*A Dosa Dossier <http://outlookindia.com/article.aspx?263867<http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://outlookindia.com/article.aspx%3F263867&usg=AFQjCNHMkQpj-Y3Ey7F2S9xFVmspjHIfig>>*
The masala dosa, voted as the 'national dish' in *Outlook*'s year-end food survey, is a recent phenomenon, an exotic adaptation that provoked profound civilisational arguments when it arrived... Sugata Srinivasaraju Excerpt: ...in a brilliant essay written by a renowned Kannada poet, playwright and composer, P T Narasimhachar. The essay written sometime in the late 1940s, when the masala dosa was just about getting popular in Bangalore and Mysore and small eateries were proliferating, speaks of how the masala dosa has become a marker of urbanisation, modernity and, to a degree, elitism. In fact, the essay takes a satirical view of the city dweller's anguish over a villager eating masala dosa. It begins by asking: "Can a city slicker bear the sight of a rural bumpkin eating a masala dosa in their hotels?" Then the essay goes on to list a perceived set of woes caused especially by the rural palate taking to the taste of the masala dosa. It asks if there is a connection between food shortage in the country and the farmer getting addicted to the taste of the masala dosa? If lands are being left uncultivated and barren because the villager has begun to take a bus to the city every now and then to taste the masala dosa? For the essayist the masala dosa is at the heart of an enveloping sense of catastrophe in the urban soul: "A Brahmin is a Brahmin because he chants the Gayatri mantra, a Muslim is a Muslim because of the kalma, a Lingayat is a Lingayat because he carries the Linga, the rituals of a Christian makes him a Christian, similarly a villager is a villager because he eats the humble ragi (millet) balls. Once he starts eating the masala dosa he is converted into a civilised person." In this sense the masala dosa is projected as an unsettling and revolutionary stuff.
