God save them from bhut jolokia

And, good news from India’s northeastern states continue. On Wednesday, India exported its first-ever consignment of bhut jolokia — literally, ‘pepper from Bhutan’ in Assamese, but also translating rather aptly as ‘ghost pepper’ — to Britain. Eat your spicy heart out, ye phantoms of the East India Company. Even in this globalised world with growing tariffs, this is hot news. For starters, we’re talking about the world’s hottest chilli based on the Scoville scale that measures pungency of hot peppers. Grown in Nagaland, this consignment of 250 kg of the hot stuff from Tening, was sent off from Guwahati in a special package after getting plant quarantine clearance to London. Some palates in Notting Hill are likely to soon wake up and smell the pepper.

The bhut jolokia measures more than 1 million Scoville Heat Units (SHUs). The Tabasco brand of hot sauce, in comparison, measures a pusillanimous 3,750 SHUs. But, will we now, in a generation or two perhaps, get to find British cuisine like chicken tikka masala and poppadom — still exotic for us here in India — raise their hot quotient? And, will this, in turn, play its part in raising if not global warming then local warming in, say, Chichester and Salisbury? May this Naga warrior-sadhu make continental condimental cuisine more fiery. We wait with bated breath, and a gallon of water.