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The Philosopher’s Tome
Accidental Magic, Keshava Guha’s debut novel, ponders Harry Potter fandom but is light on geeky delights. ♦ Originally published in India Today. Since Harry Potter debuted in 1997, books, films and fan material related to J.K. Rowling’s novels have proliferated faster than cursed objects in a vault at Gringotts. There are academic treatises, pop literary …
Mother of Invention
Perumal Murugan remembers Amma in his latest book. ♦ Originally published in India Today. I’d been waiting a couple of days to hear back from the writer Perumal Murugan, via an editor who promised to translate my questions into Tamil and his replies to English. That this kind of exchange is possible at all is …
The Great Trotter Resurrection
Irwin Allan Sealy’s Trotter-Nama comes alive for the third time. ♦ Originally published in India Today. It’s hard to imagine that the author of a book as gargantuan, complex and exuberant as The Trotter-Nama ever suffered such a crisis of faith in his creation — which had been out of print for an extended period — that …
Exile and the Kingdom
An ongoing exhibition of miniatures inspired by the Ramayana, at the Met in New York City ♦ Originally published in India Today. Far from the bustling, big-ticket shows of Dutch Masters or Camp fashion, beyond the high-ceilinged galleries of large American canvases, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a maze of jewel-box galleries. Hosting exhibitions …
East is Beast
Book Review ♦ New Kings of the World: The Rise and Rise of Eastern Pop Culture, By Fatima Bhutto Originally published in Open. As 2014’s feeble monsoon faltered to a close, India burnt for Fawad Khan. The Pakistani actor had just crossed over into Bollywood with Khubsoorat, reducing women across the country ‘to wobbling blobs of …
The Book of Waswo
The new miniatures from the studio of Waswo X. Waswo are as captivating as his latest photobook. ♦ Originally published in India Today. Nearly two decades ago, when Waswo X. Waswo was travelling in Pushkar, a group of camel herders started referring to him as “Chacha”. “The name just stuck,” the artist tells me in …
Greener Pastures
Aunty Sudha Aunty Radha is a world apart, capturing the slow rhythm of daily life in a kothi in Lahra, Uttar Pradesh, without embellishment. ♦ Originally published in India Today. One of the most striking things about Tanuja Chandra’s first documentary, which premiered internationally last month and features her 93 and 86-year-old aunts, is her …
Floods and Streams of Anarchy
William Dalrymple discusses his new book on the rise of the East India Company ♦ Originally published in Mumbai Mirror. “At the dawn of the nineteenth century all seemed dark; the stars were paling, and it was not by any means plain what the day was likely to be,” wrote orientalist historian HG Keene in …
The Writer’s Endurance Test
Book Review ♦ The Assassination of Indira Gandhi: The Collected Stories of Upamanyu Chatterjee, Volume I Originally published in India Today. From the ‘hazaar fucked’ slang of English, August through six subsequent novels and a novella, linguistic playfulness has always been a central feature of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s style, enamouring as many readers as it puts …
Interview: Raj Kamal Jha on ‘The City and the Sea’
Indian Express editor Raj Kamal Jha sheds light on why he believes stories like Nirbhaya’s need to be told through fiction. ♦ In 2012, the initial response to the gang rape of a physiotherapy student in Delhi was gut-driven, a tidal wave of pure outrage and protest. A documentary followed a few years later. If the …
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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 …
bpb Review: Kampai, Aerocity
Samurai gour-meh. ♦ Leaving aside roadside chow mein, unaffordable five-star hotels, and Delhi’s immortal Aka Sakas and Ichibans, three newer categories of east Asian eateries abound in the NCR these days. The first: pan-Asian delivery joints of varying quality, from the comfort curries of Culinaire to the poké bowls of newer contenders like Orient Heritage. …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
“Plagiarism Is Such a Heavy, Loaded Word.”
Why pop-poet Rupi Kaur doesn’t worry about being unique. ♦ Originally published on VICE India. Fresh from her success at the Jaipur Literary Festival, 25-year-old Indian-Canadian poet Rupi Kaur met with VICE India editors Sonal Shah and Vivek Gopal earlier this year. Only glancingly familiar with her oeuvre, we flipped through her two books, Milk and Honey and The Sun …
A Photographer Takes the Bull by the Horns in His Jallikattu Series
Ryan Lobo wrestles with the controversial tradition of bull-baiting in Tamil Nadu. ♦ Originally published on VICE India. For the past few years, Jallikattu has been a flashpoint—often covered in the news as a conflict between tradition and modernity, or between India’s northern and southern centres of power. The Tamil celebration—in which men wrestle with bulls in an …
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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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Beef in Sheep’s Clothing
A chef spills the beans about serving beef in India. ♦ Welcome back to Restaurant Confessionals , where we talk to the unheard voices of the restaurant industry from both the front-of-house and back-of-house about what really goes on behind the scenes at your favourite establishments. This time, a Delhi chef tells us about his beef with the ban. …
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 …
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). …
The Holi Pre-Party at a Bhang Theka in Noida
Two VICE editors visit a bhang shop before Holi. ♦ With Vivek Gopal Much like a hugely gentler version of the Purge, Holi is the one day of the year in which cannabis becomes socially acceptable in India. A popular staple of the festival is bhang, a ground and cooked mash of cannabis leaves and flowers. …
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 …
bpb Review: Shibuya Food & Bar, Greater Kailash-II
Lost in gustation. ♦ Unlike its namesake, Shibuya the restaurant is relatively quiet in its first week of operation. Just a few families and groups of friends occupy the dining room and enclosed balcony of the lower floor. The bar on the upper floor isn’t open yet, but includes a bigger open area for mingling. …
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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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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 …
bpb Review: Aku’s, Defence Colony
This new “brrgrr co.” urgently needs vowels, but is sweet on the tongue all the same. ♦ Passing through the newly-shorn Def Col this week, we notice a little shop more than a bit reminiscent of New York City’s gourmet fast-food chain, Shake Shack, outside which we’ve spent many an anticipatory hour in the queue for …
bpbReview: The Hong Kong Club, Andaz Delhi, Aerocity
Sampan in the way she moves. ♦ This writer is a fan of Andaz hotel’s stereotype-busting AnnaMaya restaurant, with its locally sourced vegetables and wall of micro-greens juxtaposed against an over-the-top dessert display. When AnnaMaya opened last year, it proved a welcome departure from the stuffy banality of most upscale hotel coffee shops with their …
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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 …
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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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; …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
YouTube Journeys: Channel Surf ‘N’ Turfing through Rural India
How pastoral potboilers shot to fame. ♦ The sight of early watermelons, piled up like cannonballs along the roads, had worked its way into my brain, and I found myself searching for recipes that incorporated the ingredient. One thing led to another, and there I was in Gudivada, Andhra Pradesh, watching 106-year-old granny Masthanamma cooking …
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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 …
Fathers, Sons and Motherlands
Book Review: South Haven ♦By Hirsh SawhneyHarperCollins Publishers India, 2016 When the Babri Masjid was demolished, I was about the same age as Siddharth Arora, the preteen protagonist of Hirsh Sawhney’s debut novel. Like him, I was a first generation Indian American, growing up in an east coast suburb; like him, the news reached me …
Goya Journal: 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 …
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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Against Extinction
From petting zoos to eco-tours, Victoria, Australia offers many models for wildlife conservation. ♦ As the plane descended, the moon rose, inching across the sky like the bioluminescent tail of a giant glow-worm. The land glistened with its light, reflecting off lakes, waterholes, and muddy riverine slivers. The illuminated, striated hillocks below, pocked with bush …
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 …
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 …
Arcade Games
Time travelling on Melbourne’s historic retail trail. ♦ Melbourne feels less like a small city than a miniaturized big one. Roughly the size of Delhi’s old walled city, its central business district is compact enough to survey on foot in a few hours. Its regular grid, buildings in diverse architectural styles, and vibrant summer streets …
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 …
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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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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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. …
Eight Women: Shanti Devi
Shanti Devi works alongside her husband in the no woman’s land of Delhi’s largest truck stop. ♦ It’s unclear exactly how the Internet originally discovered Shanti Devi, a 50-something who works alongside her husband, repairing truck tires in the Sanjay Gandhi Transport Nagar, a sprawling truck yard stuffed with mechanics, about 16 km away from …