~ UNDER CONSTRUCTION ~
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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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 …
Thukral & Tagra
Admen, artists, ambassadors ♦ In the ongoing search to furnish India’s contemporary art scene with international emissaries, it is appropriate that two most prolific ambassadors have a background emblematic of the country’s most shining industry: advertising and design. Anything but appropriate, however, is the impish name of the fake brand that artist/designer duo Sumir Tagra …
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 …
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 …
Owl is Well, around Greater Kailash – I
A midnight takeaway delivers food that would be ambitious for a sit-down restaurant. ♦ The midnight burger has become an heir of sorts to the 24/7 hot dog, the first after-hours trend to help expand Delhi’s traditional late-night kebabs and parathas. A new fly-by-night specimen, operating out of GK-I, adds itself to the flock. Knock Knock, Hoot’s …
Cutting edge
Performance art: History, highlights and what to see at the India Art Fair 2012 ♦ Time Out Delhi‘s timeline of performance art from India and elsewhere, published January 20, 2012. Read the full story below, download it as a pretty PDF here, or find it in somewhat mangled form online at Time Out Delhi.
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: 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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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. …
Welcome to Americastan
Jabeen Akhtar knocks stereotypes out of focus ♦ Samira Tanweer just wants to be left alone. Unfortunately for the former political analyst, being back in the bosom of her Pakistani-American family isn’t going to make it easy for her to put back together the pieces of her recently shattered life. Samira indulges in a fair amount …
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 …
bpb Review: L’ Amour Fou Afghan, Kalkaji
Qorma kofta with a side of crazy love in an artist’s family restaurant. ♦ Hidden in a quiet gully off Kalkaji’s main market, L’Amour Fou Afghan catches our eye for its location and its extraordinary name: Afghan eateries usually call themselves Balkh or Kabul or Mazaar, and cluster in neighbourhoods with settled patron populations, such …
Espresso Grill
Rich flavours on pretty plates ♦ Delhi’s largest multilevel parking lot on Baba Kharak Singh Marg, which opened to much fanfare last year, is a desolate, glittering island between the hustle of Hanuman Mandir and the panoply of state emporia across the street. A digital display outside lists the impressive number of available spots, 1,408, less …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Spirit uprising
Once upon a time, the Old City was besieged by ghosts ♦ Read this article as part of Time Out Delhi’s “Haunted Delhi” cover story. “No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in a short story from 1888, “but many English ghosts have scared the life …
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. …
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 …
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; …
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 …
Chez Nini
Cozy up for a friend-date ♦ Chez Nini’s decor suggests a nest, with twinkling lights, glossy tree trunk tables, branches and quite a few finely feathered patrons, likely out for what they might consider a “casual” dinner. This French café has a few fancy twists in its salads, soups, baked goods, main courses and desserts, …
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: 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 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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
News flashback
Anuja Chauhan’s third romantic comedy is set in Delhi of the 1980s ♦ A tall, dark and distinctively handsome journalist with a conscience meets a beautiful, intelligent “DeshDarpan” newsreader with four sisters, a house on Hailey Road and a distinctive mole on her chin. Delhi in the 1980s and India’ widening mediascape are the backdrop of …
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 …
Crash of Civilisations
City of Spies ♦ By Sorayya Khan Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2015, 239 pp., Rs 295 (PB) ISBN 978-93-83064-78-6 Pakistan was scorchingly hot during the summer of 1977, the narrator of City of Spies recalls: “the newspapers were filled with worry that rain might never come”. And the persistent Cold War chill in relations between the United States of America and the Soviet Union only …
Mind your language
Learning Urdu in Delhi ♦ Growing up mostly in the US, my Hindi instruction was limited to brief bouts of Sunday school and reading that ubiquitous Children’s Book Trust Panchatantra with my mother. I did all right, but my family’s own connection to reading Hindi was slight, given that half wrote in Gujarati and the …
Home of horrors
Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges combine efforts to draw a poignant, disturbing picture of post-capitalist America ♦ Black and white truth has little place in the slippery grey of liberal opinion. Poverty porn or slum tourism are easy dismissals of writing on the human fallout of consumer capitalism. And plenty of people make a fetish …
Gunpowder
Fully loaded ♦ Purely via word-of-mouth, this unassuming little room with a view has become the new hotspot in Hauz Khas Village. Ears are buzzing, tongues are tingling and Dilliwalas in the know are all asking the same question: “Have you been to Gunpowder yet?” Of course, it helps that one of the owners, Satish …
Stirring the pot
Delhi’s culinary melange ♦ Part of a Time Out Delhi food cover story, this is a short history of Delhi food, plus a guide to eating in the old city (published in 2008). Read the story as a PDF, find the text reproduced below, or download the PDF here. (Pairs well with this story on old Delhi …
Eight Women: Pelva Naik
Young classical vocalist Pelva Naik lets nothing come between her and her passion for dhrupad, a genre that has largely been performed by men. ♦ For Pelva Naik, a 31-year-old classical vocalist, art is something that transcends differences. In interviews, one of her favourite responses to the question of being a rare female dhrupad performer …
Delhi Hectic
A new online “Instagram graphic novel” seeks to puncture Delhi’s poseur pride ♦ It might seem like the height of irony, but Arjun Jassal, creator of Delhi Hectic, insists that his new online graphic novel project is a sincere attempt to make sense of Delhi’s pretentious, disjointed social scene. The story features Jassal and his …
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: 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 …
Vega
Pure vegetarian, old-school Indian ♦ The owners of one of Delhi’s oldest hotels (Alka in Connaught Place, established in 1968) decided not too long ago to try their luck at the cursed spot at Tavern on the Greens in Lado Sarai, which has thus far summarily rejected Climax, F Bar and Bar Sávanh. They opened a …
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 …
Shahjahanabad coolers
Ajmal Khan, Barfiwali lassi, Chandni Chowk, Chawri Bazaar, Chikoo, Drinks, Fatehpuri, Fruit Sandwich, Hakim Abdul Majeed, Hamdard Dawakhana, Harnarain Gokalchand, Kewra, Khari Baoli, Lal Kuan, Lawrence Road, Murabba, Old Delhi, Pandit Ved Prakash Lemon Wale, Rooh Afza, Shahjahanabad, Sharbat, Street FoodShahjahanabad coolers
Street the heat ♦ Feeling a bit parched in puraani Dilli? Quench your thirst at these local institutions. Read the Time Out Delhi (July 2009) story as a PDF, find the text reproduced below, or download it here. (Pairs well with this story on old Delhi street food.) Amritsari Lassi Wala The thickest lassi we’ve found in old …
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 …
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 …
