Pongal Celebrations: Food from across the country

It is not often that one gets to go to a school that sits on a farm but for the children of Yellow Train, this is what the everyday entails. Needless to say, Pongal is an extremely special occasion here at school. This year saw the entire event being taken up a notch. 

Tractor rides, kolam competition, stalls with sankranti delicacies from across the country, kumi to the beat of drums - the list is endless. The food stalls were quite the hit amongst students and teachers alike. There was a stall with Bengali sankranti dishes like patishapta and payesh. The akka incharge of the stall, also a grandmother of the school said “There is no sankranti in Bengal without these two dishes. You have to dip the patishapta in the payesh. The jaggery used to make this was sourced specifically from Bengal.”

Right next to this, stood a counter with thayir vadai and another one with kozhukattai. “We chose to bring the thayir vadai because it’ll be a relief to eat in this heat!” The parent in the stall nearby says - “This kozhukattai recipe was my patti's. So I wanted to bring it and share it with the kids.”

Another hit was a stall that had fresh tapioca chips, adhirasam, coconut barfi and lime juice. With so much sweet to indulge in, the tapioca chips sold like hot cakes! “Every ingredient you see here was sourced from our farm. The tapioca, the coconuts for the barfi - everything comes for our land,” says another grandmother who has taken proud ownership of the stall. 

With so much of the delicacies coming from different farms and with parents and grandparents speaking proudly of their produce, the spirit of Pongal was celebrated in its truest sense. We gave thanks to the land and the hands that care for the land.