As I devoured the last remaining bits of the leftover Diwali Mysore Pak my mother had made, my wife asked a question: “I am ordering samosa, do you want some?”

Some savory stuff would be nice, I thought. But there is a problem. My North Indian wife and my North Indian friends have been running a scam for a long time. I would actually generalize that to all North Indians. For some reason, they insist on having potatoes added to samosas. The only acceptable form of samosa to me is the one with onion and that looks like a triangle if you visualize it on a 2D plane.
You might ask if I won’t eat potato samosas. Let me answer that with a Tamil idiom: “A tiger, even if hungry, won’t eat grass.” I am not a tiger; I am a cow. I will eat everything. I am not vegetarian, of course, like the cow, which brings me to biryanis.

I like a lot of biryanis, the Dindigul version is my favorite, the Hyderabad one is not too bad (eat from Hotel Shaadab if you’re in Hyderabad; your stomach will be guaranteed an upset, but it’s totally worth it). The following section can be a trigger warning for vegetarians: please order a mutton biryani, for chicken biryani is not a real biryani.

Going back to potatoes, however, for a long, long time, I have joined the rest of the country in bashing the Calcutta biryani. I mean, potatoes on biryani, really? Today, I have a confession to make: I have mocked the Calcutta biryani in the past purely out of peer pressure. I actually enjoy it. Sure, it’s not the first or the second or, for that matter, the fifth best biryani I like, but it’s not bad at all. The baddest (like really bad, not like badass) biryani of them all is Donne biryani. Like what is that even? Does that mean I don’t order it? Of course not. “A tiger, even if hungry, won’t eat grass. But a cow will eat grass if it’s not hungry.”

I have to go and order a samosa and Donne biryani now. You know how whenever uncles make an ironical point, they actually call out the irony? I am that uncle.