By Tara Narayan
CAN anything be as exquisitely beautiful as original pale gold wild honey? I’ve got a couple of bottles of fresh-from-the-beehive honey and this time around it is not my friend David Gower’s wild honey all the way from the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu! My honey is courtesy the Goa Forest Development Corporation […]

LOOKS LIKE the khaas aadmi of Goa has run away from Goa’s sweltering summer heat …gone to Thailand, gone to Vietnam, gone to Malaysia and Singapore, or may be Switzerland, Austria, New York, London, where they’re probably feasting on choice mangoes imported from India! Like we’re eating apples from New Zealand, Chile, South Africa, Washington and China, here in summer time in India when we should be eating our very own national fruit - the mango! Mangoes from Goa are more expensive than apples from New Zealand!

I COULDN’T believe my eyes. A rudraksha tree in Goa? A tree most precious to mahadeo, Lord Shiva, the seeds of which are popularly revered as the ‘tears’ the good lord shed over something or another! Hindu mythological lore, generally speaking, has it that Lord Shiva is as emotional and sentimental a god, as tempestuous when he angry … but this is about this most beautiful lush green rudraksha tree growing in the landscaped gardens adjoining the Selaulim Dam in Sanguem taluka.

DON’T ASK me why, but every time a new cake shop opens in town I get annoyed! As if there are not enough cake shops in Goa. I know it’s absurd to feel like that, but that’s how I feel whenever a new cake shop opens in town. This time it was Pallavi Salgaocar and Anjali Walawalkar’s Desserts & More (around the corner near Delmon Hotel, Panaji) and since both women are friends, I trotted out to check if they have any health-conscious stuff at all.

IALWAYS think of the merry month of May as the stir-fry month, my dears, also as heartbreak weather! Ask me why? Well, one may sizzle and sweat it out in the streets and then in the evenings take pleasure in all the flowering trees of Goa…the gulmohrs, laburnums, pink cassias, frangipanis, queen’s trees, copperpods, silk […]

By Tara Narayan
DON’T ASK me why, but I love the sound of the hot cross bun and look forward to eating all the hot cross buns in town come Maundy Thusday-Good Friday-Christ’s resurrection and Easter breakfast celebrations with hot cross buns and chocolate bunnies…or something like that. I think I’m quarter-Hindu (born Hindu), quarter Muslim […]

By Tara Narayan
SUDDENLY the humidity is making me melt like ice-cream and I’m also in a sour mood! Not sour bad, but sour good…as in mango green. This is the green mango season and somebody should take a picture of these children on holiday going around raiding mango trees festooned with bunches of fattening green […]

YOU MAY take one’s pick of hospitals in Mapusa now! The newest to join the list is the four-storeyed Galaxy Hospital at Duler, a dream come true not just for noted pharmacist Suresh Kolwalkar (of Drogaria fame) but his son Dr Ravish Kolwalkar and daughter-in-law Dr Lairai Kolwalkar (skin specialist and cosmetologist). More likely it will be called Dr Kolwalkar’s Galaxy Hospital for Dr Ravish Kolwalkar is an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in pelvis and acetabular surgeries, perhaps the only one in Goa who has done as many as 600 of such complicated surgeries.

DON’T ASK me how one afternoon last week in the cool, luxurious comfort of the Goa Marriott Resort & Spa’s AZUR lounge, I found myself rediscovering the world’s most premium ice-cream - Haagen-Dazs. Especially, when I’m not an ice-cream but more of a desi chaat girl! I outgrew ice-creams a long time ago and hardly ever pine for it now (especially when I know what goes into it most of the time)….but Haagen-Dazs’ reputation precedes it as the best — and most expensive — ice-cream in the world. Why? Don’t really know why yet, must find out though. May be it’s more health-conscious than the other run-of-the-mill junk ice-creams of commerce!

Gene testing has come to India and it’s not the same thing as gene modification, says DR LENNY DA COSTA of the Margao-based Rafael Medicare Centre.