~ UNDER CONSTRUCTION ~
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 …
Flaps over jackets
What’s behind the various covers of Indian books? ♦ On the US edition of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a girl squats in a swamp, surrounded by a slum. Her face, tilted towards a pale, yellow sky, could reflect grief or devotion. The UK and India edition’s cover is the polar opposite – saturated with shades …
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 – …
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 …
bpbScoop: Devan’s Now Has A Café
The old coffee store now makes drinks, because Devan is a place on earth. ♦ Stopping by recently for our go-to bag of beans (shoppers often have their own customized blends of the various grades of coffee), we were pleasantly surprised to see something new brewing at Delhi’s favourite coffee store, Devan’s. A big sign hangs …
Fodor’s Essential India
Guidebook ♦ I wrote several chapters for Fodor’s Essential India guidebook and helped update others for the second edition. This included articles on Indian history and culture, food, archaeological monuments and Delhi. You can preview some of the content here. Originally published in 2011, updated in 2012.
Ten spiritual trails
Exploring Delhi’s religious landmarks ♦ Excerpt from a Time Out Delhi cover package from October 2008. Read the excerpt below, download it as a PDF, or read text of the individual stories on Old Delhi walks or Delhi’s cemeteries.
A dog’s life
Capital canines unleashed ♦ Dogs are both Delhi’s most maligned and best-loved creatures. From strays who know our city’s tough streets better than most people, to pet pooches who hold their owners hostage to their every need, take a walk with some capital canines in this Time Out Delhi cover package from April 2012. Read …
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, …
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 …
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 …
Eight Women: Nidhi Goyal
A visually impaired activist and stand-up comedian, Nidhi Goyal took up the mic to talk about the way people perceive her. ♦ From the age of four, Nidhi Goyal loved to paint, and by the time she was a teenager, she knew she wanted to be a portrait artist. When Nidhi was diagnosed with a …
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 …
The treehouse for two
Paramjit and Arpita Singh line their sunny nest with warm reds and leafy greens ♦ This article is part of a series on artists’ homes. When artists Arpita and Paramjit Singh first visited their house in Nizamuddin East, it was in 1975, for chai with barsati resident Bhaskar Kulkarni (a “hippie-type”, as Paramjit put it) who …
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 …
Cheese Chaplin
Quick bite ♦ Did someone say cheese? Cheese Chaplin, tucked into the air-conditioned, office-like basement of a tiny building draped with bougainvillea in Lado Sarai, is primarily a purveyor of domestic cheeses, made by the shop’s own brand Dairy Craft (which has been around since the ’90s), and some imports. Cheese Chaplin has been delivering …
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 …
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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From Baghdad to Your Backyard
Iraqi emigrée Roaa Sardar delivers kunafa, shawarma and more around Delhi. ♦ The Back(lava) Story The first few times we call Roaa Sardar to ask her about her Arabic food delivery service, we can hear her baby daughter shrieking on the other end. “I’ll call you back!” Roaa says, sounding hassled. “Indian children are too, too, naughty,” the …
bpb Review: Bohca, Asiad Village
Khel Gaon gets a new tapas bar. ♦ Long before “the Village”, there was the Village Restaurant Complex, a clutch of family eateries in Khel Gaon. Established as part of infrastructure for the 1982 Asian Games, the restaurants were run by Connaught Place stalwart Kwality, the Games’ official caterer. As Delhi expanded southward, Chopsticks and …
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 …
Eight Women: Shubhangi Yuvraj Mandare
As an officer in the Mumbai Fire Brigade, when Shubhangi Yuvraj Mandare is on the scene of disaster, she’s the woman in charge. ♦ Shubhangi Yuvraj Mandare can’t remember the details of her first call, but she does remember a small incident, one or two days after she joined the Mumbai Fire Brigade in 2012. …
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 …
Stepping up
Artists engage with a land rights movement that touches down in Delhi this October ♦ What do a Delhi painter, an English photographer, a Swiss multimedia artist, and one lakh rural Indians fighting for land rights have in common? More than you’d expect, according to Walking: A Dialogue between Art and Social Movement. The exhibition coincides …
bpbReview: Rustom’s Parsi Bhonu, Delhi Parsi Anjuman
A Delhi classic gets a (lagan) nu lease of life. ♦ The Zoroastrian fire temple on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg has nourished the souls of the city’s small Parsi population since the 1960s. But it was Dhun Bagli’s kitchen in the Mengusi Parsi Dharamshala next-door that kept the community’s stomachs sated during social functions, and, …
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How a 1.5-Generation Immigrant Came to Love the Strip Malls of America
“The Trip That Changed the Way I Travel” for National Geographic Traveller India. ♦ Washington DC, USA “Welcome to the Valley of Death,” said my dance classmate grimly. We stood on the stoop of our Kuchipudi teacher’s cookie-cutter clapboard house, contemplating the uniformity of the landscape around us. Once farmland, this developed acreage in Maryland, …
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Uptown Takedown
Wrestling takes hold in Harlem ♦ In Harlem, basketball and football are the most popular sports. But at Kappa IV, a public middle school at St. Nicholas and 135th Street, wrestling is gaining traction. The afterschool classes started a month ago, when an organization called Beat the Streets teamed up with Jets of Harlem, the youth …
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 …
Driving passion
Three transport museums light up the road ahead ♦ This article is part of a longer story on Delhi’s museums. The words “Guggenheim”and “Gurgaon” have rarely, if ever, been uttered in the same breath. Yet Vikas Harish had the audacity to refer to the New York landmark as he talked about an upcoming suburban museum. It …
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 …
RT Book Reviews
Magazine review ♦ Name: RT Book Reviews Circulation: 70,000 Date of Birth: 1981 Frequency: Monthly Price: $4.99 In a little brick building in Brooklyn, the offices of RT Book Reviews (formerly known as Romantic Times) are divided between two suites. In one, paperbacks and curios line shelves set in converted fireplaces and against a wall painted with pink …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
bpb Review: Chez Jerome, GK1
Escoffier & escargot in an unlikely market. ♦ Henri Cartier-Bresson took an iconic image of a Parisian boy with a bottle of wine tucked under each arm, and a saucy grin on his face. The same joie de vivre runs through Jerome Cousin’s latest Delhi establishment (after Petit Bar, Rara Avis, and the Q Cafe). …
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 …
What’s Thalassery Biryani Doing in Lajpat Nagar?
A Malabari mystery at the heart of the world’s soya-chaap capital. ♦ When KC Deepak discovered that his Mallu bride, Leena, was a fantastic cook, the germ of an idea took root. For twenty long years, Deepak, who was born and grew up in Delhi but has family in Thalassery, let it simmer over extremely …
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Eternal returns
William Dalrymple on researching Return of a King, his history of the First Afghan War ♦ In Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, William Dalrymple’s third book set during the decline of Mughal rule, the Scottish historian and adoptive Dilliwala chronicles the first British military foray into the land of Khurasan, between 1839 and …
Fragments of beauty
Attiya Shaukat at Anant Art Gallery ♦ Lahore-based Attiya Shaukat’s miniature-style paintings on view at Anant Art Gallery are sensitive and intelligent works. Like several Pakistani artists nowadays, Shaukat draws on contemporary themes and symbols in her miniature paintings. Her work stands out, though, for its experimental montaging of symbols and compositions and for her inspired …
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 …
My Bar
All the essentials in Paharganj ♦ Strip a bar down to its basics, and all you really need is an accommodating room, some seating, an efficient refill team, some liquor and – ideally – a liquor license. My Bar in Paharganj has the essentials, and quite a few bonuses. Opposite the Metropolis hotel, this air-conditioned …
Here’s looking at you
The eyes have it ♦ On the occasional morning, a tall, dark, handsome man and his short, dark, even more handsome Labrador visit the pocket-handkerchief of a park opposite my house. Once in awhile, the man happens to look up towards my balcony and, suddenly, the world is transformed. The scraggly park becomes a charbagh …
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 – …
Privet Party: Malviya Nagar Has A New Russian Delivery Place
Vod more do you want? ♦ In 2001, when Vladimir Putin was finishing up the first year of his first presidential term, a Russian named Aleksandr Melnikov arrived in Delhi to sell leather garments. Instead, he ended up opening a tiny Russian eatery in Anand Niketan. Beloved by a small, loyal clientele for almost a …
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Smoke House Room
Tripping the bite fantastic ♦ Being high isn’t usually associated with great gastronomic discretion. Smoking up is more likely to leave you seeing the world in a grain of fried rice than it is to get you drooling over haute cuisine. Then again, “usual” is nowhere close to what Smoke House Room is aiming for. …
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. …
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 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, …
