Midnight in Paris

For once, it was not Woody Allen who wrote my template for a city even though his urban scapes have imbued every other city I lived in with his curious charm. So what if my cities were thousands of miles away from the black and white Manhattan montage unfolding to George Gershwin's music? Despite loving my favourite neurotic American director's quirky tribute to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast in his Midnight in Paris, my inspiration for the city was a pastiche of books I had read, films I had watched and stories I had heard. From some of the most romantic moments in cinema captured in the lights of the Eiffel Tower's glitter and the chiaroscuro shades of the gas lamps lining the streets of this magical city of lights to the artists, writers and poets living in their consumptive freezing garrets in vertiginous old buildings producing some of their greatest masterpieces in the midst of squalor and poverty. From the bohemian cabarets of Boulevard de Clichy to the colourful parties and balls of Montmartre, Paris has occupied a pivotal point in my introduction to the world of art and culture.

Ever since I could remember, as an idealistic teen, an ambitious 20-year-old, a bit more worldly 30-year-old, every trip I ever planned whether as an imaginary itinerary or as a near-possibility — featured Paris. Time and again I would return to my worn-out globe, give it a spin and make it force stop on that same old dot circled with a red felt pen— Paris.

After all these years obfuscated by mundane matters and the daily business of life, when I finally did make this trip in the late summer of 2013, I was a bundle of nerves. Just like meeting a virtual love interest for the first time in the real world, I fretted whether my imagination had just built up this massive fantasy city unable to match anything that actually existed. And sure enough, it was a more frayed, edgy, dusty and older version of the imagined city pieced together from celluloid and poetic representations — and yet, it was more perfect than anything I had ever dreamed up. While I could write reams about Paris... it is Woody Allen again who has the perfect context for the city for Paris at midnight is when it is the most beautiful. It is the bewitching hour when the city draws you into herself and holds you in her thrall forever.

Like many others who have come before me, I too discovered and fell in love with the city by night Walking the banks of the Seine, with a view of the flying buttresses and the jaw-dropping magnificence that is the Notre Dame Cathedral, crossing the iconic green facade of the marvellously quaint and characterful Shakespeare & Co bookshop, walking cobbled streets of the artsy and fashionable 3rd and 4th Arrondissement, stopping at the first cafe that was yet to down its shutters and downing glasses of its cheapest house red to the sounds of a city not yet asleep and not yet awake.

Paris turned me into a wide-eyed girl, looking for the familiar indices of my growing up years as I read copiously and found the world in the pages of the books. I imagined yesteryear movie stars doing a little hop down these ancient avenues, bathed in the same neon lights reflecting off the restaurant signs that coloured my face...

It was the city that Remy, a tiny rat in the film Ratatouille, stared at from a rooftop window and felt the desire to overreach himself and his humble origins. It made you forget you were watching an animated film... all that filled your heart at that moment in time was the vast city and its myriad twinkling lights.

Paris by night allowed me to belong even if for those fleeting moments. My temporary home was truly mine and I was a Parisian till morning dawned and the harsh light of day stripped me of that illusion and left me a behatted tourist with a map, queuing up in lines to visit the nth museum and art gallery.

(First published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 23 April, 2015)

The curious lovechild of horror, fantasy and chicklit

Author, graphic novelist and journalist Shweta Taneja's latest offering Cult of Chaos (Harper Collins India) is a curious book. It is a new kind of cross-breed, much like the oddball and imaginative creatures in the fantasy universe that she creates, right from the freewheeling and powerful female tantrik — Anantya Tantrist — to the host of rakshasas, minor demons, supernatural bladesmiths, serpentine potion makers and mysterious half-breed cops and forensic experts. Melding humour with horror, fantasy with chick-lit, the occult with technology and ancient myths and legends with a modern and urban vibe rooted in Delhi's posh farmhouses and crowded back alleys, the author has created a genre bender which is a fast paced and racy page-turner. Taneja's first full-fledged novel was The Ghost Hunters of Kurseong — a comic-ghostly caper for tweens and a training ground of sorts for this book, which is the first of her occult mystery series featuring Anantya Tantrist.

The chapters boomerang between the horrific and violent sacrifices and murders to some outright humorous oddball apparitions of the night, from apparently normal dates in a posh central Delhi restaurants to glamorous Page 3 parties showcasing filmstars and supernatural freaks.There are elements of a baroque excess about some of the set pieces in the book as a supernatural canvas unfolds across a very real Delhi life populated with all manner of supernatural creatures or 'sups', tantrics of various clans, rakshasas, daevas and many other half-breeds and undefined creatures from the various planes that are visible through Anantya's magical 'septifocals' and allow her to view what is unseen by regular human eyes.

There are some truly inspired creatures like the gnarled ancient tantrik Guru B with his great labyrinthine library of marvels and a taste for peacock meat. Then there is Kaani the blademaker who belongs to a tribe that has mastery of death and is a creation of pure genius. There are the absurd denizens of the Bedardi Bar who look like they would be perfectly at home in a Guillermo Del Toro visual spectacle. Shweta Taneja's brand of horror features generous doses of humour, plenty of high-octane action sequences, spell-casting duels (imagine Harry Potter & company going native), gizmos drama, romance and even a teensy bit of fashion thrown in. Above all, Cult of Chaos launches the newest crime fighter on the block who has shades of Nancy Drew, Lizbeth Salander, Miss Marple, Modesty Blaise and Trixie Beldon. At the same time she is her own peculiar person. Anantya is a curious character who piques one's imagination as much as the book itself. Armed with mantras for every occasion, this beedi-smoking, outcast rebel child of a detective has an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth and a knack to summon up the oddest supernatural sidekicks and minor demons to do her bidding. She straddles the worlds of darkness, light and all the supernatural things that lie in between with the preoccupations of a young 20-something free-spirited and independent young woman complete with raging hormones, an eye for vintage clothing and accessories and a taste for the heady soma. She can kick ass like no other and find a way out of the toughest spots with her ability to cast spells to match the occasion, summon spirits from the darkest circles of hell and give two hoots for order, propriety or hierarchies that other members of her order seem bound to.

The mystery itself follows the usual tropes, twists and red herrings and it is not the final resolution that leaves you feeling satisfied, rather it is in the telling of it. That and a spunky and irrepressible heroine and Taneja's mini mythopoeia with its assortment of 'sups', its parallel universes that lie beneath the cracks and around the bends of very real city like Delhi that makes Cult of Chaos a darned good yarn.

(This piece appeared in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 21 April, 2015)

Suniti Namjoshi: the fantastic fabulist

I met Suniti Namjoshi on a stormy evening last month at the Bowring Institute in Bangalore over cups of strong filter coffee. In town for the launch of her first ever picture book, Little i, published by Tulika Books, the London-based author was full of stories, especially about how she started writing for children—quite by accident and in part inspired by her niece Aditi, who is the inspiration behind her Aditi series.

“I was tired of taking her books about pink and blonde kids, so I typed up a story about an Indian girl and set it in surroundings that would be more familiar to her,” says Namjoshi, “This became Aditi and the One-Eyed Monkey, my first ever book for children which was actually published many years later.”

The funny part is that when nine-year-old Aditi read the story, she solemnly declared, But, this is not about my childhood, It’s about yours! “And she was bang on,” Namjoshi agrees. “In the story, I had written in places and characters who were derived from my own growing-up years.”
The second Aditi book also happened by chance after Namjoshi went for an event to the Blue Gate Fields Junior School in London, UK. “It was the strangest thing. There I was in front of a sea of brown faces in a school in London and all the children were thrilled to see me because I looked like them and I had also written a book about a character who was just like them,” she recalls. “They wanted Aditi to come to them and so I wrote Aditi and the Thames Dragon.” It was often such odd twists that caused the series to grow, and the places that Namjoshi visited, along with the things she liked—computers and the cyberspace, for example—wound their way into the books.

Little i is the latest instalment from Namjoshi’s imaginarium—a clever, whimsical and “stroppy little character” who is actually a runaway computer programme from an earlier book, Beautiful And the Cyberspace Runaway. Little i is a symbolic representation of the mathematical imaginary number, a little hat-tip to the self and a small but extremely important alphabet who keeps wanting to assert herself as the writer spins a witty and playful pictorial fable around her. On being asked for the nth time about her affinity with the fable, Namjoshi elaborates once again: “What the writing starts off with is an image, and a set of lines. These images start talking to each other and following their own inherent logic. Then begins the hard part of cleaning it up till it finally begins to sound right and the end result, whether it be a fable, a poem or something else, is something that takes shape through the process of writing. For example, when I think of a character like Little i who is a runaway computer programme, I try and think of what she would want to do now that she is outside the computer and in the real world. I figure that she would probably like to make friends and play. That is exactly what she goes about doing, stealing their vowels, and having some fun.”
She is as nimble with her language in a picture book like Little i as in the beautiful love poem, "All the Words", from the Flesh And Paper collection.
All the words have leaped into the air like the cards/ in Alice, like birds flying, forming, reforming, swerving and rising, and each word/ says it is love.

Images that leave an impact, whether from Shakespeare or a comic book, all contribute to Namjoshi’s fables. “I didn’t choose the form or the animal characters, they just came together from the debris of images, stories and poems floating about in the bottom of my mind and from what forms the rag and bone shop of the heart,” she says.

Her fables, she says, mean something entirely different for different people. And it is children who often have the power to observe things that adults miss (remember the child who points out that the emperor is stark naked in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes?).
"The Monkey And the Crocodile", one of her representative fables in The Feminist Fables, is a story that could be read on many levels by different kinds of readers. In it the monkey which lives on a jambu tree protected by her crocodile friends has a perfectly safe and charmed existence. However, bored by the sameness of her life, she wants to see the world, or at least the source of the river. Although she is warned by her friends about the beasts in the big bad world, she persists and sets off on her travels. When the monkey returns, several years later, she is bruised, battered, missing an eye and rather worse for the wear. On being asked about her condition she mentions the beasts and it is a telling statement which reveals that they looked just like her friends. While at the most basic level, and especially to a young reader, this could be a fable about the dangers that a girl might face in the outside world after leaving her friends behind, there are far deeper layers of gender inequality, abuse and iniquity that would be revealed to a more mature frame of reference.

Namjoshi herself has experienced several contexts in her life. She was born in a small town in Maharashtra, educated in an American school in Mussourie, and worked as a young officer in the Indian Administrative Service. Shocked at the imbalance of power in her country, she realized the necessity of subverting this equation. But, as she put it, she “wasn’t good enough” to bring in that change as a government official. So she turned to writing and her journey thereafter spanned three continents and 46 years away from her original homeland.

Home is now a nebulous concept for the writer, as she grew up in India, was given Canadian citizenship, and meanwhile lives and teaches in Exeter, UK. As she writes in Goja: An Autobiographical Myth: “I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me. I have to make sense of what has been and what there is”.

Namjoshi explains that this feeling of rejection is often due to the inability to fit in. And she describes it through her inimitable and wry humour. “Once, a fellow graduate student asked me whether I had smoked grass and I said that I hadn’t and, in an attempted jibe at coolness, had instead told him how I had tried to smoke rolled-up cabbage leaves in the past,” she says. “Needless to say, our versions of grass were entirely different.” At her poetic best, she describes the difference between the two cultures as the difference in the ephemeral shades of light in the afternoon.

Namjoshi writes herself into many of her stories, such as "The Conversations Of Cow" to "Saint Suniti And the Dragon". “There are different ideas behind each casting of myself,” she says, “If Sant Tukaram and other Bhakti poets can do it so why can’t I? I use this technique to question the existing norms at my own expense without attacking anyone else or gender stereotyping.”

It is this sense of humour that pervades her interactions as well. From joking with the photographer about the fact that there is finally a new picture to replace the existing one on the Internet (which, she says, makes her look like as though she owns precisely one red top) to cracking jokes about her age, Namjoshi is as full of lightness as her stories.

It is perhaps fitting that our meeting draws to a close with a striped tabby elegantly picking its way across a red shingled roof of the Bowring Institute in the fading light. It stops us in mid-sentence. To my mind, this unexpected image could well be the beginning of a new story for this extraordinary fabulist of our times.

This story appeared in the HT Mint Lounge on 27 September, 2014

The Unsettling Beauty of a Dark City

Delhi by night is dangerous, threatening, seething with discontent. There is something almost otherworldly about its tree-shrouded neighbourhoods and deserted multi-lane roads cast in the chiaruscuro shades of the sodium vapour lamps glinting through unruly amaltas trees. This is the real city that provides the context for Avatar Singh's literary city where crime, history, power, violence, beauty and death reign supreme. Published by Fourth Estate, this genre-straddling work is aptly named Necropolis and reveals a side of the city where the dead are never quite gone. The book which is at once an ode to a city as well as a vindication of its shortcomings is a city novel like no other. And who better to write this than Avatar Singh, the Dilliwallah who knows its numerous nooks and crannies and their varied secrets and offerings. As editor of Time Out's very first Delhi edition, he encouraged people to go out and explore the city and find its many stories in its many mohallas.

One of the reasons Avatar Singh succeeds in his crazy literary experiment of a book is the deftness with which he juxtaposes types, characters and styles. He pits poetry against hard-boiled crime fiction, a literary ethos with genre exercises and history with news from the sensationalist urban rags. Necropolis is both an episodic novel as well as a collection of short stories linked through their common protagonists, antagonists and fictional landscape.

It is perhaps fitting that its cover features the forbidding yet enticing image of a dark purple rose — an image that is morbidly fascinating as a symbol of a strange and almost decaying beauty. It is also apt that a murder is announced in the first three lines of the book followed up by a detailed description of the dead body especially its most unusual feature — "Around his throat was a necklace of fingers". This finger collector or Angulimaal is one of the recurring characters in the novel — a mysterious young man whose face is always shrouded by a kaffiyeh — and whose actions remain cryptic as he plays nemesis as well as informer to DCP Dayal with equal ease.

DCP Sajan Dayal is our unmistakable hero, a Dilliwallah to the boot with a hint of an old-world tehzeeb, a love for Ghalib and in his own words "a chowkidar with a taste for history". He is an anomaly of sorts — an original denizen in a city of migrants, a well-bred and upright police officer — both characteristics of a rare and vanishing breed. He is well aided by Kapoor, an older and legendary police officer with a longstanding if violent reputation of dealing with criminals, and Smita Dhingra, a fresh IPS recruit who struggles with her experiences as a woman law enforcer in a city which "isn't famous for treating its daughters well." This trio form the crime fighting protectors of the city, its last defence against an endless anarchy.

Their milieu is made up of other shadowy creatures of the night ­— the lycans, the vampires, the drug dealers, the kidnappers, the rapists and the murderers as well as the other equally dangerous creatures who roam the corridors of power by day and act as puppetmasters controlling the fates of its 25 million odd inhabitants. Into this mix is thrown the novel's most pivotal character, an anthropomorphic representation of Delhi through her various pasts and presents, her muse and her burden — the irresistible Razia. She is all charm and romance and poetry. She personifies night and time and in all her endless ages, she is both a victim of the city as well as its vigilante defender. It is her passionate relationship with DCP Dayal, her omnipresence across the pages and crimes that make her fascinating. In one of her first encounters with the DCP, there is an inspired exchange of words between the duo:

“These girls call me Razia. I don’t know why.”
“It fits. Delhi’s own Sultana. Regal, powerful.”
“Dead, too, these past eight hundred years.”
“A blink of the eye in this city’s history, surely.”

Singh fuses fantasy with gritty realism. His exploration of the city noir is deliberate as he traverses the length and the breadth of this heaving metropolis capturing the stench of the Yamuna, the decrepit evil lurking in the carefully tucked away urban slums, the fragrant beds of hollyhocks and rows of silk cottons in Lutyens Delhi, the mirrored ostentation of South Delhi's nouveau mansions, the anonymity of its migrant workforce, the staggering power of its elite and the shadow of the crime that lurks at every corner of the various Delhis encased in each other like Matryoshka dolls.

He scratches at the raw surface of a shared history to reveal the crimes wrought by time and finds no healing balm even as his crusaders race to stop the marauders who threaten to destroy all. He takes the reader through the different textures of the city through its changing seasons and neighbourhoods. His novel is the chronicle of an unforgettable and unusual love affair with Delhi, a city where the possibility of romance exists near the darkest pools of hell.

A loopy and lesser edited version was published in the New Indian Express Bangalore on 24 March, 2015

The compelling lure of Goa

ln the past few weeks, every time I have spoken to a friend or an acquaintance about to burn out from the corporate grind, looking to celebrate a birthday, or rekindle their romance, or simply get away from it all, the one thought that has floated into my mind has been “Why don’t you go to Goa?” And in an odd multiple mirroring of this thought, they have piped up on cue — “So we are going to Goa...” From the gaggle of girls off for their bestie’s bachelorette to the impulsive weekend partygoers who continue the weekend binge by tottering to the Majestic bus depot in the wee hours and taking the first bus out to Panaji without a care for Monday morning, it isn’t hard to identify a Goa junkie. And, I would like to think that I am as much of a Goa enthusiast who would like to return to the state over and over for some of that much needed susegad.

What is it exactly about this sunshine state that draws you in? The obvious charms of the sun and the sea don’t quite seem to define it as that is a feature of the entire Konkan coastline and a drive along it would perhaps yield virgin beaches, whiter sands and clearer azure waters than anything you’d see in the often crowded Goa itself. To ascribe the newly slashed airfares with the arrival of low cost carriers also doesn’t quite explain an influx that dates all the way back to the first wave of the flower people in the 1960s. This is a call that is far more primal than the call of the beaches, the parties, the free-flowing spirits, the hippie vibe, the fresh seafood, the spicy Goan delicacies, the yoga and the greenery.

It is all of these things, but most of all it seems to be about a mythic and historical bond between the people and the idea of susegad—a sense of contentment and peace with one’s surroundings, a tolerant approach towards all things and a unique enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life. It is perhaps fitting that each year, the Goan Carnival procession begins with the blessings of the symbolic leader of the proceedings, King Momo. He is the eternal figurehead and an annually appointed actor who dons the crimson robes, accepts the crown and sceptre and then deems all of Goa fit to eat, drink and make merry. His carnival motto is an extension of the idea of susegad.   

It is this irreplaceable living kernel that is encased in the many carapaces that form that ancient marine creature that is Goa. There is a Goa for everyone — from the fiercely protected and private Goa of the locals — the proud descendants of the Portuguese settlers — to the Goa that is the adopted home of all those free spirits who adopted this tropical land as their home and continue to imbue it with their bohemian laissez faire — to the bit of Goa that belongs to everybody from the tourist to the coconut seller, from the hotelier to the student, from the immigrant waitstaff at your holiday resort to the visiting writer on a residency program.

It is a state which boasts a tolerance and acceptance of all — the state in fact has colonies specific to nationalities from around the world. Despite the potential to turn into a global village, Goa remains fiercely individualistic, straddling its history and modernity with ease -- revering its 16th century Catholic saints as much as it celebrates the arrival of mobile phone penetration and Internet and Wi-fi in the remotest of villages and riverine islands. Its people are as comfortable doing a folk dance to Konkani fisherfolk’s tunes as they are grooving to the latest electronic mixes from the top DJs in the world. Goa is a  state where you can find a fine French stew just as you can find a neighbourhood shack where you can be assured of a hearty rice plate and fish curry even when your bank balance dips to the double digits. You can discover that one jolly aunty who can rustle up a mean sorpotel with homemade pav and a family-run bar where you can always find a friendly ear, some delicious food and free-flowing tipple.

Viewed without a rose-tinted lens, Goa has her share of political, social and environmental problems — and yet she is resilient and ever-welcoming, with a will to turn it all around some day. No matter what the issue of the day is, Goa remains the homing beacon guiding you back to her sunshine-filled heart time and time again.

This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 19 March 2015

A Young Woman in Search of a Husband

A self-confessed funny girl, Itisha Peerbhoy’s debut novel, Half Love Half Arranged is definitely funny, laced with familiar characters and an easy urban vibe that is immediately recognisable. It is the tale of 30-year-old Rhea Kanwar — a single Punjabi IT professional who lives with her parents — and is as plagued by her unchanging single status as she is by the impending threat of her ‘boobs racing towards her toes’. About ten kilos over the ideal weight for the prospective bride, Rhea is on a husband hunting mission spurred on by her mother who is our very own homegrown Mrs Bennet, obsessing about the perfect match while running her household and the lives of her three daughters with an iron fist.

If one uprooted Bridget Jones from a very cerebral London sort of a life to a Punjabi household and replaced the dishy suitors with prospective husbands 1 to 3, one would arrive at an approximation of Rhea Kanwar. Except here, the obsession seems to be with finding a husband rather than Mr Right and so much so that towards the end, the book spirals into a crazy race towards the mandap with pretty much anyone who will agree to be there. While this is the disappointing and regressive plot point in an otherwise light and sparkling work of "chicklit", Itisha’s story still retains its fizz and underlying humour. A quick, frothy and light read, Half Love Half Arranged could have done with some brevity as the twists tend to wear thin by the last 50 odd pages of the book and a part of you wants to shake Rhea’s ample frame and ask her to wake up to the 21st century with its suffragettes and the bra burners rather than regress into an imitation of a 19th century Victorian heroine, despondent without a man in her life.

For someone who is independent, strong-willed and otherwise pretty smart and spunky, Rhea ends up in a pile of Pimms-fuelled simpering silliness ever too often. Rhea’s adventures with Pammi Auntiji’s esoteric marriage bureau, her all-girl Vodka fuelled bitching sessions, her camaraderie with her sisters and some spicy dollops of love, sex and dhoka, make this an engaging and light-hearted read without devolving into the stuff of diabetes inducing pulp that seems to have become the mainstay of commercial romantic fiction in India.

The first generation torchbearers of chicklit included the path-blazing wit of Anuja Chauhan, the quirkiness of Advaita Kala and the effervescence of Swati Kaushal. Thereafter, there seems to have been an imaginative void and Itisha Peerbhoy brings some hope to this tired genre, infusing it with a new spark and creating winsome characters for today. While these are women who are unabashed about the choices the make and make no bones about the merit of a good roll in the hay and boast a wicked sense of humour to boot. Peerbhoy’s singular flaw is perhaps her hurry to acquiesce to the fact that a single woman in possession of a brain and a will must be in want of a husband.


This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 3rd March 2015

In memory of the man who spread edible happiness

For the uninitiated, Michele Ferrero was a real-life Willy Wonka and innovator of marvellous confections and owner of the chocolate manufacturer Ferrero SpA. He was the man behind the magical Nutella Hazelnut spread, the mouth-freshening Tic-Tacs, the dense and rich Ferrero Rocher chocolates and every child’s all-time favourite, the Kinder Joy eggs. He died this week and his passing feels like an immensely personal loss, for he touched my life and my culinary universe in more ways than one.

At almost all given points in time, I am likely to have the trademark little plastic tin of Tic-Tacs in my bag. I like to call these mouth freshening pills, ‘mintlets’ with just the right amount of sweetness and zing. Among the staples in my larder, there is always that much-loved glass bottle of Nutella that has offered succour when days were cold and dank, an element of joy when meals were bland and cheat moments during diet breakfasts comprising bottomless bowls of Dickensian gruel. Whenever I have been at a loss for presents, the Ferrero Rocher pralines have been my go-to last-minute saviours, immediately adding a suitable sense of gravity to any occasion.

Mr Ferrero pretty much thought of it all, offering smart plastic cases that were pretty enough in their own right and available in different sizes for the varying relationships between the gifter and the giftee.

If there is one thing that Mr Ferrero made that I missed trying, that would be the Kinderjoy egg. Always a stickler for collecting Easter eggs, this little egg-shaped chocolate surprise entered the supermarket and my life in a post-lib India long after I had left my childhood long behind. Although the idea of having my own Kinder egg appealed to me, the idea of being in queue with wee babies, cajoling their parents to buy them yet another one, was a tad embarrassing. However, this week in tribute to this man, I shall sacrifice my adult composure and return to the innocent joy of discovering a toy inside a chocolate egg. 

And Nutella... Well... I could sing paeons to this creamy chocolate-hazelnut spread that has spawned hundreds of pretenders but never a worthy equal.

The journey from a Napoleonic war-time substitute created from the hazelnuts of Piedmont to a gianduja (an Italian chocolate and hazelnut sweet) inspired by World War II cocoa shortages to the modern-day phenomenon which was launched in its current Nutella avatar as late as 1964 and has since spread across the world, is remarkable.

The product has spawned reams of numbers and statistics including the near unbelievable one which states that a bottle of Nutella is sold somewhere in the world every 2.5 seconds! A World Nutella Day is celebrated every February 5. Nutella recipe festivals, competitions and even a postage stamp commemorating this jar of joy.

It is Mr Ferrero’s masterful blend of chocolate, hazelnut and palm oil that has emerged as a winner, turning his father’s small pastry shop into a veritable chocolate empire and one of the most successful businesses in the world,

It also skyrocketed its owner into the list of the world’s richest men. Despite the success, the company has remained family-owned, Mr Ferrero remained reclusive and closely guarded his secret recipe through his life.

One could almost expect an army of Oompa Loompas to be manning the sprawling factories in Alba.

While Michele Ferrero might be no more, he leaves behind a marvellous legacy and continues to spread the happiness across the world.

This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 21 February, 2015

Trucking into food heaven

I imagined my first food truck experience to be straight out of the freewheeling Jon Favreau’s 2014 film Chef, taking me to melty cheesy barbecued heaven and even though it wasn’t by a beachside promenade in San Francisco and on a leafy bylane of Indiranagar, Bengaluru instead, I was not complaining.

Salivating at the thought of a freshly grilled and juicy chicken steak burger and onion rings from the Spitfire BBQ truck, I made my way to 6th Main, Indiranagar.

The last thing I expected in this gastronomic idyll was an ugly run-in with the local authorities and the very serious problem that this burgeoning business of food trucks in the city is facing, something that could shut down this novel enterprise altogether.

I entered a scene of chaos. There were hungry diners in queue, waiting for their food, three cops in their police van, making rude gestures to shut down operations and the last wonderful smells of freshly grilled meat dying out as the grill was extinguished and the back doors of the truck closed, signalling the end of the evening.

As I followed the truck away from the main road into a quiet alley by a park, I met the two harried partners of Spitfire BBQ, Siddhant Sawkar and Pratika Binani and tried to understand what the problem was. The lack of any existing laws or licences around food trucks in India makes them operate in a grey area where they are neither breaking any laws nor conforming to them. More than anything else, it makes these upcoming young startups ripe for exploitation by every neighbourhood police authority, residents’ association or even other fixed commercial establishments. “Anyone can slam a case for anything ranging from ‘public nuisance’ to disruption of peace. In fact someone even complained to the cops saying that we were blocking his view...and the view from his house was of a bar across the street!” says Siddhant.

While Spitfire BBQ’s three-day stint at Indiranagar was part of their Save the Food Trucks drive, there is clearly a problem here and laws need to be put in place to protect as well as nurture these small startups which could portend exciting things for street food.

Spitfire BBQ comprises a young and enterprising duo who started their business from scratch, outfitting the truck themselves and launching their food dream of classic American-style fast food on wheels. Siddhant is the chef among the two who believes that quality produce goes a long way and in keeping with this idea, every aspect of their menu is handcrafted from scratch. Not only does he make the bread for the burgers himself, each burger is stuffed with a freshly cooked chicken steak hot off the grill. Everything is carefully sourced from local farms and Siddhant maintains high quality controls and consistency across his menu which keeps changing depending on the availability of ingredients. At one point, he was curing his own meats and even making his own cheese. However that was very hard to sustain as a business model especially since they plan to scale up and are looking at franchisee options.

Comparisons with Jon Favreau’s food truck in the film are inevitable and it is interesting that a whole two weeks after watching the film, Spitfire BBQ actually did their versions of the famous Cubanos or Cuban sandwiches, thus “giving the film free publicity,” says Siddhant.

Their menu ranges from sliders to burgers, onion rings to hot dogs with new stuff constantly being added to the list. Evrything carries Siddhant’s trademark ‘dude food’ style as well as a bit of Southern Italian flavours. So between driving around the city, dealing with the cops and irate neighbours, engaging with their customers (four groups came up to them while I was chatting with them) and cooking, the Spitfire BBQ guys have much on their plate and plans to increase their tribe as well. With competitive pricing (Rs 90 - Rs 300), this food truck encourages you to come out in support, eat their food and get some sauce on your chin!

This piece appeared in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 14 February, 2015

Around India in 29 Plates Part IV

Culinary Treasures of the Northeast

While travel and food are intrinsically linked, sometimes the latter becomes a singular aspect of a culture and a reflection of its way of life.Visiting local joints, sharing home-cooked meals with strangers and eating your way around a place is almost the cryptic route to the heart of a land and its people. This week, we visit the beautiful Northeast through its food. The land of the seven sisters has perhaps the most eclectic and diverse cuisine, combining local produce and flavours with an entirely home-grown eating culture that is as exciting as it is unexplored. And no, momos are not a part of their daily diet! If there was a food spectrum with much flogged tandoori chicken at one end, the Meghalayan Jadoh would be on the other with a far richer flavour palette. This cuisine (which varies across each states with some commonalities arising due to a similar climactic pattern and local produce) is only now beginning to pop up in the urban Indian centres reappropriated as nouvelle cuisine for those who like to experiment. However, the best meals would be eaten at eateries by the side of hill roads or bustling markets in the Northeast, or if you can manage it, someone’s house with some a rather potent local alcoholic brew to wash it all down. It is also extremely hard to choose one dish from each state as different tribes and communities within the same state have dramatically different eating habits. The cuisine is wonderful for many reasons with spices, herbs and methods of cooking that predate modern appliances and are healthy, less oily and masala based and protein heavy.

Masor Tenga (Assam)

With an abundance of rivers, lakes and ponds, this gateway state of the northeast is rich in freshwater fish and this along with rice, forms the chief source of sustenance. The Masor Tenga with fleshy and tender pieces of rohu fish cooked in a light and sour gravy is a delight. Unlike the neighbouring rich Bengali fish curries, the tenga is a light and fragrant staple eaten in nearly every household.
 
Jadoh (Meghalaya)

Jadoh stalls are an extension of the community eating in Meghalaya. Jadoh is essentially a rice and meat stall. However, before you start thinking that this just your ordinary pulav, the unique Jadoh combines the joha rice of the region, fatty pork pieces (other meats can also be also used) and the condiments of fermented soya paste as well as companion dish of Doh Neiong (Pork cooked in a sesame paste).

Smoked pork with Akhuni (Nagaland)

While pork is indeed quite a staple around these parts, the Naga preparations of this meat burst with intense flavours derived from local herbs, dried and fermented leaves, shoots and beans and the famous Naga Morich, a close cousin to the bhut jalokia. This particular dish combines pieces of fire-smoked pork with Akhuni or fermented soy beans, lending it a lovely dark smoky flavour.

Gudok (Tripura)

Tripura’s tribal communities greatly influence the food in these parts. The dish was originally cooked inside bamboo stems, lending it a wonderful flavour. Essentially a black-eyed bean and fish preparation, this dish gets its unique tart fishy aroma from Berma, a fermented fish, which works a bit like the Thai fish sauce.

Pasa (Arunachal Pradesh)

While this dish is somewhat of an acquired flavour as it is a raw fresh fish soup, it is a tribal delicacy. In my mind it is a combination of the flavours of sushi and the French tartare. With a host of aromatics and raw fish paste, this dish was believed to have been a wartime inception when cooked food would have been a giveaway for the tribal soldiers.

Iromba (Manipur)

Combining Ngari or fermented fish with mashed boiled vegetables and a pungent chilli paste, this dish has numerous variations depending on the herbs, leaves and veggies used. The Manipuris eat this as a side dish, an entree with boiled rice and even as chutney!

Sawchair (Mizoram)

This traditional dish from the state of the rolling hills is a rice dish cooked with chicken, duck or pork and veggies. This wholesome all-in-one meal in a bowl is a hearty meal perfect after a hard day’s work


This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 26 February, 2015

Around India in 29 Plates Part III

Food as a Map Through Which we Learn 

 This week, we continue our culinary journey across the country continuing from where we left off, somewhere in between the syncretic fulcrum of food and identity in Kashmir and the simple, wholesome and rustic fare of Haryana and Himachal. This week, as we move from the mountains to the northern Gangetic plains which is the ancient seat of power, the heartland of India and the proverbial rice bowl of the country, the task at hand for this humble chronicler becomes harder as this belt is a vast swathe of influences — from the ancient to the medieval to the modern era in terms of religions, culture and, by extension, the cuisine. Food is the cumulative result of a civilisation’s transitions through history and this week’s picks aim to be a reflection of the same.

Mutton Kebabs (Uttar Pradesh)
It is hard to pick one dish in a state that is synonymous with food. From a royal repast to street food delicacies, from the best of Awadhi cuisine to the princely Nawabi variations of the same, from chaats to an array of desserts, Uttar Pradesh is a gourmand’s dream with every part of the state offering a peek into a way of life and eating and Lucknow is the crown jewel.
While I have chosen mutton kebabs as a representative dish, this is more a sub-genre which covers everything from the esoteric and fragrant kakori kebab, the tender and spiced boti kebabs, the melt-in-the-mouth galawat or galauti kebabs to the robust shami and pasanda discs and the delicately spiced seekh cylinders. There is very little chicken in the kebab lexicon of this region. These kebabs are part of the elaborate set of starters in a traditional Dastarkhwan (a ceremonial meal) conceptualised by gifted khansamas (chefs) as well as the common man’s victuals from the smoky street tandoors paired with a variety of unleavened breads. Uttar Pradesh’s kebabs are ubiquitous as well legendary. Thus there is the myth of the toothless kebab-loving nawab in whose kitchen the famed kakori, or the softest kebab in the world, was born. Then there was the tale of the one-armed genius kababchi called Tundey Miyan who tenderised his meat with the stump of his amputated arm to create perfectly consistent kebabs, earning him legions of fans and a reputation that lasted generations. These stories are part of the food lore of a state whose cuisine has to be experienced to be believed.

Bal Mithai (Uttarakhand) 
The beautiful mountain kingdom of Uttarakhand is washed by the River Ganga, resplendent in natural beauty with its misty mountains, folk traditions, ancient temples and sprawling national parks. The fairy tale setting of the region is in sync with this iconic sweet of the region which is rich, sweet and milky and covered in sugary balls that pop in your mouth. One can imagine this to be the treasured candy out of an enchanted edible house that tempts all with its appearance and aromas. Especially popular in Almora, some version of the Bal Mithai is found in most towns of the state. Cooked with khoya, cane sugar and covered with sugar coated poppy seeds (posto), this home-grown fudge which was invented by an enterprising Almora halwai, is a hit among kids and adults alike. With no cocoa content, it is interesting that this sweet is locally known as ‘chocolate’ and is a delicious treat on winter days that will warm you right till the cockles.    

Laal Maas (Rajasthan)
This list does not escape the bias of the listmaker and in this case, my own love for meat. Despite being an avowed carnivore, this state’s vegetarian food is a treasure trove with offerings that smack of invention and are derived from the local produce. With culinary influences ranging from the all-vegetarian Marwari community to the robust meat-centric Rajput cuisine, Rajasthani food is an amalgam of its land, its weather conditions and its people. Thus one can pick from an assortment of savouries like mirch ka pakora (batter-fried chilli peppers) and pyaaz kachori (onion fritters) and preparations like the ker sangri sabzi (a piquant desert preparation of dried beans and tart berries). But for me, Rajasthani food shall always be the eye-popping and aromatic Laal Maas, a fiery red mutton curry cooked in a dried red chilli paste. Redolent of garlic, chillis, yogurt and more chillis, the base meat can be goat, deer or any other game meat and while sure to raise your temperature by a couple of notches, this food of the Rajput warriors will transform food into a sensory experience intended to fire your blood with new life and vigour.

Litti Choka (Bihar)
This traditional celebratory food, this spiced wheat and powdered lentil ball is infused with fragrant ghee and roasted over coals or a chulha (traditional oven fired by cow dung cakes), or even deep fried. This cross between bread and savoury fritter is accompanied with chokha, a delicious flame-roasted eggplant and tomato preparation. Litti-chokha is a wholesome meal in itself to be had on winter evenings by a raging fire and while time-consuming to make, is equally comfortable in both urban and rural settings.   

This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 19 February, 2015

Bound In Laughter, Love and Arrack

The Amazing Racist opens on a hot tropical day in Colombo, Sri Lanka. There is a tropical storm brewing in the distant horizon as well as one far more deadly, simmering in the office of Thilak Rupasinghe, top litigation lawyer and former president’s counsel, a protective and dominating father and a man with a diminutive stature but a persona so towering that he could literally frighten away cancer. In the momentary calm before the storm, Eddie Trusted, a rather bewildered English schoolteacher, waits in the verandah burping curry and watching the minutes vanish in the buildup to one of the most significant moments in his life — as he is about to ask this much feared patriarch for the hand of Menaka Rupasinghe, his daughter — a mere seven weeks after he has landed in the country.
Plagued by the effects of spice on his digestive tract, the weather on his constitution and the chaotic traffic on his stress-prone disposition, Eddie is an outsider in more ways than one. And yet, unable to resist the charms of the veritable Sri Lankan goddess Menaka, he finds himself falling so deeply for her that he is ready to marry her and make this little politically fraught island country his own. But first of all, he has to pass the many tests laid out for him by his future father-in-law with a fairly anti-colonialist bent of mind and a distaste for the white man and his imaginary 21st-century burdens.
Chhimi Tenduf-La’s The Amazing Racist (Hachette India) is a rollercoaster ride through the life and times of two men, divided by the colour of their skin, age, cultural traditions and opinions, and brought together by their unusual circumstances, a whole lot of whiskey and the girls in their lives. Their interactions are less meetings and more like mini battles fraught with manic car rides, liver-melting arracks, sparks and tension, racist jokes and the ghost of deportation lurking around the corner. Eddie Trusted and Thilak Rupasinghe are polarised ends of a cultural spectrum forced together by the headstrong and free-spirited Menaka.
The author’s skill lies in his telling of this simple and straightforward tale with generous shots of humour, wit and sensitivity. From laugh-out-loud moments to politically incorrect jokes, from the black humour of human foibles to a witty look at the innards of the modern family mechanism, from the curious frailty of traditional bonds to the poignancy of unlikely and resilient bonds, the book chews its way through human relationships in all its myriad hues.
Chhimi Tenduf-La, who has mined some of his personal experiences in order to bring this world to life, is a fresh and promising new voice on the literary landscape. With a British mother, a Tibetan father and a  Sri Lankan wife, the author certainly knows a thing or two about cultural cross-connections. Also, having spent enough time in Colombo, he had the unique vantage point to write this story with its motley cast of characters dealing with this strangely functional and dysfunctional city.
Set against the backdrop of an ancient-modern country ravaged by war and yet somehow getting on with all the motions of ordinary life, The Amazing Racist teeters away from deeper political issues presenting a light-hearted fictional universe with just the occasional real-life reference slipping through. Unlike hardened semi-fictional narratives of war and terror, this book soars free of the political baggage of its nation and tells a funny, accessible and charming story about a family and its oddball denizens. And the best part is that it doesn’t take itself terribly seriously as it sets out to expound exactly why every character finds himself or herself a place they can call home in Sri Lanka or the “best country in the world”. 

This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 10 February, 2015

Around India in 29 plates (Part I)

India has long been regarded as the land of diversity, and in no segment is that more apparent than in its food which is as varied as its topography and  the culture of its people. Drawing inspiration from the local produce, climactic patterns, aesthetic influences and historical background of a place and its people, food is a true reflection of the nation’s polymorphous identity and in this series, we take you around the country in 29 delicious plates. This week, we introduce some of the standout and perhaps uncommon dishes that reflect the diverse metropolises that are Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai.

 Sitaphal Cream (Mumbai)
This simple and uncompromising dessert is a perfect representation of a city which is always on the go, always open for business and rarely sleeps. A city teeming with people, Mumbai belongs as much to the shanty-town dweller as it does to the Bollywood stars who live in their skyscrapers away from the ground-level grime and dust. Mumbai is a city of possibilities and disillusionment. Hundreds of dreams die every night and new ones are born in its place. In such a city of global cuisine and vada pav, the Sitaphal Cream silently holds its own. Invented at the iconic Haji Ali Juice Centre, this seasonal dish is incredibly popular and standing and relishing a bowl of this dish with the waves crashing behind you and the city going about its frantic life is an experience akin to none. And it’s really quite simple ­— custard apple or sitaphal and cream are served together with some sugar and a dash of vanilla. A juicewallah came up with this divine concoction and it has flown off his counter since then and has not been replicated in the best restaurants in star hotels. While the custard apple ice cream is common enough, the fruit cream is a rare dish and the best part is that it comes at a price point that makes its accessible to all — from a skyscraper dweller indulging in a late night dessert to a balloonwallah counting out the saved up rupees for this treat, the Sitaphal Cream belongs to all.

Daab Chingri  (Kolkata)
This sophisticated delicacy is an exercise in innovation. This dish is believed to be an adaptation of something called the Malay Curry, a recipe that travelled with migrant workers and the colonisers as trade flourished between this all-important erstwhile capital city of the Raj and the rest of Southeast Asia. The Daab Chingri is all about the tender green coconut which blesses this steaming tropical state with its plenitude. It is about the pungent yellow mustard, a Bengali’s response to the Japanese wasabi. And finally it is about the prawns, the queen of all piscine creatures, the crustacean served at every special occasion and found in abundance in the rivers and lakes of this state. In this dish, fresh tiger prawns (chingri) are marinated in a delicious green chilli and mustard paste and then inserted into fleshy and tender green coconuts (daab) and slow-cooked till the prawns are tender and have absorbed all the flavours of the coconut. This dish when cooked right is sophisticated, simple and just bursting with flavour. One could describe it as creamy golden sunshine with a taste of the sea. This is a regal dish and one that could send its eater into a rapture. It also represents the people who put great value on the finer things in life, like the perfect Daab Chingri accompanied with soft, fragrant Gobindo Bhog rice and a refreshing afternoon siesta vis-a-vis matters of industry or a life spent in fast food meals. This dish is the crowning glory of every Bengali kitchen and a testament to the culture’s obsession with all things food.

Idlis (Chennai)
While some might consider this a plain-talking dish, in my books, an early morning breakfast at the Murugan Idli shop in Besant Nagar, with a view of the expansive beach and the blue curling waves in the distance is unmatched. The texture of those warm fluffy idlis with a delicious array of chutneys as well as the aroma of the sweet-sour-spicy sambhar is something that could make me roll out of bed every day of my life. Capturing a unique ethos of the city that combines daily living with tradition and functionality with flavour. Somewhere in between the city’s sunny days, cultural pursuits and political brouhaha, there is always time for this delicious breakfast served on a banana leaf bookended by frothy cups of strong filter coffee and great conversations.

Whole Mango Kulfi (Delhi)
This winner of a dessert is the stuff of sheer ingenuity and a perfect fit in this city of immigrants and erstwhile refugees who have survived and flourished by dint of their ingenuity alone. Old Delhi is a bastion of business which drew in merchants, traders, khansamas, artisans and labourers, basically anyone who had a skill to hawk and a business idea to sell. This congested walled city then became the place for innovations and food like no other. While the culinary delights of Purani Dilli are neverending, there is something about this particular dish that has just embedded a certain blazing summer day under the arches of an old haveli into the brick and mortar of my mind. I ate this kulfi at Pandit Kuremal’s Kulfi Shop in the gullies of Chandni Chowk. This magical dessert is clearly one of the best things I have eaten in this city. The whole mango is sliced, deseeded, stuffed with kulfi and put back together. When it is served later, the mango is peeled and you get delicious chunks of fruit with your creamy and icy mango flavoured kulfi. This dessert could give many exotic ice creams a run for their money and combines the best things about summer – Alphonso mangoes and ice creams in one fell sweep. For me, this is the best indigenous homegrown ice cream there could ever be and a lasting taste memory of the capital city.

This was published in The New Indian Express on 29 January, 2015

For the love of Biryani

For anyone who has grown up in Kolkata, biryani is the holy grail of food in the city and one that is available in plenitude, around street corners, in nondescript eateries, five-star establishments and historical hole-in-the-wall establishments. The distinguishing mark of this biryani is the gleaming white boiled egg and the delicately spiced potato perched on top of the otherwise Lucknowi style of dum pukht biryani. Having been weaned on this particular meat-rice-egg-potato combination my entire life, in my later migrant wanderings, while I discovered much by way of food, the perfect biryani remained elusive even as I trawled the back alleys of Jama Masjid and Nizammuddin in Old Delhi, the heart of Mosque Road in Bengaluru and Mohammed Ali Road in Mumbai. It is true that my quest has been far from perfect and I have missed the the two essential stops on the biryani map. Lucknow and Hyderabad, rival bastions of biryani, still remain like hidden pearls.

I have however eaten countless degs of this dish inspired by the styles propagated by the two cities. From Luknowi dum pukht biryanis by specialist cooks to numerous plates of Hyderabadi biryanis from various establishments called Hyderabad Biryani House serving up a spectrum of the dish ranging from virulent to dull-orange.

The entire point of this prelude is that I stuffed by belly with many artery-clogging plates of biryanis, always to return home disappointed. In all those years that I lived away from home, the only plate of biryani that has sparked my taste memory has been a plate of reheated biryani brought by a friend from the legendary Paradise Hotel in Secunderabad.

Even though this box had spent a few hours on a flight before landing up on my plate, the taste was unmistakable and from the saffron-laced long grains of rice to the spiced gravy from the melt-in-the-mouth pink mutton pieces to the mirch ka salan, this pukki-style biryani was as different from the Kolkata-style one as could be and yet it was a keeper in my taste memory.

Many years later, while doing the usual weekend round of our neighbourhood high street, Indiranagar, I spotted a sign which immediately jogged that half-remembered memory. While I may not be an expert on the original Paradise, my sample portion being too small, I know that it is spoken of with the same reverence that I have for my  much-loved Kolkata-based eateries.

While this gleaming avatar of Paradise on CMH Road may not score high on the character and history attached to these legendary joints, it is a smart fuss-free modern format that works for the diner on the go and also serves up a pretty good biryani. And even though   it missed the egg-potato accompaniment, it did check many of the other boxes.

Our group arrived in the middle of a chaotic day as the restaurant had just opened and despite being hungry, we were also feeling rather charitable. And even if it took a few long minutes, the food did arrive without too much of a delay, only our lime sodas were forgotten till the very end, but given the biryani in front of me, I could wait. The mutton biryani was flavourful with the trademark pink-tender mutton pieces, a surprising find in a city where the meat has always been a bit too chewy for my liking. Layered with a rich and flavourful gravy, this typical Hyderabadi pukki biryani came with a cooling raita and a mirch ka salan.

Unlike the over-spiced orange rice in most packaged Hyderabadi-style biryani, this dish with individual grains of white, yellow and saffron-coloured rice, although spicy was also a complex combination of flavours.
Apart from this, their chicken biryani, something I usually avoid like the plague due to the tendency of the over-large pieces to dry out, was rather good.

A plate of chicken tikka did not disappoint though it was a tad on the spicy side. Their mutton tikkas were really well-grilled and tender.  Comparisons always tend to be scathing in their dismissals and a tad unfair and while I am sure there will be those who will argue about the merit of the original joint vis-a-vis these far-flung outposts, Paradise brings to Bengaluru a flavour of an old city and its Nizami kitchens albeit in a 21st century package.  

This was published in The New Indian Express on 24 January, 2015

Travelling Light

One of my favourite science fiction writers, Ray Bradbury wrote in his dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, “See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.” This was imprinted tattoo-like on my mind, teaching me to learn how to travel without an itinerary, experience places through their food, shared conversations over a cup of coffee or a beer, walking the streets endlessly and simply watching a new world unfold.

I wanted space to breathe, not the alarm clock shrilly announcing the beginning of the next day. I longed for a leisurely carafe of wine and cheese by a roadside cafe in Montmartre rather than endless queues to enter the Eiffel Tower. The package tour was my holiday nightmare and all that I wanted never seemed conceivable by a travel consultant sitting across me, completely devoid of imagination when it came to offering anything more than a great bargain price, or a free cruise.

However, things have begun to change as the adventurous who like me love the idea of travel,  have taken this passion a step forward and come up with curated holidays. From the Bengaluru-based WOW or Women on Wanderlust, a travel club that organizes women-only trips across India and the world, to the fast-growing Thrillophilia that offers  high-octane travel experiences across India for all those who want to venture off the beaten path to the newest kid on the block, No Thepla Holidays.

 This startup is the brainchild of three friends, Arjun, Ayesha and Sanaya, who come from backgrounds as diverse as corporate M&As, animal rescue operations and event management, drawn together by their love for travel and especially the kind that does not involve carrying a bagful of deep-fried snacks and pickle in a foreign land.

"We want to cater to the modern Indian flashpacker who is roughly between 25-35 years, is open to meeting a whole bunch of fellow travellers and having a whale of a time in another country discovering its local food, underground clubs and the lesser known experiences," says Arjun Malhotra, one of the partners in No Thepla Holidays.

For the uninitiated, flashpacking is a global trend that seems to be made for the lazy Indian as all the arrangements (stay, internal commute) are made for you which means that you don't have to wander the streets searching for a room for the night, be stranded at a train station because you forgot to book a particular leg of the journey and can also go occasionally posh with a champagne cruise or a truffle lunch!
No Thepla Holidays might have just two trips under its belt so far, but their resounding success portends well for the future and it’s no surprise that they already have three trips planned for the first quarter of the year.
Their first trip was to Europe in June-July 2014. Rather than do the typical six countries in five days itinerary, these guys curated an offbeat music-wine combo that was bound to work. Thus the trip covered five days in Paris during the Fete da la Musique, taking in the different performances across the city, a champagne cruise on the Seine, five days in Barcelona, a 'booze cruise' of the city and exciting pub crawls with your fellow travellers and finally ending up at the village of Haro for the San Vino or a crazy wine fight, just like our Holi, but only with the lovely wine of the region.

In the second trip to North Vietnam, parties and outdoor activities were the focus and thus water sports, local underground clubs and the delicious Vietnamese food formed the highlight here.
So while making friends, sampling street food, partying with the locals and an overall good time with plenty of good cheer, dancing, high-adrenaline sports and a lot of beer form the trademark experiences of No Thepla Holidays, there is also culture (trips to famous archaeological sites and monuments) as well as activities that allow you to mingle with the native communities (like fishing with the locals in the villages around Mai Chau Valley in Vietnam). The winning feature  is their fluid itinerary.

"So while we travel with all our guests offering them our experiential advice as well as inputs for food, tourist-friendly bars, public transport etc as well as plan different activities to keep everyone entertained, we also don't make a rigid itinerary for them. So if somebody wants to go and get a drink at a local cafe with a friend he or she has just made at the hostel instead of a visit to a temple, they are more than welcome to do so," says Arjun.

The company makes internal travel arrangements, provides accommodation at hostels and some homestays, organizes cruises, parties, barbecues and other activities and so far all of the partners actually travel with the group to ensure that a jolly good time is had by all.

Their upcoming trips include a scuba-diving trip to Andamans in March, an adventure-party trip to Cambodia in March-April and another trip to Vietnam later this year. These holidays minus theplas (their website warns that these might go missing if you actually end up carrying any) are the perfect solution for those who have hunted for options that are not determined by rushed itineraries, packing in every monument and museum on the block, or bookended by group meals of chicken butter masala and tandoori gobhi in foreign lands.

These are for the new and improved Indian traveller who is on a quest to explore and understand diverse cultures, sample local flavors, dance to eclectic music and meet kindred souls along the way.
 Visit notheplaholidays.com or email them at info@notheplaholidays.com

This was published in The New Indian Express on 22 January, 2015

Decoding Kerala with a Brief and Whimsical Lexicon

In Fort Kochi, one can never be far away from a good meal, a story and a picturesque photo-op. These are epic tales of a God that resides in these parts and is sometimes benevolent and sometimes not. There are fishermen’s songs whose timbre matches the ebb and flow of the tides; tales of men with red and green faces whose dance chases away the nightmarish hobgoblins; stories of food that makes you weep with its aroma of love, loss and longing. These picture-stories are memory stamps of spectacular sunsets, a hundred shades of green, tinkling laughs and an everlasting romance with the backwaters...

A for Avial
Avial, a simple, steamed vegetable dish transformed  with freshly ground coconut and tempered with just a hint of mustard seeds and curry leaves. It is highly recommended that you eat avial as a soothing first course before the fiery spice-laden fish curries and pepper fries arrive. It is also recommended to eat this wonderfully fresh and flavourful preparation straight off a banana leaf with a mound of steamed rice and preferably a view of the serene backwaters. 

B for Banana
Surrounded by the swaying fronds of young banana tree and lulled into catlike contentment after gorging on flaky and tender banana fritters, it is hard to escape thoughts about the banana plant in Kerala. There is a single-minded obsession with the fruit as the people eat it as chips and chops, jams and jellies, cakes and candies. Grown in every backyard, big or small, eaten in nearly every form sweet or savoury, the banana is an omniscient presence and a familiar green stain along the whole coastline. The banana fruit carries with it memories like those of grandmothers making the delicious puttu for breakfast and the sound of the gentle waves of the narrow backwaters where rural country boats laden high with freshly plucked bananas, make their way to the local markets.

C for Coconut
Coconuts in Kerala are scattered all over the land. Nestled in sheltered boughs and protective fronds, these moon-like spheres come of age under the sun and by the sea. From a tender green fruit to a browned and hardened nut, their sweet water and milk nourishes the men and women of the soil. They form the mysterious quintessence of fish curries, pot roasts, avials, and custards. They reveal a glimpse of a kitchen in thrall of this all-purpose fruit that cooks and priests offer obeisance to.  

C for Chinese Fishing Nets
The Chinese went in two by two...hunting for the fish that had vanished from their own seas. They built giant creaking contraptions like the machines of Mordor. These nets were the scourge of the sea as well as the boon for starving fishermen. Today, they are silent sentinels of bamboo and net that are silhouetted against the docks. Their catch serves this quaint and historical erstwhile fishing village. In Fort Kochi, it is likely that every time you see the sign which says Catch of the Day, its probably found its way to your plate through the Chinese Fishing Net. 

K for Kathakali
The Kathakali dancers twirl in a frenzy of skirts and swords as they tell stories of gods, emperors and folk heroes. They bicker, growl, joust and dance. They are the immortals for the night that they spend on the stage, outside their body, their time and their context. They fence with papier mache sabres. The gods and demons who are stabbed and burnt as the story unfolds in a crescendo of drums and music. They collapse into a heap of red, white and gold. They live and die with their eyebrows puckered in surprise.

S for Spice Market
While the Spice Market had many treasures to reveal, it was home to the wonderful allspice, a miniature globe containing the whole world within its circumference. All the spices in the kitchen dropped their essence into this tiny, innocuous, mud-coloured ball and it bloomed into existence as the Queen of exotic flavours. This apart, the myriad coloured peppers, the rolled and aromatic cinnamon bark, the multitude of dried berries, each with its own medicinal and cooking instructions, a spice market in Matancherry, Kerala is an experience akin to walking into God’s own kitchen.

U for Uruli
Uruli, the light of my kitchen, the fire of my stove, my faithful cauldron of delight. Oo-ru-Lee...the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Oo. Ru. Lee. It is a cooking utensil unlike any other. With its versatile uses, its wide and deep-bottomed character and its ability to heat and cook food to that miraculously perfect temperature, this one merits being lugged across the world. 

V for Vallom
Vallom or the typical Kerala country boat is both livelihood and instrument of leisure. As the laidback life of the backwaters unfolds with each dipping motion of the vallom sluicing through the tranquil waters, one cannot help but settle into a peaceful self-reflection. This one is a ubiquitous part of the landscape from public transport to fishing boats, from a romantic honeymooning couple’s ride of choice to a local lad’s school bus.

This was published in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 15 January, 2015

The Giant New Year Street Party

The last day of any new year is celebrated with gusto across the globe and more often than not, the party is often taken to the streets. From the ancient times, celebrations were marked by large public gatherings. People cheering on in town squares festooned with lights and decorations suited to the occasion, fireworks and general goodwill doing the rounds. However, this year our celebrations are marred by a pall of gloom and an undercurrent of fear because of a world that is dramatically veering towards polarisation, a lack of balance and respect for human life and an increasing propensity towards violence. As the year draws to a close, I revisit the cities that have reaffirmed my belief in the indomitable human spirit which makes sure there are good times even when the going is not so good.

From mile-high curtains of fairy lights to the noise and sparkle of fireworks as the clock chimes twelve, from a multitude of heads bobbing to a countdown in glittery party hats to party whistles, new year’s eve in some of my favourite cities has been all about bonhomie in these large gatherings and a whole street doing a new year countdown. Nothing is quite as festive as  strangers, families and friends coming together in what seems like a giant metaphorical hug to the universe at large. There are a few cities of the world I have travelled to during this time and a certain joie de vivre prevailed that made them memorable in different ways. New Year’s eve gatherings in these cities somehow served as a time capsule for me, capturing the place and its people in one frozen moment in time.

Kolkata, the city that will always be home, is a city of revelry in the last week of every year. It is a city I yearn to return to at this time simply because of the frenetic energy with which it celebrates a festival that has little to do with its socio-religious fabric. Christmas and new year celebrations here have been given state sanctions with Park Street, the epicentre of festivities, dressed up in lights and festive banners sponsored by the government itself. I remember being a part of these celebrations since when I was allowed to venture out on the streets on my own. I remember  teetering on the broken pavements in my first pair of high heels especially purchased for the day. I remember being with friends, lovers and family on various new year’s eve celebrations on this selfsame street. But more than anything, I remember being one of a milieu which drew people from all walks of life. As long as you had a party horn and shiny headgear, you were welcome to join in the fun.

KL, the capital city of a predominantly Muslim country, couldn’t be more liberal and full of energy and camaraderie on new year’s eve. With the restaurant and pub-lined Bukit Bintang drawing in the crowds, I found myself among the expats and locals, the Asian, Hispanic, Black and Caucasian people, the young and the old-- all of us who had come together for that one night in a street party that just went on and on. Federation Square in Melbourne makes for a beautiful New Year’s eve celebration. With a massive fireworks display across the water and thousands of people who gather together to watch, it is quite a remarkable sight. My memory remains that of a newlywed couple kissing against sparkling pinwheels in the sky...an image that has remained etched in my memory, though other details of the holiday have begun to blur.

This year I am in Bengaluru, my first New year’s eve in the city, and as I plan to gather with many others at MG Road to usher in 2015, I too hope that it will be a better year for me, my loved ones and the world at large. As I walk under the glittery canopy of lights on Brigade Road, blowing on my bells and whistles, I pray for Bhavani Devi’s two children and hope they find the strength to deal with the tragic death of their mother due to the horrific explosion on Church Street three days ago.

This year I shall wish for more travel and a more peaceful world that enables it. My top destination for this year will be Kashmir and its stark beauty among all its war debris.

Today as I celebrate new year’s eve under the presence of police drones and patrols, I can’t help thinking how it is more important than ever to get out of our homes, parties and isolated urban islands, to go out and greet strangers, mingle and celebrate in one giant street party wherever you might be.

This appeared in The New Indian Express, Bangalore on 1 January, 2015

To Buy or Not to Buy, That is the Urban Vegetable Question

I live, like many other migrants to Bengaluru, in a well-guarded multi-storied bastion, keeping the rest of the world out. I also live on a bustling main arterial road and the nearest market is a good 20-minute walk, 20 minutes too long after a long working day. My early days in the city thus saw me heavily dependent on a well-known supermarket chain which has its outlet right within the campus of my building. While it is adequate enough for daily groceries, it is a disaster as a greengrocer. With maggoty fruits, holey salad leaves and bruised veggies, this was the nail in the coffin for my supermarket adventures which had started with a rat which jumped out of a shelf full of wilted spinach in a neighbourhood supermarket in Delhi. For me, that moment marked everything that was wrong with our so-called retail food boom.

I had grown up in Kolkata, going to the local market with my grandfather, where everyday's veggies were bought fresh from the vendors whose burlap sacks upended piles of fresh seasonal vegetables straight from the local farmers. There was no excess and there was no wastage from the seller to buyer and from the cooking to the eating. It was a way of shopping and eating that has become alien in our workaday lives. We now live away from our families and their expansive kitchens. We shop on weekends at chain stores, buying stuff for the fortnight and the food we eat comprises limp, half-frozen vegetables that are turned into quick and insipid curries.  

In my mind I was an old-fashioned sort. It is the early morning market visits with my grandfather which taught me that. I liked handpicking my veggies. However, as a recently grown up, working and married woman who had recently left her pampered home and hearth, these shopping rituals were hardly a luxury. From Delhi to Bengaluru, my experiences with local sabziwallahs have been complicated. As they looked at my discomfiture vis-a-vis veggies that I had grown up hating, they would give me withering looks. My naivete made me especially gullible to the vagaries of these men and women who would convince me of the seasonal freshness, the problems with the crops and the unfamiliarity with the local prices.

This is what drove me to a supermarket and its everything-under-one roof convenience. As I would move from aisle to aisle towards the vegetable section with my hope still afloat. Every single supermarket disappointed. Every fruit and vegetable on the shelf looked like it had travelled the breadth of the country fighting disease and deprivation till it reached this particular metal shelf—its chosen spot for its last breath. It was organic carnage. The potatoes had either turned green or into mutant flowerpots with little leafy stems. Tomatoes would burst into a bloody mess the moment I dropped it into my empty cart and once, I even saw a few little worms clinging to the plastic of the cling-wrapped Washington apples.

My local sabziwallah would set up his cart-shop ten minutes away from my apartment every evening from 5-9 pm without fail. I would return to that shop over and over with a woebegone face. I imagined him smirking as he imperiously tossed fresh-from-the-field veggies into my bag while charging me a premium and dismissing my arguments about the supermarket deals with a single "take it or leave it" look.
It is quite the conundrum, one that eludes a perfect solution. Bengaluru is a city of many choices from the exorbitant organic to the weekly farm-fresh produce in mandis at the other end of town. However, in all these situations, the idea of being an incompetent haggler in an unfamiliar language was as unpleasant as it is was a blow to the ego of a bargain hunter such as myself.

In my search for options, I often ended up at a bright, airy and air conditioned gourmet store sprawled across the top floor of a swanky city mall. The visit to this store ended up being weekend entertainment like visiting the zoo rather than a chore. As unfamiliar food and artistic culinary displays have a strange allure for me taking me to unknown lands on the culinary map. This particular store with its piles of delicate berries, smelly cheeses, exotic mushrooms and candied fruits, is my vicarious food trip across the world. Rare mushrooms, Mediterranean peppers and hairy tropical fruits jostled for space in this alien smorgasbord straight out of a Ridley Scott masterpiece. The end result, I purchase no useful staples that we can actually eat, but overpriced and useless exotica which sit uneasy in a good home-cooked meal.
Despite my aversion to aisle store fare, I do recommend its fair pricing. In the many veggie cons that have been pulled on me, most famous was the one where I went to a specialist Bengali market where I met a vegetable seller with the gift of the gab though and I was the recipient of the one standout sale he made that day. I bought a lau (a bottle gourd), which according to him had arrived that very day from Kolkata on the superfast train. And with such a narrative flourish, he sold us a `15 vegetable for more than five times its worth.

As I returned time and again to my neighbourhood sabziwallah, his grouchy face seemed to occasionally carry the hint of a smile. It was a less-than-perfect relationship. Yet, we learn to make do. And he always sold me the plumpest, reddest and freshest tomatoes which made up for my disillusionment with the pre-packaged "lowest price" supermarket rotters.

This appeared in the New Indian Express Bangalore on 29 November, 2014

The Travelling Bioscope Part II

I recently watched The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and soaked in the beauty of Middle Earth aka New Zealand for the last time—from Turoa, Ohakune, North Island or the mythical and imposing Erebor to the idyllic Lake Pukaki which provides the stunning backdrop to the waterside village of Lake Town, the character of the films has been intrinsically tied together with the landscape of New Zealand, bringing this island nation alive in all its virgin splendour. The Hobbit: There and Back Again, the original title of the film marked the perfect journey of discovery and homecoming across this country, capturing its natural epic grandeur and preserving it on film for all time. This is the power of real and mythical journeys on screen. They imbue a land with an imagined history and drama, thus drawing you into viewing even a humble rock from a whole new perspective. A case in point would be travelling through Ramanagara, a small town about 50 km from Bengaluru on the Bengaluru-Mysuru highway, a completely nondescript sort of a place that you only pass through. Its only claim to fame are the ancient granite outcrops on its outskirts, another sight I would have bypassed for greener climes, had it not been for Sholay. The Ramadevarabetta formed the backdrop for iconic scenes from the film including the introduction of Gabbar, Hema Malini's memorable dance on broken beer bottles and key chase and fight sequences. For me these rocks resound with the sounds of Gabbar's classic dialogues and Hema Malini's ghungroos. This is but one of many points on a journey through various points on the celluloid map of the world.  

The Sideways Wine Tour (California)
This quirky and humorous story about two middle-aged men, Miles and Jack (played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church) is all about wine, great food, inebriated conversations, naked cuckolded husbands and fleeting holiday romances. Laden with high spirits and lubricated with good wine, this film brings to life the Santa Ynez Valley in Santa Barbara County with its mountains, lush rolling meadows, its expansive vineyards and quaint tasting rooms. The film piqued the interest of travellers and actually contributed to an increase in the tourism of the area. The famous Hitching Post II restaurant (Miles’ favourite restaurant where he meets Maya) actually exists and is a pitstop for most undertaking this tour. Apart from their excellent collection of wines, they also have quality meat, poultry and seafood grills. This apart, who can forget the celeb ostriches which show up in the film. The quirky Ostrich Land is home to these feathered bipeds and you can feed, meet and hang out with them just like our onscreen duo.

The Highway trip (J&K, Punjab and Rajasthan)
This film offers a fresh view of some of the lesser travelled paths on screen. Imtiaz Ali’s beautifully shot Highway, captures the sometimes pristine, sometimes chaotic and always colourful scenery as Alia Bhatt and her captors travel across North India in a truck. Far from the urban setting, this film dwells on the journey, the silences and often lets the backdrop emerge as the central metaphor in the film. As Alia Bhatt’s character breathes in deeply of the fresh air outside of her constrictive city life, she finds her personal freedom in the midst of her captivity. One of the most powerful scenes in the film include the nighttime shot in the monochromatic Sambhar salt pans in the Rann of Kutch where while attempting to escape, Alia Bhatt is overwhelmed by the futility of the exercise as well as the infinite night sky teeming with its stars overload. Then there are the stark snow-clad peaks of Kaza as well as the fairy tale setting at Aru Valley in Kashmir. The film makes us want to hitch a ride on the first truck leaving the city.

The Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara trip (Spain)
This film brought to life this Mediterranean country with its sun-kissed beaches, its plethora of churches, historical towns, cobblestoned paths, age-old traditions and colourful music and dance while showcasing some equally beautiful people (special note must be made of Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif whose tanned and toned bodies made them perfect poster children for Spanish tourism). This slice of life film ushered in a very modern and urban Bollywood ethos spearheaded by Zoya Akhtar and also introduced a countrywide audience to obscure rituals like the La Tomatina as well as the Bull Run at Pamplona. With a great soundtrack and an easy vibe, the film did for Spain tourism among the urban youth what Yash Chopra had done for Switzerland back in the day. So much so that there was a reported 32 per cent hike in the number of Indian tourists to Spain in the first year following the film. Suddenly everyone was interested in the Flamenco and everyone wanted to visit Spain. Designed for the young and sporty, this trip traverses the coastal towns of Costa Brava and includes all the elements for a real life bachelor party/trip which mimics the one on screen.

This appeared in The New Indian Express Bangalore on 25 December, 2014

The Travelling Bioscope

While Raj Kapoor might have been the first Indian director to take his audience to foreign locales with Sangam in 1964, it was Yash Chopra who reinvented romance creating an everlasting association with chiffons, Swiss dales and meadows in full bloom. Ever since Rekha and Amitabh Bachchan immortalized the famous Kuekenhof tulip gardens in The Netherlands with the riot of colours and the magic of Kishore-Lata in Dekha Ek Khwaab from Silsila, this garden has been a highlight on the itinerary of a large number of Bollywood loving honeymooning couples from India. Apart from these gardens, this legendary onscreen pair also brought Switzerland home to the Indian viewer, beginning a trend which was faithfully followed by blockbusters like Chandni and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge among a host of many other films. And thus began the Yashraj formula for sureshot success which fused the hero of the day singing hit romantic songs, actresses in chiffons cavorting on green meadows and the snowcapped Alps in the backdrop. So much so that that Swiss tourism tied up with Yashraj Films and Kuoni Travel Group in 2010 to create a customized tour called the YRF Enchanted Journey which takes travellers to different locales from the various films produced under the banner. While this one is perfect for couples, we take a look at a few other cinema-based tours that continue to fuel our imagination long after their last scenes have unspooled on screen.

Middle Earth  (New Zealand)
Peter Jackson’s award-winning trilogy brought Middle Earth to life in all its magnificence and glory. Great credit goes to the director for choosing New Zealand as the backdrop for the LOTR films as its natural beauty is quite unsurpassed. The film catapulted the country’s sights and sounds into the public imagination across the world as Lord of the Rings series went on to become one of  the highest grossing films of all time. Almost all parts of the country have different LOTR tours and can be customized to suit your interests. Some of the most breathtaking sights include the Tongariro National Park providing the stark landscape for Mordor with its central peak Mount Ngauruhoe as Mount Doom which is the figurative beginning and end of the ring. For those who want only the Middle Earth experience, there are the Hobbiton movie set tours which recreate the green splendour that is the shire, complete with the little hobbit holes, the Green Dragon Inn and the Party Tree where Bilbo does his disappearing act!

Amelie’s Montmartre (Paris, France)  
Amelie, the wonderfully quirky 2001 film, follows the travails of a dreamy young waitress through the charming cobblestoned paths of Montmartre. This erstwhile artist’s village is one of the most charming parts of the city, associated with the music of the Jazz Age, the impressionism of Monet, the genius of Picasso, the madness of Dali and the never-ending dances of Moulin Rouge. It is also the MontMartre of Amelie Poulain. From the metro station she used to take to the local grocer and butcher shops that she visits, this is one inexpensive tour that you could craft for yourself with help from the numerous online sites. A good place to end your tour is at Café des Deux Moulins on 15 Rue Lepic, the lovely, quaint and now legendary little cafe where Amelie is shown working in the film. Wrangle a terrace (outdoor seat) and treat yourself to a glass of wine and watch the laidback life unfold on the gorgeous Montmartre Hill.

The Feluda tour (Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Varanasi) 
This one is quite the personal favourite. While following Feluda’s complete adventures could very well turn into a Bharat Darshan, a fan of the two Satyajit Ray’s films, Sonar Kella and Joy Baba Felunath, could follow this super smart private detective’s adventurous trail across four cities in North India.
Every Bengali’s much-loved sleuth from 21 Rajani Sen Road, Ballygunge, Kolkata, Feluda is Satyajit Ray’s immortal creation whom he brought to life with finesse in his films Sonar Kella and Joy Baba Felunath. While the films were continued by his son, Sandip Ray, it is Ray senior’s mastery over the craft that brought this Charminar-smoking detective to life with all the sharpness of his intellect. Soumitra as Feluda turned in a stellar performance which was equally matched by his young assistant Topshe, essayed by Siddhartha Chatterjee and the unassailable writer of thrillers Jatayu, played by Santosh Dutta. Together, they travel to various cities, encounter oddball characters from those places, find themselves in humorous situations brought about by the clash of different cultures and languages and solve great mysteries plaguing the people and police force alike. Follow the Sonar Kella route as envisioned in the dreams of the young boy Mukul and journey across the often surreal landscape of Rajasthan. A traveller can visit destinations including the Nahargarh Fort in Jaipur, the lesser-known Circuit House in Jodhpur and finally wind up at the marvellous golden-yellow sandstone fort—the Jaisalmer Fort. Travel by train all through and hope to meet characters as diverse as Lalmohan Ganguly, the writer of popular detective fiction and collector of antiques. For those attempting to get lost in the bylanes of Varanasi as depicted in Joy Baba Felunath, the film is the perfect map for the same and will no doubt take you to interesting sights and bring the city alive in a whole new way.

(This was published in the New Indian Express Bangalore on 27 November 2014)