Bigger and better than ever before with Goa Chamber of Commerce & Industry Women’s Wing coming a long, long way from the humble beginning of Asturi!

THE GCCI Women’s Wing did itself proud this year with its meticulously organized Asturi exhibition-cum-sale out at the Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Indoor Stadium out at the Kadamba plateau on the outskirts of Panjim this year from December 2 to 3, 2024. Asturi is the annual event dedicated to bringing women entrepreneurs and businesswomen together under one roof and here one gets an opportunity to catch up with a whole host of goodies for everything for mind and body, heart and soul. Mostly a women’s affair but men join in to encourage women from various strata of society and community.
Women do a lot of fashionable attire of course and there was lots of this along with real and surreal jewelry which I have no use for now; yes, every kind of masala to make cooking easy except that with not much shelf life masala powders tend to get “fungafied” – still, Goa has a maximum number of interesting masala mixes in the country, from the main favorites of recheado, shagoti, cafreal, ambotik, jiremirem, caldin is hard to find. But at the Rama’s stall I found a breathtaking range of “masala jo maa ki yaad dila de” (meaning masala which reminds you of mother)!
These Rama’s masala folk had a caldin masala (Rs90) and I got it to try out, although I can never make up my mind about whether dry masala or wet masala is better or fresher, most honest to use, although my cooking is simple and off too much masala, not even garam masala which is considered the master masala of them all and put into anything and everything with undiscriminating passion. But one masala I’m addicted to is tea masala with its cardamom-clove-black pepper aromatic flavors. I bought some excellent cardamom powder too. Crazy range of masala here at Rama’s: Malvani and Goda and Kolhapuri kanda lasun masala mix, Afghani and Mughlai and Bafat and East Indian and Malabar and Arabic Kabsa, etc. Okay, no more.

THERE’RE always finds in gorgeous ladoo, the mainstay national sweet of India; here were the Chitramay (healthy bites) ladoo women Mayurakshi Abhisheki and Chitra Kelkar of Mangesh village, who retail their wide range of desi ghee ladoo using jaggery as the sweetener; so read besan (gram flour) ladoo although this one features sugar, the only one I’m told; but there are the jaggery sweetened ladoo of moong, wheat, jowar, bajra, gond or dink, methi, dry fruit, and so on. I took a real shine to the bajra ladoo and a winter time favorite haleem seed ladoo which I bought before I could change my mind! Soft haleem seed ladoo you won’t find in every ladoo shop, it’s said to be all kinds of good things and has to be stored in the fridge for its short shelf life (haleem translates to “garden cress” in English) . You may find the ladoo at Amonkar Enterprises (next to Honda Priority showroom) in Taleigao.
What else: Dehydrated veggie powders are finding a market nowadays. Eshan foods from Pune were marketing dehydrated sprouted mataki, chana, moong, methi, coriander leaves, spinach leaves, curry leaves, kasoori methi most of us know about, but also mint leaves, activated almond, carrot flakes, tomato flakes and many more. When fresh is unavailable dehydrated should be the best, I guess. I know travelers from abroad who travel around with portable dehydraters trucked in their backpacks, in which they buy apples and semi dehydrate before making a breakfast of them, and other fruit too. Useful tool for young travellers.
Kanchan Patwardhan, a clinical dietician from Mumbai was offering health and nutrition dietary guidance to some of the women visitors (we do have a huge obesity health problem in urban India and women eat worse than men, depending on which page of enlightenment they’re on)…come to think of it things are moving for there was quite a bit of focus on health-conscious food at Asturi this year. Fryums too at some stalls, the kind we fall for everytime, namely savory “chakri,” “choora” and “chatakdar sev” from Kohapur.
Jaggery and jaggery powder and also unrefined sugar has been in the market for a while now and folk are preferring it to refined sugar. The world is spreading to shun the carcinogen sugar and most of the refined carbs of kingdom come if you want to be happy. At Asturi I found Aamrut Jaggery from Satara in Maharashtra…take your pick of jaggery cubes with ginger, saunf (aniseed), elaichi (cardamom) and even dry fruit enshrined jaggery cubes.
Jaggery’s nutritional brief is that being more primary food it’s more nutritious, it increases hemoglobin, is a blood purifier, prevents anemia (Indian women are forever suffering from anemia), is rich in iron and mineral values. Boycott refined sugar today if you haven’t done so already. These days I’m reading the more sugar, the more cancer thrives in shortening all our telomeres or something like that (go read up the big time health gurus of the world today who I keep mentioning here now and again).
AND elsewhere I found Shilpa Gaonkar with son Yuvraj retailing a mindboggling range of kurta in sizes ranging from the most desirable to the most undesirable but useful if you’re putting on weight, which I tend to do off and on depending on my state of mind. The trim Shilpa bai tells me she’s been doing kurta and kameez attire sets from her place in Bicholim for the last 28 years and most of Goa’s women must pretty much know her.
I couldn’t take my eyes of some of the other non-foodie things like the softest cotton quilts and durries, crochet jewelry, there were tarot mistresses and rudraksha mala and all kinds of precious stone wristlets for good luck, necklaces, bangles, rings…someone was doing the “philosophy of nails” – for women who don’t have to do the housework of cooking and washing up, I presume.
I cannot do better than offer you a photo essay here to confirm how well the Asturi women are doing, worth your while to go become a member of the GCCI’s women’s wing to launch yourself into a business career of your dreams! Women today just don’t need to depend on their men folk to keep them happy when it comes to maintaining body beautiful or anything else. Hear me, my dears, it’s never too late to liberate yourself from all that is not important…or what all you have outgrown with time and too much experience of the esoteric kind, whatever that mean.