She wants Bhai to taste her creations
Making cakes for over a decade now, 90-year-old Kalawati Tallam helps her grandson Sriedhaar run the bakery they own and make ends meet
How many times have you had a fresh fruit cake that has left your mouth watering even after you have eaten to your heart’s content? It’s not very often that a cake is soft, extremely fresh and has been prepared minutes before it reaches your door-step. Granny Amma’s Bakery is a quaint little space to watch out for in Rasta Peth.
Living in Pune since his college days, Sriedhaar Tallam has done a lot of odd jobs to help run the house. Right from working in a bakery and a hotel to assisting a tailor, the 42-year-old has had a rough time growing up. During all these odd jobs, he also assisted an expat family who had recently moved to a house in Koregaon Park and that was where he learned to bake cakes. He taught his grandmother and sister the tricks of getting the texture and flavour right and thus began the story of Granny Amma’s Bakery.
“It was a speech by Ratan Tata that inspired me to start the business. In his speech, he spoke about how if you ran a business and employed someone you not only fed that one person but four others along with him. This inspired me further to set up my own bakery and I am indebted to all those who have helped me,” he shares. A lot of what he has learned has been through observation and trial and error. There were hundreds of cakes that he himself rejected when he started off and refused to deliver them irrespective of the overflowing orders. He also makes sure that every single product he uses for his cakes is fresh and of the best quality. As if this was not enough, he delivers all over Pune and is just a call away. While he has a huge list of people to thank there are a few names that immediately come to his mind. These are all those have helped him along the way and without whom achieving whatever he has today would not have been possible. There is Rahul Bhandari, Vipul Oswal, Gautam Jain, Deepak Mankar, Jitendra Shah, Raju Mutha, Vikram Kakade, Renu Desai, Vijendra Pawar, Mobina Khan, Chetan Puram and Raviraj Takavne, among many others.
Talking about his grandmother, who is a huge Salman Khan fan, he tells us that her only wish is to bake a cake for him and feed it to him too. She absolutely loves the actor so much so that Sriedhaar even has a Tata Nano custom-made for her with a small television inside on which she watches Salman films. It was after she saw the film Hum Aapke Hai Kaun that she fell in love with him and can keep watching his movies on repeat. She makes it a point to see every single film of the actor on the big screen and is willing to travel distances to the theatres houses for whichever show’s ticket she gets.
For the Tallam family challenges and struggles are an everyday affair. Especially after a major accident a huge part of the funds are spent on Sriedhaar’s medical treatment. “Irrespective of everything that we have been through our optimism isn’t weak enough to stagger. I have met enough and more generous and good-hearted people in my lifetime to believe in the fact that things will turn around some day,” he says, with a smile.
His future plans include expanding his business, continuously inventing cakes and creating an experience for the customer other than just delivering a product. An animal lover, he has already adopted three stray dogs and hopes to even start a pet clinic for the others that he can’t take in.
salonee.mistry@goldensparrow.com
Originally published on The Golden Sparrow
