Search giant Google is celebrating India's premier street food ‘pani puri’ with a special interactive game Doodle today. In the game, Google will allow users to help a street vendor fulfil pani puri orders by helping them choose from different pani puri flavours in order to match the flavour and quantity preferences of each customer.
On this day in 2015, a restaurant in Madhya Pradesh's Indore made it to the Golden Book of World Records for serving 51 unique pani puri flavours to its customers.
Google introduced the new pani puri game Doodle by terming pani puri as a “popular South Asian street food made of crispy shell stuffed with potatoes, chickpeas, spices, or chilis and flavoured waters.”
Origins of Pani Puri and its regional variations:
According to legend, Pani Puri was first invented by Draupadi during the time of the Mahabharata. The story goes that when Draupadi became the wife of the Pandavas, the warriors were still living in exile with limited resources. Draupadi's mother-in-law, Kunti, told her to use some leftover aloo sabzi and wheat dough to make something that would satisfy the hunger of all five men. The resulting dish that Draupadi made was a bite-sized pani puri that helped satisfy the Pandavas' hunger.
The popular street food has many variations and is known by various names across the length and breadth of the country. In Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, Pani Puri signifies a ‘bite-sized street food’ usually dipped in boiled chickpeas, white pea mixture and sprouts paired with spicy pani.
In north Indian states such as Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and New Delhi, gol gappa means a small street food filled with potato and chipea, paired with jaljeera-flavoured pani. Similarly, in West Bengal and some parts of Bihar and Jharkhand, the street food is called puchkas or fuchkas, with tamarind pulp as the main ingredient.
