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; …
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 …
Eight Women: Bhavna Paliwal
A private detective and head of her own agency, Bhavna Paliwal is intimately familiar with Delhi’s darker side. ♦ When Bhavna Paliwal came to Delhi at the age of 22, she intended to study public relations but soon switched to journalism. “I thought journalists were a big deal and could do anything,” she says, sitting …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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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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 …
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: 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). …
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 …
Damn nation
Siddartha Deb finds life less than shiny in the new India ♦ In The Beautiful and Damned, F Scott Fitzgerald’s profligate main characters embody the two adjectives in the title. The novel – an attempt to critique the excesses of America’s jazz age – ended up as a rather self-indulgent byproduct of it instead. Fitzgerald’s narrative …
Eight Women: Prajakta Dandekar
Biotechnologist Prajakta Dandekar is on the cutting edge of a new technology that could revolutionise the pharmaceutical industry. ♦ Lush gardens filled with tropical plants and meandering paths surround the buildings of the Institute of Chemical Technology in Matunga, Mumbai. The inside of Prajakta Dandekar’s lab presents a stark contrast, with machines for the culturing …
The Grey Garden
Fabric of our lives ♦ To get to this Hauz Khas Village eatery, you first descend a cramped alley hung with fabric, reminiscent of the Katra Neel cloth market in the Old City. Once you pop out on the other end though, you’ll find less commerce, more conversation. The Grey Garden, perched at the rear edge …
Delhi dictionary
Mind your language ♦ From Time Out Delhi, March 2013 The word “kedgeree”, according to The Concise Hobson-Jobson, “appears to have been applied metaphorically to mixtures of sundry kinds and also to jargon or lingua franca.” That definition, from the Anglo-Indian glossary first published in 1886, still finds a place in this issue’s cover story: …
Mission accomplished
An American architect in Delhi ♦ Some of Delhi’s most beautiful buildings sit on foreign soil. In Chanakyapuri, the American Embassy’s Chancery and Ambassador’s residence are two of independent India’s oldest diplomatic buildings – and arguably the most successful at blending modern minimalism with motifs from Mughal and British architecture. Architect Edward Durell Stone, who …
Shelved selves
Unpacking literary baggage ♦ The first library I fell in love with was my great-grandfather’s study in Shimla. An angular room with thick glass windows, dark wood furniture and a scuffed, burnt orange carpet, it looked out over the misty tops of ragged pine trees and rounded hills. Like any good study, its architect knew …
Seeing like a Feminist
Nivedita Menon sets her sights on a broader audience ♦ Don’t attract attention, don’t get yourself raped. Do get married and definitely make babies. In the face of all these patriarchal rules, we want justice and it’s pretty much a given that we want it now. Feminist scholar and activist Nivedita Menon wouldn’t necessarily dismiss …
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 …
Buried treasure
Air Force Museum, Bhai Mati Das Sati Das, Central Bureau of Investigation, Crafts Museum, Gallery of Musical Instruments, Gargoti Mineral Museum, Heritage Transport Museum, History, Indira Gandhi Memorial, Museums, National Agricultural Science Museum, Parliament Museum, Shankar's International Doll's Museum, Sulabh Toilet Museum, Tenzing Norgay, Town Hall, Tribal Museum, Walled City MuseumBuried treasure
Digging out the weird and wonderful in Delhi’s museums ♦ For this Time Out Delhi cover story from September 2011, the team visited almost every museum in Delhi and found everything from accountancy methods to dinosaur eggs. Read the full story below, or download it as a PDF here.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
Flights of fantasy
An interview with Alia Syed ♦ Experimental filmmaker Alia Syed was born in Swansea, Wales, to Indian and Welsh parents. Over the last thirteen years, Syed’s films have discussed diaspora, subjectivity and narrative, creating mesmerizing visual experiences. From the 24th of December to the 31st of March, Delhi’s Talwar Gallery held Syed’s first solo show …
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. …
Scent of a season
Farewell to winter ♦ Winter ends as it began, its first and last trace a lingering scent, like the whiff of tobacco on a smoker’s shawl. All season, the city has mostly been a smudged landscape in indeterminate shades of grey, lifted from a palette of fog, smog, smoke, haze and mist. Hindi might have …
View with a Room
A watercolour of a friend's room in what was once a convent on the Upper West Side, Manhattan.
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 …
Consuming passion
Anjum Anand ♦ Anjum Anand served a station full of beefy British fire-fighters naan and lamb curry – cooked by one of their fellows – in the last season of her debut cooking show Indian Food Made Easy. However, the meal was not as heavy as the usual lunch the fire-fighters consume. “Light” Indian food …
Asharq Al-Awsat
A worthy detour on the road to Damascus ♦ We don’t often find ourselves in Sarita Vihar, but Surya Sweets – a restaurant run out of a budget hotel for Middle Eastern medical tourists – was always reason enough to navigate the truck traffic and the potholes. On a recent expedition to the rapidly urbanising …
Wat’s up
The new Ethiopian Cultural Centre ♦ Set in a couple of low-lying whitewashed buildings with red tiled roofs clustered around a courtyard, the unpresuming new Ethiopian Cultural Centre brings a taste of Addis Ababa to Delhi. Director Ashok Verma, who set up the centre in tandem with the Ethiopian Embassy, met us in the coffee …
Portrait of a lady
The last century of Mughal rule comes to life in The Mirror of Beauty, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s compelling picture of Delhi and its wider world ♦ View as PDF Beloved of poets and coveted by kings, conquered and constructed again and again, Delhi in its present avatar is a tough city to love. Yet many …
Holy trinity
Manil Suri on writing the third of his mythological novels ♦ Math professor and writer Manil Suri grew up in Bombay, but has lived in the USA since attending college there in the 1980s. Suri revisited his home city in his first novel, Death of Vishnu, which was long-listed for a Booker in 2001. His …
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 …
Yoko Ono
The avante-garde artist performs and exhibits in Delhi ♦ This article is part of a cover story on performance art in India. Yoko Ono’s artistic journey has been a strange one. When she became a household name, her avant-garde art became just one more reason for the mainstream media to vilify her. But as Dilliwalas …
Unclaimed Terrain
Ajay Navaria’s stories deal with the new customs of caste ♦ A tea cup, a clogged toilet, a pair of old gym shoes; these innocuous objects are transformed into loaded signifiers of caste in a new collection of short stories by Jamia Millia professor and writer Ajay Navaria. These concrete details and objects anchor the …
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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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 …
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 …
A Conversation With: Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
A Conversation With: Literary Critic and Novelist Shamsur Rahman Faruqi ♦ India’s literary establishment is abuzz about the recently published novel “The Mirror of Beauty,” a 984-page fictional account about the life and times of Wazir Khanam, the mother of the famed Urdu poet Daag Dehalvi, set mostly in Delhi and its environs during the …
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 …
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 …
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 – …
Unbreathable
Why taking the air is a bad idea ♦ A cover story on air pollution in Delhi, from Time Out Delhi, March 2009. Read an excerpt of the story below or download it as a prettier PDF here.
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 …
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. …
Crumble in the Bronx
Threats to New York City’s Affordable Housing ♦ Note: This reported, unpublished story was written as part of a master’s program at the Columbia School of Journalism. With her peppery grey hair cut efficiently short, but dyed a youthful honey blonde, Martha Castro is a modern matriarch. At sixty-six, this mother of five children and grandmother …
