Lucknow Returned

Considering I spent most of my time on the highway to Faizabad, it might be unfair to deliver a damning verdict on Lucknow. After all, one hopes there's more to Lucknow than a shitty airport and a medieval highway. Be that as it may, I'd still like to maintain my earlier position of cautious dread towards the city and its inhabitants. From what I could see, Mayawati has taken her megalomania to new extremes. The infrastructure is a shambles. The crime rate is sickening. Yet her bovine face is hard to miss anywhere in Lucknow. Statues, billboards, banners and handbills. Imagine Nero, after the conflageration in Rome, got a bust made to commemmorate the occasion. As for the famed Awadhi cuisine, seriously overrated. It's like the head cook of the palace (sometime in the 16th century or whenever they concocted Awadhi cuisine) sat down, scratched his head and tried to come up with something that delicately balances flavours and best brings out the nuances of the food he was cooking, failed and then just decided, 'Fuck it. Let me just go buy the most expensive things in the market, put them in a pot and hope they go for it'. Before question marks are raised about the authenticity of the food, I'll have you know that the Oudhayana, at the Taj Residency is considered a torch bearer of the Awadhi cuisine. I tried their famed Galawati and Kakori kebabs. It's an overbearing spice explosion of saffron, nutmeg, clove and million other flavours. The meat is almost an afterthought. Oh well. To each their own. After all there are people who eat corrugated iron and like it.
(http://championkickah.blogspot.com/2006/09/warning-may-contain-trace-elements-of.html)