~ UNDER CONSTRUCTION ~
Child Speak/Woman Song
Vasundhara Tewari Broota at Shridharani Gallery ♦ Much like her paintings, the title of Vasundhara Tewari Broota’s current show at Triveni suggests more than it says outright. However, as is evidenced from the catalogue essay by Gayatri Sinha, Broota has a lot to say – this time about childhood, and the woman as a mother and …
bpb Review: Café Hameen Ast’o, Said-ul-ajaib, Saket
Firdaus lost and found. ♦ In a million tourism brochures and travel articles, both Delhi and Kashmir claim to have inspired the Persian couplet: “Agar firdaus bar-ruu-i zamiin ast / Hamiin ast o hamiin ast o hamiin ast”— If there is paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here. The bumpy …
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Walk the chawk with Sam Miller
Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity ♦ Journalist Sam Miller’s new book Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity describes the British expat’s walks around town, which followed the same spiral route he’d laid out for himself. We phoned him as he was commuting, by foot, from his office in Hauz Khas to his home in Panchsheel. “I’ll …
Ab Dawa Ki Jaroorat Nahin
A doctor uses medical charting software to plot trends in classic Hindi film songs. ♦ Originally published on VICE India. Anupam Kumar Singh, 35, works in the cardiology department of Hindu Rao Hospital in Delhi. Originally from Bihar, Singh told me he didn’t always plan on being a doctor. “I wanted to grow up to …
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 …
Gargoti Mineral Museum
A hidden gem ♦ This article is part of a longer story on Delhi’s museums. [cycloneslider id=”gargoti-mineral-museum”]Dark, mysterious purple amethysts, spiky crystals of chalcedony, rheumy quartz and brilliant blue cavancite line the shelves. It’s not hard to imagine a sighting of the Virgin Mary or an Om within all this lustre (there are, in fact, …
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 …
Capital Rambles
Delhi: Unknown Tales of a City By RV Smith (Roli, ₹295) Among the contemporary crop of Delhi’s flâneurs and society chroniclers, Ronald Vivian Smith is a tall figure. The septuagenarian arrived from Agra in the late 1950s, and his regular columns in The Statesman and The Hindu span the decades of wandering he has done in …
Haunted Delhi
The bhoot is out there ♦ From the haunting of 10 Janpath to Gef the singing mongoose – not to mention djinns, headless sepoys and Certified Leading Paranormal Investigators – this Time Out Delhi cover package from October 28, 2011 chronicles the capital’s ghost stories. Read the full story below, download it as a pretty …
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 …
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 …
Home is where the art is
Gulammohammed Sheikh creates sacred spaces for the secular minded ♦ In Gulammohammed Sheikh’s first solo show in a decade, there are maps everywhere. There is Sheikh’s version of the thirteenth-century Ebstorf mappa mundi, a European world map that was lost after World War II. There are aerial cityscapes based off of Google Maps. A fold-out “Book …
Windows in the city walls
Two Old Delhi buildings are waiting to be reborn as city museums ♦ This article is part of a longer story on Delhi’s museums. In a miniature watercolour from 1820, Sir David Ochterlony lords over a nautch, dressed in Mughal garb with hookah in hand. That portrait shows Delhi’s first British Resident in his home – …
The Angst of Being a Modern Indian
The Cosmopolitans ♦Anjum HasanPenguin India, 309 pages, Rs 499. “Being a modern Indian is hard work,” a former king tells Qayanaat, the protagonist of Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmopolitans. If this is true for the King, the dispossessed monarch of fictional, small-town Simhal, it’s certainly so for Qayanaat, a 53-year-old single woman who lives in Bengaluru, subsisting …
Nox
Basic mixed drinks and loud karaoke at this casual HKV bar ♦ Nox, a long, sitting-room style bar thrust up the backside of Hauz Khas Village, is a likeable enough place, even if it does fall victim to the all-encompassing tendencies of most of the city’s drinking holes. This one literally aspires to a drinking hole …
The Stranger’s Child
Alan Hollinghurst teases out the thoughts behind his character’s smallest actions ♦ The opening image would enchant any serious reader: a 16-year-old girl reading poetry in a hammock in an English garden. Her mind wanders from Tennyson to the impending visit of Cecil Valance, a poet and young nobleman who is her brother’s friend and, though …
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 …
Amritsari Meatwala
Khau gali ♦ The market under the Defence Colony flyover is possibly one of the least savoury destinations inside the Ring Road. Just behind red and shiny Nirula’s, behind the thekas, men in banians guzzle beer and chomp on kababs at an Afghan chicken stop. We’re more interested in the other side of the bridge, …
View with a Room
A watercolour of a friend's room in what was once a convent on the Upper West Side, Manhattan.
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, …
French Affair
Roadside rendezvous ♦ From its Toile de Jouy wallpaper with dancing French country couples to its aqua wrought-iron chairs and mixed-up crockery, this bakery is a little oasis of charm on the stretch between Mehrauli and Chattarpur. With a stone wall façade and muntined windows, illuminated by the warm yellow light inside, The French Affair …
For Good Resin
On the frankincense trail in Muscat. ♦ Oman smells like Christmas all year round. Walking in out of the hot sun—whether it’s into a mosque, a hotel, or someone’s home—means being engulfed by the pervasive plumes of frankincense smoke. It fills every interior space with a rich, piney fragrance, nuanced with hints of citrus peel; …
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 …
Alex Moser and the Art of Constant Arrival
After drinking vodka in Vladivostok and avoiding horsemeat in Bishkek, the German chef is scouring India for ingredients. ♦ Chef Alex Moser arrived in India on a Saturday last year, to begin cooking up a food plan for Andaz, the new hotel by Hyatt in Delhi’s Aerocity. “On Sunday,” Moser recalls, “my boss took me …
A Lingering Puff of Smoke
With the Hyatt Regency opening a nightspot after a decade, Sonal Shah reflects on Djinns, the hotel’s erstwhile party-starting genie. ♦ At any popular nightclub, the most delicate dance is usually the one at the door. Delhi, with its deep class divides and social snobbery is no different: the city’s earliest dance clubs (Tabela at …
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 …
The Butterfly Generation
Palash Krishna Mehrotra on India’s flitty young things ♦ Form shouldn’t always mirror content. Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s musings on “the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth” flit from subject to subject in short chapters, resting a moment on the bloom of homosexual rights (“Gay ho!”, eight pages), then on the thorny issue of morality …
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 …
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. …
Eternal outsider
Abraham Verghese talks about Cutting for Stone and the idea of home ♦ This interview was conducted for a feature in Time Out Delhi. Could you tell me a bit about how your family came to be in Ethiopia and the background of Malayalis in that country? I am told that Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia …
River crossing
Five Yamuna walks ♦ Cities usually consider a river to be a blessing, but us Dilliwalas tend to turn our backs to ours. We hold our breath while driving across the Yamuna, thoughtlessly discharge our waste into it, pour concrete over its banks and, during the occasional festival, dump statues, diyas and other religious paraphernalia …
Mathur Nature: A Kayasth Cook’s Family Secrets
Kanak Mathur’s delivery service sends old Delhi cuisine to new Delhi homes. ♦ If anyone can lay claim to an authentic Delhi food culture, it is the Kayasth community – the resident Hindu administrators for royal and colonial rulers in the capital and elsewhere. Much has been written about Kayasth cooking’s syncretic, Ganga-Jamuni nature; the kababs …
A room on the roof
Notes from the last barsati ♦ Delhi, early morning. The sun burns through the haze, like a lighthouse lamp growing brighter as the bustling port of waking life approaches, pulling the tides of thought out of the ocean of dreams and towards the shores of reality, where I find myself cast up, suddenly solid, embodied. …
Object lessons
Subodh Gupta greets New Yorkers with A Glass of Water ♦ Subodh Gupta’s stainless steel glass, filled to the brim with water, created quite a splash in New York. This isn’t surprising for an artist who is often referred to as the ‘Indian Damien Hirst’ in international circles. What is surprising, however, is that Gupta’s …
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.
Age and beauty
The walled city oozes so much spiritual history, every gali could turn into a trail. Here are four roads less travelled ♦ Older Delhi The pre-Shahjahanabad tour. The walled city hides several sacred sites that predate Shahjahan’s imperial city. Four major ones are relatively close together and can be …
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 …
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. …
Shankar’s International Doll’s Museum
The world in miniature ♦ This article is part of a longer story on Delhi’s museums. [cycloneslider id=”shankar-dolls-museum”]To celebrate Janmashtami this year, the doll-makers at this museum’s hidden workshop spent four months working on a new diorama. It’s the 45-year-old museum’s only multi-sensory display: a tableau of Vasudeva crossing the Yamuna with baby Krishna on …
A picture is worth a thousand pixels
The new photojournalism ♦ In 1972, after a run of 36 years and more than 1,800 issues, Life magazine published its final weekly copy. The issue was a year-in-review, featuring photo essays on the last lunar landing of the Apollo mission and the approaching end of the Vietnam War. Within the glossy pages, which now appear slightly garish …
Where Sinbad Sailed His Dhow
The Arabian peninsula’s maritime history comes alive in Oman. ♦ In 1979, British adventurer and maritime explorer Tim Severin wandered the west coast of India, the country of his birth, looking for rope. Severin had already voyaged across the Atlantic in an open boat, approximating the journey of a sixth-century monk. Now he wanted to …
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: 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 …
The big wheezy
Winter may well be gone, but our ashen city’s pall of pollution lingers on. A close look at Delhi’s visible air ♦ This article anchors a longer cover story on Delhi’s air pollution. Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss may have banned smoking in public areas, but – as any masked Japanese tourist will tell you …
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 …
Going off script
A cross-border blog spreads the word of South Asian literature ♦ In India, Pakistani writers in English are considered common property. Their books are often published here first, and writers like Mohammed Hanif, Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie and Nadeem Aslam frequent our literary festivals. But when it comes to contemporary Hindi or Urdu fiction crossing the …
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 …
The Saints Come Marching into Her Living Room
Behind the scenes at Marjorie Eliot’s Parlor Entertainment jazz sessions, an uptown institution. ♦ Over the years, Count Basie, Paul Robeson and other prominent Harlem musicians and artists have lived behind the embellished iron gates of 555 Edgecombe Avenue, just beyond Sugar Hill. In apartment 3F, jazz still lingers in the air every Sunday afternoon. Marjorie …
Take notice
Resignedly yours ♦ Leave-taking has been on my mind lately, and my thoughts found their reflection in a photo currently making the social media rounds. The picture shows a resignation letter in edible form: a passion cake (prosaically: carrot cake) with white icing, over which is piped a letter by one Chris “Mr Cake” Holmes, …
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 …
