An Amritsar phirni seller’s resemblance to Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez has caught the internet’s fancy, with an X post garnering 37,000 views and prompting witty wordplay inspired by the Colombian author’s books.
“Had the pleasure of buying excellent phirni from Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Amritsar,” wrote X user @Stereotypewriter, setting off a flurry of literary puns in the comments.
Keshav Das quipped, “Love of phirni in the Time of Cholera,” riffing on Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Sakshi Singh came up with “One Hundred Years of phirni-tude,” a play on One Hundred Years of Solitude, while Piyush Gupta commented, “Chronicle of a Dessert foretold,” an apparent reference to Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
The repartee continued, with Deepak Mohoni suggesting “Twenty-Four Sakoras of Firnitude,” while Sachin Mandot offered his take: “100 years of solitude in Amritsar!”
Shomona Khanna was equally charmed by the discovery, writing, “Phirni inspired by yellow butterflies. True love,” an apparent nod to the magical realism associated with Márquez’s writing. MetaHacker, meanwhile, used the encounter to celebrate the city’s diversity, observing, “Walk around in Amritsar long enough and you’ll spot every human ethnicity imaginable (And they’re all Indians).”
The man at the centre of the online buzz is Ramesh Kumar, a second-generation sweet-maker who learnt the craft from his father and has been making sweets for more than four decades. Kumar laughed when the X user showed him a photograph of Márquez, popularly known as Gabo.
“I have no idea about the Nobel Prize, to be honest, and nobody ever told me I resemble him. It’s funny. He does look like me, or the other way round. I can probably pass off as his brother,” he told the X user, who spotted him.
Kumar sits next to the famous Kesar Dhaba at Passian Chowk in Amritsar, while his two brothers operate bigger shops nearby. He makes just four sweets — phirni, gulab jamun, rasmalai and rasgulla — and supplies some hotels in the city, though he primarily operates out of his modest outlet.
Who was Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer and journalist, widely regarded as one of the most-influential literary figures of the 20th century. A leading exponent of magical realism, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
Márquez, affectionately known as Gabo, was renowned for weaving elements of fantasy into ordinary life, a hallmark of his writing that cemented his place among the world’s top literary figures.
