UK's Curry King' Gulam Noon recalls his Mumbai horror

London, Nov 29: Few would know that Britain's Curry King" Sir Gulam Noon originally hails from Mumbai, and has never lost his love for his birthplace.

This week, this ultimate Anglophile and inventor of the famed Bombay mix and chicken tikka masala had to barricade himself into his suite on the third floor of Mumbai's Taj Mahal Hotel for more than nine hours before being rescued by a fireman in a crane.

"I could see the smoke coming along the corridor. The gunfire was continuous all night. We saw two terrorists on our floor. It was a very frightening experience, you had no idea whether they were going to shoot down the door and enter," The Times quoted him, as saying.

As a moderate Muslim, Noon said that he was horrified by the rise of extremism in Islam.

"This isn't real Islam - there is no religion or caste or creed that believes it is right to terrorise people," he said.

Describing the British Government as going soft on terrorists, he said: "Britain is a soft target because we are mollycoddling these people. You start mollycoddling them and they take it as a sign of weakness. I have told all the Home Secretaries you send 50 imams back home and that will send a very strong signal. Forget about their human rights - what about our human rights? They don't fit in my society."

Noon's father died when he was 10, he worked in the family sweet shop in Bombay until he had enough experience to start a chain. Within 40 years of arriving in London and falling in love with Piccadilly Circus, he was producing a quarter of a million curries a day for British supermarkets and turning over 100 million pounds a year.

ANI