~ UNDER CONSTRUCTION ~
Charred minars
Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie surveys the world from Guantanamo to Peshawar in an interview ♦ Extending from the callousness of the Nagasaki bombing to the compassion of a spider whose web hid the Prophet Mohammed, Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie’s fifth novel, Burnt Shadows, won praise from critics for its scope and detailing. Shamsie’s characters survive (or …
A Deadly Cocktail in Delhi
Book Review: Killing Time in Delhi ♦By Ravi Shankar Etteth A certain kind of book predictably gets described as a “heady cocktail” of sex, drugs, crime and money. Killing Time In Delhi is such a book. As with other quaffable novels that suggest endless parties and rapid repartee, high-polish beauties and dark underbellies, Killing Time is about society’s upper …
The collector
Meet Tarun Thakral – a different sort of transport mogul ♦ When the COO of Le Meridien hotel first showed a tendency towards hoarding, it seemed an innocent enough personality quirk. Tarun Thakral was studying hospitality in France in the early ’90s when he noticed that the people around him seemed more interested in their …
Gossip Folks
From feuding queens to rebel sultans, the dead are alive in Manu Pillai’s books. ♦ Originally published on VICE India. When Manu S. Pillai (“the S is important”) and I sat down to talk, gossip was at the top of the table. We were at a mutual friend’s apartment, our chat getting progressively boozy as …
Drive-By Hooting: On Board Delhi Tourism’s Party Bus
2010 was a red letter year for Delhi transport. The airport’s T3 was inaugurated in time to welcome athletes arriving for the Commonwealth Games; the Delhi Metro opened two more lines. Cycle lanes sprang up along recently constructed BRT routes. A fleet of big, blue high-capacity buses also joined their shiny new red and green …
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Breaking Barriers, Challenging Stereotypes
Eight women, eight professions for International Women’s Day ♦ As India’s economy grows, reports have indicated alarming drops in the percentage of women in its workforce. From a high of 31 percent more than a decade ago, the number has dropped to about 23 percent in recent years. The reasons for this are myriad and …
bpb Review: Bo-Tai, Mehrauli
Bandage dresses, duck sausage, and Naga fireballs. Oh Mehrauli. ♦ To be seated at the bar at Bo-Tai, restaurateur Zorawar Kalra’s newest establishment, is to survey a food empire from one of its loftiest watchtowers. Above us, the liquor shelves bristle with bottles of Cîroc vodka and Monkey 47 gin; around us waiters and hosts …
bpb Review: Kofuku, Ansal Plaza
Delhi’s Japanese dining scene may have a slight edge on Mumbai’s in terms of numbers, but with the novelty of Tsukiji-sourced seafood wearing thin in recent years, the arrival of Bandra’s Kofuku restaurant in the refurbished Ansal Plaza ought to rejuvenate this genre, with its casual approach to offerings that go beyond sushi and teppanyaki. …
Murder most fowl
Tarquin Hall discusses his latest Delhi mystery ♦ For the third of the Vish Puri mystery series, journalist and author Tarquin Hall dispatched the Punjabi private eye far from his Khan Market office. Hall met Sonal Shah at Khan’s L’Opéra patisserie to chat about The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken. Did you set out …
Eco-friendly Getaway: The Great Ocean Ecolodge, Australia
Cosy up with endangered tiger quolls along the Great Ocean Road. ♦ I woke up to sunlight streaming into my room through large French windows. Within minutes, a strong wind buffeted the leaves of a gum tree outside, bringing with it clouds rolling in from the coast of Cape Otway in southern Victoria, towards the …
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Hats and Doctors
Daisy Rockwell’s translation of the late Upendranath Ashk ♦ Daisy Rockwell’s translation of Hindi-Urdu writer Upendranath Ashk’s short stories is more of a teaser than a complete introduction to the Jalandhar-born author. Rockwell, who also edited the collection, had the fortune to meet Ashk a year before he died in Allahabad in 1996. She admiringly characterises …
Epic tale
Raavan Chhaya is iPad myth lit ♦ Indian epics cast a long shadow into popular culture, but it’s safe to say they could never have been described as “trending” before now. Every other day, a new fantasy series, comic or film inspired by the Rama-yana or the Mahabharata finds space on a the shelf or screen …
Another Country
Anjali Joseph processes bewilderment ♦ If Anjali Joseph’s second novel is best devoured in one sitting, it’s not because it wouldn’t hold up to slow, literary scrutiny. Rather, it’s because Another Country is the refreshing opposite of that “urgent book” that demands moral engagement. It builds character-driven emotional momentum through protagonist Leela’s peregrinations through Paris, …
bpb Review: Fig & Maple, Greater Kailash-II
Salads and more, with a side of sunshine. ♦ January has melted into February, disappearing with a last huff of fog, and with it is going the feasibility of al fresco dining in Delhi. Our hunt for brunch spots that rival the conviviality of Lota — where everyone now recognises everyone else — and the …
Hippies vs hipsters
The case for Paharganj ♦ For years, there’s been no stemming the southbound, outward drift of Delhi nightlife. The mega-clubs of Noida and Gurgaon first lured revelers away from the city with the promise of police raid-free parties. Then South Delhi got its own malls, complete with rooftop clubs: extravagant light-and-sound beacons of the lush …
The spectacle of books
Notes from the Jaipur Literature Festival ♦ “This is literature as spectacle” — the phrase was a common refrain at the recently concluded DSC Jaipur Literature Festival. I heard it uttered, worriedly, by publishers, sceptical that all the song and dance would translate into sales. I heard it from journalists, expounding between complaints of the …
Sex and Sidi
Meet Sidi Ibrahima, a pulp fiction author in Harlem ♦ Harlem’s 125th Street is a bazaar of cottage industry products: incense and earrings, knit hats and demo CDs. But the goods on one table near Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard are more colorful than the rest. Bright books with racy covers are spread over the stand. …
Chukandar chop
Beetroot patties ♦ Here’s a beetroot, juiced for breakfast and its fibrous bits turned into patties for lunch. With lettuce and tomatoes from the veranda gamlas.Beetroot patties: Fibre of one beetroot (also happened to be two carrots, a cucumber, and mint in there, but only because this was all juice byproduct); 1 egg; bunch of …
Saanuk Oriental Bistro & Lounge
Luxe Buddhas and a killer deal ♦ In the early days of Time Out food reviewing, there were no quaint little tea rooms or reservoir-facing bistros popping up every other week. You were lucky if you got to go to a hotel once in a while; otherwise, a high percentage of the free dining experience …
bpb Review: Chateau, Adhchini
“Castle,” but in the cricketing sense. ♦ At first sight, Chateau seems to descend from that lineage of brunch specialists best exemplified by Olive Bar & Kitchen just further down on MG Road. Its inviting Greek taverna aesthetic (white stucco walls, blue and turquoise accents, mosaic floor), and decorative objects (wrought-iron cages, upside-down planters, a wall of perched …
bpb Review: Bengal Delight, Kalkaji
An Odiya cook brings authentic Bengali food to Delhi, via Mumbai. ♦ We’ve had our share of fish fry, mochar chop, and radha-ballabhi at CR Park’s abundant eateries, but the most exacting Bengali epicureans we know usually turn their noses up at the area’s “Punjabified” restaurants, claiming the food is “too spicy,” “too oily,” and …
Two to dastango
Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain ♦ Part of a longer cover story on Delhi’s theatre scene. If Delhi’s theatre universe can lay claim to any dramatic form, it’s dastangoi, the almost-forgotten art of narrating epics (dastans). Dastangoi has roots going back several centuries to recitals of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, but the form got a second …
It’s Not Easy Being Green…
… for a Budding Cannabis Entrepreneur in India. ♦ A couple of years ago, Omair Alam was at a party full of people “in the bhabis and bhaiyas category”, when people started asking around for a joint. “That’s the time I realised it’s not just me—everybody’s OK with it,” Alam told me when we met …
The fandom
The universe of Indian comics collectors and geeks is expanding ♦ This article is part of a cover package on new directions in Indian comics “I had about 5,000 comics when I stopped counting,” said Mayank Khurana. “That was about ten years ago.” In his library, Khurana has shelves organised by country and publisher, figurines and …
Eating Out in Delhi
From the Goya Journal’s City Guide series. ♦ [Lucky Peach, our favourite food magazine, is putting out its last issue this month. Although the magazine had a relatively short run of six years, in that short period, it changed food media forever. It showed us that food writing need not necessarily fall under two polar …
Superiority complexes
The silly building name epidemic ♦ A man’s home may be his castle. But is it absolutely necessary to call it King’s Court? Absurd, westernised residential development names have plagued the NCR for a few years now. All over the city, hoardings advertise Paramount Emotions, Golfforesté, Grand Savannah Ghaziabad or Monde de Provence Gurgaon – …
bpb Review: Is Instapizza’s New Sandwich & Sons Starting A ‘wich War In Jangpura?
Neighbourhood favourite Hawker’s House gets a hot new competitor. ♦ Among the chock-a-block tikka joints and butter chicken factories of Jangpura, there has always been one place where the neighbourhood’s Punjabi householders mingle with its young lawyers and professionals. With the dubious exception of greasy spoon Om Hotel, Hawker’s House—otherwise known as Novelty Dairy & …
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Time Out: India Perfect Places
Guidebook ♦ I contributed a chapter on Agra and some writing on Delhi for Time Out India: Perfect Places to Stay, Eat & Explore. You can preview the book here. Originally published in 2010.
Printer’s proof
A public airing of a private collection of prints could spike interest in an underappreciated medium ♦ When people in the Indian art frat hear the details of collector Waswo X Waswo’s first encounter with printmaking, they sometimes “express a little shock.” The son of a grocer, American-born Waswo once had a job in an …
Type Out Delhi
Typographical interventions ♦ A series of “typerventions” spearheaded by Kriti Monga of Turmeric Design and commissioned by Time Out Delhi. Read more about these type projects here.
A Weekend in Old Delhi
A budget weekend in purani Dilli ♦ The most difficult decision I had to make while packing for a weekend in Old Delhi, was what sort of attitude I ought to carry with me to this contiguous yet discrete part of the capital city. Many travellers have written about how home can only be understood once …
bpb Review: WD House, Greater Kailash II
A well-known Chandigarh restaurant unsheathes weapons of mass degustation. ♦ At a time when Indian modernism is threatened from every angle—from the demolition of the Hall of Nations at Pragati Maidan, to the final blow to Nehruvian geopolitics with Modi’s mushy embrace of Israel—WD House is an unlikely but welcome throwback to the robust, idealistic …
Bridges, not barriers
Delhi’s new literary festival is an appropriately polyglot affair ♦ If India is, as Mark Twain put it, “the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues”, then Delhi is the place where all these nations and tongues inevitably meet. This fortnight, a new festival acknowledges the importance of the capital as a literary destination …
A Strange, Familiar Place
This Place ♦ By Amitabha Bagchi Fourth Estate / HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2013, 253 pp., Rs 499 (HB) ISBN 978-93-5116-018-2 After being suspended from his government job, Naresh Kumar, the title character in Amitabha Bagchi’s previous book, The Householder (Fourth Estate, 2012), finds himself a stranger in his own house. He waits desperately for the evening, …
bpb Review: Yum Yum Cha, Khan Market
Yum Yum Tree’s Saket sapling puts down roots in a new market. ♦ Last year, we took the news about the felling of the great Yum Yum Tree in Friends Colony market with a heavy heart. The restaurant—over 6,000 square feet of unrepentant Japanophile kitsch, with some Sino-Baroque swag thrown in—was a magic faraway land of …
West Side Stories
West Delhi Special ♦ A Time Out Delhi cover story from March 2012 featuring a collection of stories from West Delhi neighbourhoods. Read the full story below, download it as a pretty PDF here, or find it online at
Upside Down
Georg Baselitz: Printed Works 1965-1992 ♦ Probably one of the most important artists living today, Georg Baselitz still evokes some criticism among his contemporaries. He is best-known for his inverted subjects: figures, animals, landscapes turned upside down. While this may seem a simple contrivance, a retrospective exhibition of Baselitz’s printed works – Georg Baselitz: Printed Works …
Cracks in the pavement
Setting out to rediscover Calcutta, Amit Chaudhuri rejuvenates the genre of city writing ♦ Cities have been the incubators of literature since at least the time of Plato in Athens, or of Kabir in Kashi. In turn, they have also played muse, inspiring an entire metropolis of fiction and non-fiction that attempts to describe them. …
Mirdard Lane
Khau gali ♦ New Delhi gives way to the old city as you cross the railway line northeast of Connaught Place. A little before Shahjahanabad proper, however, the area between Ferozeshah Kotla, Gandhi Market and ITO already feels more like Sheher than Nai Dilli. This is where the balance of traffic switches from cars to …
To the Manohar born
Help yourself to a slice of Delhi food history ♦ On a walk through Khan Market’s intestinal middle lane the other day, we came upon a basket of bread, next to the imported strawberries and grapes. The smallish, dark square loaves nestled in the large basket looked impossibly old-fashioned compared to the fluffy white or …
Long exposure
Chirodeep Chaudhuri captured Durga Puja at his ancestral village in Bengal over 12 years ♦ Twelve years is a long engagement for an artistic project. But by saving up his vacation, Chirodeep Chaudhuri (formerly Time Out’s national art director), managed to capture Durga Puja in his family village of Amadpur over just such a length of …
bpb Review: Baris, Greater Kailash II
Atta Turks! A chef from Istanbul and a Sanjay Leela Bhansali set come together in South Delhi. ♦ Turkish and Hindi have many words in common: for example, duniya, divana, badam, and bulbul. The name of Masjid Moth’s newest kid on the block, pronounced baarish, sounds familiar, however means, not “rain,” but “peaceful.” Bariş’ “Inspired …
Building blokes
The Modern Architecture of New Delhi ♦ Rahul Khanna, owner of Below8 bar, and Manav Parhawk, a fashion photographer, teamed up to explore Delhi’s modern architecture. Their book, The Modern Architecture of New Delhi: 1928-2007, reads like a series of monographs. Sonal Shah spoke to Khanna and Parhawk about how they came to see their …
bpb Review: Napoli Pizza, Safdarjung Enclave
Let’s not beat about the bush. It’s amore. ♦ Every food review has its moment of truth. Sometimes, it is a prompt lightning bolt, as blatant as the bling adorning your fellow diners. At other times, it is a tardy thunderclap, arriving along with a lengthy bill that magically transforms a pretty good meal into …
Footloose
Walking with a purpose ♦ “Every walk is a sort of crusade,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in his essay on “Walking”. His particular idea of a stroll had more to do with venturing into nature to reclaim one’s wildness than ambling through a city, but his words feel like a true characterization of walking in …
bpb Review: Piso 16, Nehru Place
Literally on the level. ♦ Many, many New Delhi bars have tried to bring New York home. (Bombay is – of course – worse: an ‘It Happened In New York’ was rampant in Bandra until very recently.) But Piso 16’s vibe is, no jokes, somewhere between a posh Midtown hotel bar and a Harlem cocktail club. …
Kavia’s Kitchen
A hidden find for adventurous foodies ♦ Sau Foota (100 Foot) Road in Chattarpur has a couple of random gems, including sweet patisserie-café French Affair. But the most interesting place we’ve been to is a restaurant above a shady-posh gym called Energizer. Run by chatty owner Shobhana Gupta, who has spent significant time in Nigeria, Kavia’s …
The Walls of Delhi
Uday Prakash’s stories bring downtrodden characters to life ♦ “I bet you’re thinking that I’m taking advantage of the one hundred and twenty fifth anniversary of the birth of Premchand, the King of Hindi Fiction, to spin you some hundredand- twenty-five-year-old story, dressed up as a tale of today,” writes Uday Prakash, in one of …
Eight Women: Mehrun-Nisha Shaukat Ali
While Mehrun-Nisha Shaukat Ali once dreamed about becoming a soldier or a police officer, she ultimately put her brawn to use as a bouncer. ♦ Whenever there was military action on the border, Mehrun-Nisha Shaukat Ali and her six brothers and sisters used to stand on the roof of their house in Saharanpur, in Uttar …
bpb Review: The Sleepy Owl’s Cold-Brew Coffee Shop, Shahpur Jat
A hip cold-brew delivery service opens a café at their office. ♦ Something brews in Shahpur Jat with no boil nor bubble. The charm firm and good on tap at Sleepy Owl is cold-brew coffee, in which grounds are immersed in room-temperature water—Sleepy Owl infuses their Chikmagalur for 22 hours—slowly imparting their flavour without the …
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