Do you know how there’s always one house in a building from where aromas waft into other houses? Like on a Sunday morning, you’re by the window and you catch the smell of chickpea flour being roasted in ghee and you enviously figure that someone’s going to relish besan laddoos? Or when you smell the spicy butter tadka of Pav Bhaji coming from a flat below? I’ve been told by neighbours and other residents living close by that my house is almost that manufacturing unit of aromas in my modest neighbourhood in Kandivali, Mumbai.
Needless to say, cooking has been my most rewarding activity for years. But about a few months ago, after spending decades of improvising recipes, everyone around me including my husband and sons began encouraging me to start a food blog. ‘I’m 62.’ I said,‘How do I know what to do with a blog?’ My son assured me that he will help me set it up and run it. This got me excited.
The next hurdle for me was sourcing the ingredients for my recipes. In the good old days, I would energetically roam from one grocery store to the other. I would only buy groceries after inspecting samples of the dals and the grains meticulously on my palm. I would buy certain flour from one shop and certain masala from another. Over the years, I’ve learnt exactly where to find high-quality grocery items for my recipes. But my feet are not as forgiving anymore. I am unable to walk for a longer duration as my feet easily become sore. “Order online on those apps?” my husband suggested. “No way, I don’t trust them to know more than my local kiranawala,” I told him.
For this too, my son came up with a solution. Kids these days can handle just about anything through the internet. He introduced me to ‘LoveLocal’, an App from where I could easily order groceries from local Kirana stores without the physical labor. It is a fabulous online grocery shopping solution; I must tell you. I was able to procure ingredients for my recipes from my trusted local shops without having to move out of my living room. I ordered masalas from the nearby Gupta stores, flour from Savla Kirana shop that was two kilometers away, syrups and sauces from Shivam shoppee that’s one kilometer north of my place.
Not only was I delighted to receive my order in a matter of a few hours, the Gujarati in me was also pleased to find out about all the offers on the App. Always helps to save up some money when starting out a passion project.. I quickly became a regular user. So with the sourcing problem solved, I went about my blog as I’d planned for. What’s more, my blog took off on a good note and generated more traction than I could have imagined. Can’t be more grateful to today’s technology and platforms like LoveLocal that help me save time, energy, and money and enable me to follow my passion at this age. On some days, when I am in doubt over certain orders, I call the shop or the support staff at LoveLocal and it almost always gets resolved within minutes. It has been a seamless experience.
By way of using the services of LoveLocal, I am happy to continue to be supporting local businesses in today’s day and age where the internet has threatened old business set-ups. I like how LoveLocal has created an ecosystem that promotes the co-existence of local business and online convenience, by facilitating the shopping of online groceries in Mumbai as well as many other cities in India.
“How do you manage to run a blog and cook so many recipes at this age?” my neighborhood ladies ask in wonder. “Mysterious powers,” I tell them, unable to hide my giggles. It’s been four months since my blog has been up, yet it feels like I have been doing this for a long time. I continue to be excited about what I do.
