When pizza becomes 'peeja', that's amore!

Any notion that pizza is or was anything other than Indian will eventually be dismissed as naan-sense. A baked wheat dough roundel with lashings of tomato paste and other addons is nothing but a plumped up chapati with the subzi and/or meat conveniently placed on top rather than separately, after all. The fact that it needs no cutlery, can be shared and spiced up at will, no doubt adds to the familiarity factor for the Indian palate. The news that India gobbles up 4 lakh pizzas a day of a particular brand (and goodness knows how many more dished out by other brands not to mention local efforts in places as diverse as Salem and Siliguri) making it the second largest market for the savoury pie only after the mother territory USA, shows the process of desification is well under way. Give the naanza another few years and makeovers, and it's Neapolitan origins will be a mere incidental footnote — like Hamburg is to the hamburger.

The adoption and adaptation of the pizza should not surprise anyone as Indians are pasta masters when it comes to gladly accepting Italian immigrants who are willing to don indigenous garb. All Italian dishes have to do is add a bit of Indian tadka and they get our vote, at least culinarily speaking. Can any dish be foreign, in a nation that swears by vasudhaiva kutumbakam, or the whole world is one family?