Bangalore

Provisioning During a Pandemic

Gourmet ingredient delivery around India ♦ Originally published in India Today. Not too long ago, “gourmet” was synonymous with imported. Foreign products occupied the shelves of our loftier kirana dukaans, bearing unheard-of brand names and amusing MRPs. Still, with international shipping curtailed through the lockdown, India’s gourmands might have felt their absence. (But maybe not; …

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Volatile Reactions

The Alchemy of Secrets, by Priya Balasubramanian ♦ Originally published in Biblio India. I read The Alchemy of Secrets on the first really scorching day of India’s nationwide Covid-19 lockdown, feeling dehydrated, irritable and headachy. At a time when everything else passing before of my eyes—the news, the Twitter news, the creative ferment on Instagram—seemed …

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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 …

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