Askew Quotes

“Dawn never comes to the late riser.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Keep the margin low, build volume.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“If the rains don’t come when they must, vegetables won’t taste as they should,’ he said.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“PhD time—Precious Hours of Drinking.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“But information technology changed the nature of the narrative, changed even the city’s name from a noun to a verb; Barack Obama publicly objected to American jobs being Bangalored.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“A city is a living, throbbing organism with a soul of its own and, it would often seem, a thinking mind. Cities have memories and dreams, they nurture ambition and bemoan failure.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order’ and said: ‘This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The Internet age saw bands with names like Thermal and a Quarter, The Burning Deck, Lounge Piranhas, Sulk Station, Space Behind the Yellow Room and Clown with a Frown, playing everything from electro-pop to space funk to thrash metal.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“When you are born into a family like I am, it’s only fair that I give the business a go... I just owe it to myself, my grandfather and my father to give it a go. If I don’t like it, then no one is going to make me do it. But if you don’t do something, then how do you know you don’t like it, right?”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The business model was a winner, too, because it was so down to earth.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Prabhakar’s reputation was reinforced by the next idea he launched—food sold by weight.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“bharjari oota, sumptuous meal—a healthy and hygienic Mysore-style spread of unlimited rice, curry, sambar, rasam, chutney, buttermilk.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“darshini’, that which is visible. Under Prabhakar’s direction, a friend opened the first Cafe Darshini in Jayanagar in 1983. Roughly modelled on McDonald’s, it had modern kitchen machinery visible from the public area. In front of it was the counter where order-takers handed over the prepared items directly to the customer. There was no furniture other than a new device: an elbow-high pole on which rested a small round tabletop. The customer was to put his plate on the tabletop and eat standing. The only staff in the public area was a cleaning boy who would wipe the tabletop clean as soon as a customer left.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“darshini’, that which is visible.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“His style was to develop ideas and get his entrepreneurial friends to implement them.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The unassuming consumer activist had launched, without realizing its full implications, an idea—that a strong middle class had emerged, willing and able to sustain businesses that were fair in their ways.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“the rains don’t come when they must, vegetables won’t taste as they should,’ he said.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The Koshy who founded what became an instant landmark was a Syrian Christian from Kerala, the significance being that Syrian Christian devotion to beef, mutton and fish is almost canonical.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“When rice became scarce during the Second World War the Maiyas experimented with semolina, leading to the invention of rava idli, a hot staple today in South Indian menus the world over.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“A superior cuisine so scrupulously developed could have remained confined to the Brahmin habitats of South Canara. But the entrepreneurial spirit that propelled many of them did not allow that. They carried Udupi’s treasure beyond their district.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The overall concept was that forty-eight items should be cooked every day as Lord Krishna’s neivedyam. The main segments of this spread were to be five sweets, five payasams, five fried items, five unboiled items (such as salads), five rasa (such as sambar, rasam), five anna (rice), five vyanjana (pickles, papads) and five jeernakara (digestives such as herbal chutneys). These were not to be repeated each day, a stipulation that forced the chief cooks to become innovators and improvisers, constantly in search of new variations.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Explorations with YNK taught me that while food is notoriously localized (North Karnataka food is different in concept and taste from Mysore food just as Thanjavur sambar is quite unlike Mylapore sambar), the cuisine we were enjoying in and around Basavangudi was a speciality that could be called representative South Indian food. It was South Indian rather than area-specific because it was consciously designed to serve the purposes of tradition common to the south as a whole. It was developed by the professional culinary craftsmen of Karnataka and taken all over the world by the entrepreneurs of Karnataka, but it was generic in its South Indianness, symbolized in a word that became universal—Udupi.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Explorations with YNK taught me that while food is notoriously localized (North Karnataka food is different in concept and taste from Mysore food just as Thanjavur sambar is quite unlike Mylapore sambar), the cuisine we were enjoying in and around Basavangudi was a speciality that could be called representative South Indian food. It was South Indian rather than area-specific because it was consciously designed to serve the purposes of tradition common to the south as a whole.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Sit?’ exclaimed YNK. ‘We don’t sit. We stand on the footpath and eat.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Food, not liquor, was YNK’s love. He should have defined PhD as Precious Hours of Dining, for he was always in search of new eateries and new dishes he could call ‘the world’s best’.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“food was not just a physical element related to hunger but a subtle means to the understanding of ambrosia.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Aesthetes remained at the centre of things. They created public taste, raised education to a creative vocation and administration to a mission, sustained the arts and fostered on the sidelines a distinct cuisine that was to become famous.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“IT people represented a kind of fashionable rootlessness.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“Big companies like ITI, Bharat Electronics and HMT settled into their own well-planned, self-sufficient clusters where the companies assumed responsibility for their employees’ living quarters and schools and shops. IT tore this system apart. They set up fancy headquarters buildings with no thought to the living and commuting needs of their tens of thousands of employees.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

“The IT boom, and other forces of rapid change, had altered Bangalore from within, as though unseen hands had reconstituted its DNA. It used to be a city at peace with itself. It was now a bundle of contradictions, a battleground of competing constituencies, where going forward resembled going backward.”
― T.J.S. George, Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore