Jayan Jose Thomas

Kerala is trending this week, so let me offer a comparison nobody asked for. I have spent my whole life in Gujarat. I am still afraid of its breakfast. Everything here arrives fried. Find a proper meal while travelling, and you must hunt down a food park. Those food parks serve sambhar and chutney with great confidence. The confidence rarely survives your stomach for minutes. Kerala does breakfast differently. Every small eatery, even in the remotest corner, manages to be both hygienic and proper. I do not mean the big chains everyone already knows. I mean the tiny places with no signboard worth mentioning. Roads tell a similar story. Kerala's roads are narrow, but they are laid with real intent. Asphalt reaches almost every home, in almost every direction. Leave the cities out of this — Kochi's roads deserve a sad column of their own. Rural Kerala, though, quietly outperforms most of urban India. Gujarat has no such ambition. Outside the highways, roads seem designed for tractors, not cars. Nobody complains. Everyone has simply adjusted, the way Gujaratis adjust to most things. There is more. If you are a Malayali living in Kerala, social life finds you whether you seek it or not. Deaths, baptisms, weddings — the calendar is always full, and everyone is invited. These gatherings are where you meet your relatives. Everywhere else, you mostly meet your friends, and quietly agree that this counts as family enough. I will not dwell on the clean air, the water, the hills, the wildlife. That list writes itself. What I will mention is the weekend. Kerala offers enough recreational spots to leave in the morning and return the same night, tired but satisfied. Wherever you are. Gujarat has the longest coastline in the country and treats it like a liability. Thirteen hundred kilometres of coast, and not one proper seafood joint along the way. A state with that much shoreline choosing to ignore its own fish is a mystery I have stopped trying to solve. Till about a decade back, I thought Gujarat is my home state. That changed slowly. No offence to Gujarat though.