Side effects of Covid - The Changing Landscape

While taking a stroll on the nearby roads yesterday I could not miss noticing the change in the landscape. My neighborhood is packed with PGs and people who stay single. This basically means that they do not have functioning kitchens or no kitchens. These people depend on the number of small and medium-sized restaurants for the food all three times a day. 

There are the restaurants that normally serve Idlis, dosas, vadas for breakfast and chapati and rice varieties for lunch and dinner. Also, there are many North Karnataka-style hotels that served Jovar roti. There is nothing fancy about the place as such. But they just do what they need to do. Serve good food at a reasonable price. There were also Chinese fast food places that had tasty noodles, soups, and Manchurian options.

One of my favorite places was a healthy and tasty place called 'Just Food' where every dish was made from millets. The guy who ran the place was very passionate about the millets and traditional varieties they were making at the shop. He had transformed a very small 10ftX12ft shop into a beautiful kitchen with decorations and paintings. The millet Dosa, idli, and Rotti were just like home-made. They also made different millet rice varieties which were all fresh and tasty. Whenever I went for a walk there or went to buy from their shop, the welcome smile of the hotelier and the chitchat with their family was truly pleasant. The glaring thing that I noticed was that the place where this shop was there is now replaced by a mewa store which seems to be the trend.

Not just this but the Chinese restaurant also has got closed down. This I say is a side effect of covid since the crowd moved out of Bangalore after lockdown and the small businesses could not sustain during those blank lockdown months. Now when the situation is coming back to normalcy, there are new and bigger shops, restaurants that have mushroomed. The void this small yet fine place has created on this road is huge.