If you are someone who has been living off of recipes and cooking videos to sustain yourself during the lockdown, welcome to the club. 

So recently I was taking a regular scroll through my IG feed when I saw the most bizzare thing possible. I came across a Cookist video of someone making something that looked and felt like roti but for some weird reason they called it a ‘whole wheat balloon bread’. 

Now I’m no professional and given a chance I can perfectly burn water, but it doesn’t take a Michelin star chef to point out that it was a step-by-step recipe for making a normal roti.

Instagram

AND NO IT IS NOT CALLED A WHOLE WHEAT BALOON BREAD. WTF even does that mean?

I mean, the desi in me was infuriated. Even though I’m personally a rice person, all I wanted to do at that time was save my roti from being body-shamed. A balloon, seriously? 

Kitchen Sanctuary

And honestly can we please stop trying to rename desi delicacies with pretentious fancy names and just call them what they are? Like what the hell is a lentil soup, just call it dal. And it’s not a turmeric latte, it’s haldi wala doodh.  

Like honestly why do we have to dumb down the names of our dishes and change it to their literal descriptions just because some uncultured person is too lazy to Google what it means?

Like we understand that it might look like our politicians are obsessed with changing the nomenclature around the country (which they probably are), but that doesn’t give you the right to call our rotis ‘whole wheat balloon bread’. 

The Hindu

Desi Netizens from across the globe have united to defend their rotis from being called ‘whole wheat balloon bread’: 

Calling it a ‘whole wheat balloon bread’ won’t make you any cooler than the people who call it roti. Because, it is a freaking chapati.