Bhubaneswar, June 16: Denizens in Bhubaneswar moved over the flaming shots to celebrate Rajo festival. Are you taken in by surprise or left confused as to how they did it? Well, they chose to taste the Rajo Paan (betel leaf) with fire during the three-day long festival. This special flaming Paan is sold at Litu Paan Shop at Saheed Nagar. The mouth freshener seller, popularly known as Litu, prepares the Paan with common ingredients like clove, betel nut and meetha gulkand. Surprisingly, he wraps the betel leaf after lighting the ingredients and thereafter folds it and puts it inside the customers’ mouth. Litu claims that though it looks dangerous, the customers aren’t burnt as they relish the Paan. “The fire Paan has become popular among the youngsters. I was inspired by an online video on flaming pana. I learnt the trick from the video. Thereafter, we started serving it to customers since last week. It is a variant of the popular sweet or meetha gulkhand Paan . It comes with peppermint brass that catches fire easily,” said Litu. “I thought the Paan will burn my mouth. I was little afraid before I actually tried it. It is scary but tasty as well,”said Sattwik Ghosh, a local. It was not just the flaming Paan that was in demand. Denizens also chewed other varieties of Paan to celebrate Rajo festival. Subhash Satpathy, owner of a Paan shop near CRP, claimed that the craze for Paan increased this year. “I sold spe
cial mitha pana for the Rajo festival. We prepared special varieties of Paan with sweet elaichi (cardamom), gulukand (made of rose petals), mint, pudina, cherry, sweet nuts, and fennel seeds,” he said. This year, the flavoured pana were a big hit. “We sold flavoured Paan this time. We sold mango and chocolate pana. These were
priced between Rs 10 to Rs 60,” Satpathy added. The new variants failed to subdue the love for traditional Banarasi pana in locals. “We bring the Banarasi Paan from Medinipore in West Bengal. People came to us in large numbers during Rajo to grab the Banarasi delight,” said another Paan seller.
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