tainted’, “it strikes at the heart of our aspirations”.

“We expect that — unlike Indian foods such as ghee — global foods are, by nature, pure, healthy and ‘transparent’. That’s because they are products of modernity — and modernity is imagined to be accountable, transparent, etc — they can be trusted. We can scarcely believe it when modernity ‘betrays’ us,” explains Srivastava. “It also became a significant electronic media event because both TV news and Maggi represent a culture of the quick bite”.

As things stand now, it looks that for the two-minute snack, it will take a long time to convince customers that Maggi is “taste bhi, health bhi”.

KumKum Dasgupta is associate editor with the Hindustan Times in New Delhi.

Twitter: @kumkumdasgupta

Published in Dawn, June 12th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play