Time Out Delhi

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 …

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Shahjahanabad 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 …

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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, …

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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 …

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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 …

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Like a surgeon

In Abraham Verghese’s debut novel, fate is stitched together with sutures ♦ Abraham Verghese is a man of science and fact. His experiences as a doctor in small-town Tennessee in the mid-1980s during the early years of the AIDS epidemic led to his first book, the well-received My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story.  After a flurry …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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