This is a simple story of a small fish shop that people coming from places for its authentic food, and how google maps is helping people get there.
VEGANS! Kindly excuse this post.
I live in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu a sleeping city in South India. And, this fish shop is somewhere in Kerala, a nearby state, supposedly just 100Kms or something from my place. We make it a point to drive it down there just for the sake of fun and food. We allocate a day to this. We call it the “Yakkra day”! Yakkra is the river that is flowing down that part from which, Riaz Bhai get the fishes for us from. We reach the place, and he is beyond jovial, he sometimes acts like lunatic just for the fun of it and makes sure he bills us hefty (we are lunatics now). The way the saga goes is, once we reach the place, he would bring us all freshly caught fishes, you could literally see it twitching. Then, if we are ok with it (most of the time we never have the mind to say a NO), he would proceed to gut it out and start cooking. He cooks only with coconut oil and he doesn’t do much of chef stuff (like cutting it into pieces, cropping out the fins, removing the head, etc). He just removes the most unnecessary parts and just dunks it into the marinade and that’s it. Within minutes, he would put it into the blazing hot oil tub and get it out into our banana leaves.
So, what makes Google Maps special about this place? One thing, it is located by the river, and there are no proper roads leading to this place (the days when we started to visit this place). We used to spend at-the-least one hour to locate the place, but once, we got it established on Google Maps, we started sharing the location with our friends, and someone even created a facebook fan page and there too the locations have been shared. We showed him the Google Maps location and all the reviews that are posted, He still replied to us like a lunatic (acting) and said “Why am I going to be on the Internet?”, “I am a poor guy”, “Will income-tax come and arrest me?”, etc., He doesn’t want to reveal the excitement that he was in. Towards the hefty bill I told you about, he gave us a free water-bottle. A WATER BOTTLE! He doesn’t even give us a discount of a rupee, now, he gave us a water bottle. We were literally in tears. (just remember a dialogue in Harry Potter: Master has given a sock. Master gave it to Dobby.) The man earns crazy all thanks to the fishes and google maps ?
And, here is the man of the hour. Mr. Riaz Bhai., an entrepreneur King of Yakkra!
