Bombay recommendations (which you probably know) & Delhi ones (which you may not)

 Do you hear that? It's the distant sound of me sniffling and wheezing. To be fair to Delhi though, I think I picked it up in Bombay where I was for a few days this week [EDIT: THIS IS OLD NEWS, BUT EVERYTHING ELSE IS STILL RELEVANT], having meetings and running around in Ubers like a high flying executive. Should have worn heels for maximum effect. On the flight there from Delhi, several people coughed and sneezed right on me without covering their faces, which, like, gross and then on my way BACK to Delhi, I noticed that one of my lymph nodes right under my jaw was quite swollen, and so I've been sniffling and coughing to myself, and laying off the cigarettes, and generally being quite grumpy, but the swelling has mostly gone down now and I'm self-medicating with rosehip tea. Which brings me to the first of this week's recaps!

This week in grocery shopping: An oldie but a goodie, and besides I didn't have this newsletter the first time I visited Roots: The Organic Store, which is literally down the road from my house. Imagine a small general store that carries everything, and everything they carry is GMO free, or organic or something. Even the socks. We went to pick up some environmentally friendly washing powder for the machine (otherwise all that Surf and stuff goes into the drain and eventually mixes up with your ground water, which you eventually drink, so not good all in) (that being said, I do love my fabric conditioner, but I only use very little of that, she says defensively). We also bought similar floor cleaner, and then, errands done, I think we bought half the shop. The rosehip tea I'm drinking now, for instance. Cereal-y things for K. Cheese. Cooking oil. Spirulina spaghetti they threw in as a sample. If you live nearby, it's a great store to use as your local kirana.

This week in motivation: No coincidence that the word "motivation" has "moti" in it. I have gotten on the fitness band bandwagon, and purchased a Mi Band 2 (Xiaomi) in the hopes that this little silicone handcuff will get me up off my ass more. This explains why I walked down to the grocery shops yesterday, when I usually just sit on a couch and get everything sent home to me. My step goal is 8000 and even with pacing about the house, going to the shop and back, walking around the newly refurbished Ansal Plaza (more on THAT shortly), I only managed to do 2.5 kilometres or 5000 steps. At this rate, I'm never going to make it. The Mi Band is a cheaper version of the FitBit, and has all the features of the fanciest FitBit, you've gotta love Chinese ingenuity. I'm also kind of obsessed with it, much like David Sedaris was. Unlike David though, I actually once got a little statue of a man sleeping with the words "World's Laziest Person" on it for a birthday present, and I was PROUD of it, I displayed it for YEARS, so I'm fighting against all that conditioning.

This week in Bombay food, drink and retail:  Between meetings, I was stuck in that Bombay thing: having to sit at a coffee shop in the 'burbs for several hours because you have to meet your friends in Bandra and going back to town where your hotel is just doesn't make any sense. The "cafe" for me was Birdsong, which is great to sit and chill, but the food is not that good, so I'd suggest just sucking it up and going to Starbucks. I like the vibe at Birdsong a lot though--very hipster, very pretty, lots of people, but you do feel compelled to order something every thirty minutes so they don't judge you, whereas at Starbucks, I feel like I could hide from everyone in that one couch with one coffee and no one would care. Something to be said about corporate owned chains.

After Birdsong, I had some time to kill (MORE time) and so I decided to check out this export surplus shop I used to go to a lot when I still lived in Bombay called Cotton On. It's still there, but the prices have gone waaaay up and customer service has gone waaaay down, or else they were just as rude seven or eight years ago and I just didn't notice because I was in my twenties and coated with a layer of self-assurance no one could touch. I did buy a pretty black Banana Republic dress though since I was there and all, but I will not be going back I don't think.

Post, met a friend at a new Bandra bar called It Happened In New York with PCO-style food and drink, ie expensive! But good. Even if I did have to tell them that I preferred my Bloody Mary salt rimmed. Also went the next day to a lovely place I was taken to the LAST time I was in Bombay for a bit called Eddies Bistro, no apostrophe, which makes me wonder if there are several Eddies, since Eddy-singular traditionally ends with a "y". Eddies Bistro, so everyone who goes there is called Eddy? They only serve Eddy? I spent a long time gazing at the sign and wondering. 


This week in airport sightings: Way in: Kangana Ranaut, wearing a lovely camel coloured coat. She's much taller than I expected, but I didn't gawp properly, because I was doing that thing where you ignore celebrities and expect them to notice how cool and ignore-y you are. (She didn't notice.)

Way out: Two gorgeous golden retrievers called Peppa and Sunshine as part of a new programme bringing therapy dogs to airport for nervous flyers. "Do they help?" I asked the handlers, and they said the maximum amount of people who stopped were people whose flights were delayed and they needed something to do, so bored flyers more than nervous ones, but they DID put me in a very good mood, so there's some therapy to it after all. (At Bombay's international airport on the weekends, three hours in domestic, three hours in international.)

This week in cats: Speaking of animals, our three are great, happy to have us home and everything but SO FAT. I had posted a link to an article on our Whatsapp cat group (Kool Katz, four members) about  how to make your indoor cats more happy and engaged by making them food puzzles--essentially making them work for their food instead of just laying it all out for them. So while I was in Bombay, K set about training them to get their food differently. Quite easy: we had already bought a thing called a Kong Feeder which is essentially this hollow rubber dummy you fill with treats and then your pet has to push it over to get the food out. It's supposed to slow down eating, a problem we were having earlier with Bruno. K replicated the Kong Feeder times three with empty tonic water bottles. Bruno's gotten to be quite a champ at it, pushing the bottle whenever he needs it. Squishy just lies down with his mouth to the mouth of the bottle and sucks on it until the food comes out, and Olga is really not very smart at all and needs one of the boys to upset the food before she can get it. I thought I raised her more feminist than that.

This week in birds: Birdwatching continues! Not as exciting as Goa, but I did get a chance to make three new entries in the Notes section of my Salim Ali. The first two: the common myna and the Alexandrine parakeet. Bo-oring. But the third was the spotted owlet, a whole fam of them, hanging out a tree branch right below our house and chilling in broad daylight. Ol' Salim describes them as chilling by ruins or in trees in groups, but if they think they've been spotted, they very peevishly fly out, making clownish sounds. Quite a zoo.

This week in Delhi food, drink and retail: Went out with the Kool Katz to Delhi's newest Bombay import, Kofuku, which is this AMAZE Japanese restaurant I used to LOVE in Bandra. Like, every time I visited, had to have at least three meals there. The Delhi version is also damn nice, and it's in Ansal Plaza, which is a total blast from the past. I remember sitting at Geoffery's and The Buck Stops Here for ages, watching some kind of World Cup with friends from college and drinking all afternoon. Plus, there was a Reebok store where I bought my first and only pair of floaters that lasted me a good ten years I think, until I lost them. Also Ansal Plaza has a shop called Decathlon, which is a very large shop catering to every different kind of sport, which means they have some really cool products like these "rambling" pants I bought, with pockets, super comfy and easy dry so they're perfect to wear when you're traveling. Or like pollution masks in packs of three. Or excellent fleece jackets. We were there for badminton rackets, having left our set in Goa, but we also got sidetracked with all the other things.

Would you, like Edmund Pevensie, sell your soul for Turkish Delight?

(I think this came out in The Indian Express? Not sure though. Read ANYWAY.)




“The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on to the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which when opened , turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious.” - C.S Lewis, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe


Once upon a time in Istanbul, a sultan wanted to keep all his wives and mistresses happy, so he called upon a confectioner to create a sweet to keep them—well—sweet. (Or so says an article in the Independent, talking about the history of Turkish Delight). This was a thing that the confectioner invented, a gel of starch and sugar, sprinkled with nuts and flavoured with rosewater, a cloying, dense sweet, rubbery but not chewy. Nice, if you like that sort of thing, which I, disappointed adult, once childhood Narnia fan, did not.


There is an argument to be made about not re-reading your old favourite books as an adult. Your rational mind isn't supposed to stop and examine a problematic bit of prose, you're supposed to skim right along, breathless and caught up in the adventure like the heroes you're reading about. There should also be an argument about not eating food you've read about that has been exalted. Fish and chips were bland, kidneys smell so strongly of pee I just couldn't stomach them, and Turkish Delight was the unkindest of all—not a delight, not even remotely so. I was well into adulthood by the time I tried them, and with the first bite, I paused for a moment, with the second, I decided they weren't for me. No offense to Turkish Delight lovers, it was just that I realised in that moment, almond slivers catching on my palate, that it was no wonder that Edmund in Narnia loved them, they would please a child, achingly sweet, and only a child could consume so many in one go and not be sick after.


The first—and now, looking back, the only--time I read about the Sultan's appeasement was in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the very first of the Narnia books, which, if you're not familiar with, is about four English children who stumble through a wardrobe into a magic land and overthrow the evil queen who has been ruling there for many years. Before they can overthrow her, one of the children—Edmund—is lured into her power by the magic sweets she feeds him. This makes him silly and vulnerable—not unlike being roofied—and soon, he is her spy. While the Beavers and the children eat fish and potatoes, Edmund has been corrupted by the Turkish Delight he betrays his whole family for it, and is betrayed in turn.


“He had eaten his share of the dinner, but he hadn't really enjoyed it because he was thinking all the time about Turkish Delight—and there's nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food.”


Now, in Lewis' time, Turkish Delight was the ultimate in imported confectionery, and in war-time England, when the book was written and set, sweets were hard to get. An article theorises that maybe the idea of Narnia under the White Witch where it was “always winter and never Christmas” led Lewis to think of it. After all, sugar rations were scarce during the time, and he probably drew parallels between that life and the one he was creating in Narnia.


 Originally, it was called rahat-ul hulkum, for “comfort of the throat” but in modern day Turkey, Turkish delight is just plain old “mouthful” or lokum. Edmund's betrayal has travelled around the world—Bulgaria, where it's spiced with walnuts; Greece where it's served with coffee instead of biscuits; Romania, where you don't really want to know what “rahat” now means; and North America and England where they coat it with chocolate as they do most sweet things.


In my imaginings, the TD was marshmallow-like, spongy and soft and ethereal. I was ready o make peace with the idea that it wasn't a real thing, just a made up name for something so wonderful it couldn't be described. I'm not the only one. In an article in Slate, the author imagines it “crumbly and buttery and warm, like shortbread with walnuts, just out of the oven, with a rich, molten filling inside.” But after tasting it: “It tasted like soap rolled in plaster dust.” Maybe that's where the mystery lies, not in what Edmund ate, but why he ate it, not the reason he was seduced but what he was tasting as he gave up his whole family. I suspect it'll always be a mystery to me.

There are many things I miss about Bandra but this restaurant is in my top five

(This appeared a long time ago on The City Story)

I've always been a Delhi-ite by fate and geography. A “Delhicacy” if you will. I never had my year abroad like all my friends seemed to do straight from undergrad to a post-graduate degree somewhere cold, where they learned life skills and how to speak precisely when they wanted something. I stayed fluttering and vague, making long jazz hands mixed with ballet arms when I couldn't correctly express what I wanted to convey. Delhi was where I moved to at three weeks old, after having been born in my mother's hometown in Hyderabad, and Delhi was where I stayed ever since—till the time I was twenty five.

And then I moved to Bombay on a whim. This was my “year abroad,” as foreign a place to me as Warwick or Hamburg or New York were to my friends. I entered the city with my eyes wide, gazing up at the big buildings where someone's light was always on, no matter what time of night. I learned to navigate a system completely alien to the one I knew. I was only one thousand three hundred and eighty four kilometres away from home, but it felt as new to me as it must have done for Vasco Da Gama arriving south of where I was a few centuries ago.

Of course I loved it. What 25 year old woman wouldn't? I was free, anonymous and cavorting about the city at a rate that belied my rapidly dwindling finances. (Turns out journalism isn't the kind of job that lets you not only live without roommates but also eat in fancy places, so Carrie Bradshaw lied to us all.) However, I had moments of abject loneliness. I dreamt real estate dreams—where one of the rooms of my tiny shared flat had a hidden door, and when I opened it, I saw more rooms, more space. Sometimes, I ordered kaali daal three days in a row, just for that Delhi feeling, only to get a Gujju, Maharashtrian or foreigner-spiceless version of it. I wanted the food I had grown up with, because sometimes you long for comfort food, and the only thing that can ease your homesickness is a kebab roll without a whole lot of masala in it—just a smear of green chutney, onions on the side, thanks.

It was one of those Sunday afternoons, on a particularly blue Missing Delhi day that I discovered Khaan-e-Khaas. Maybe “discovered” is the wrong word, after all, friends had been feeding me their prawn biryani in the middle of the night for several months. What I wanted though was a Sunday afternoon feeling, and how do you translate that into a menu? Turns out you can. While perusing the dishes on offer (long before Zomato, I used the paper version that came with a bag of home delivery) I found Punjabi mutton curry. Two years of finding kari-patta in all my curries, whether North, South or Chinese had made me wary, but I decided to give it a go anyway.

Reader, I married it. Okay, not quite literally, but this, this was what my soul and my stomach had been crying out for. It was so authentic, I had probably only eaten versions at friends homes, it came with hot steamed basmati rice, and plump potatos cooked in the gravy, the mutton so tender, it fell off the bone. I ate a big lunch, all on my own, and then napped all afternoon, the humid air outside feeling almost like I was in the middle of a Delhi summer with a water cooler rumbling in the corner of the room, the evocative smell of khus making dreams even sweeter.

I held that mutton curry as a secret weapon when Bombay got too much, and if you've lived there for a long time, you know the too much I refer to. I grew to love the sound of the male voice on the other end of the phone when I called to order, “Hello Khaan-e-Khaas?” saying it almost musically. My friends stuck to the rolls and the biryani, and I didn't think that mutton curry was for sharing anyway. It belonged to my own personal private store of memories, home food when you're away from home, a South Indian lady with Punjabi cravings in Maharashtra.

Newsletter: Daydream Believer

Wow, I am behind hand on crossposting these newsletters to my blog! But here's a link to subscribe and stay current.

August 2nd, 2018

Darling potato cutlets, I went away last weekend to review a spa retreat/wellness centre in Sonepat for Conde Nast Traveler, and since it is a review for them, I will not be expanding on that any further. I'll pop a link in here when it's up and you can see all for yourselves. It ended a very heavy month though, and was my first time in one of those places, which was an interesting experience. I have returned finally having slept my fill for the first time in ages. I keep thinking about sleep because of this fantastic deep dive into the science of sleep I just read. It's all about how your brain reacts when you sleep--how you literally go mad during one stage of sleep which leads to the hallucinations we call dreams.

Speaking of mad, I have been rewatching Mad Men on Netflix for the last few months--each episode is as rich and long as I remember it, meaning that you can only binge watch up until a certain point, and then there's too much information happening. I missed the last two seasons when it first aired, and now I'm curious to see what happens to everyone since I'm almost all caught up with what I had already seen. It's such a gorgeous show, and it features one of my favourite man/woman non-romantic pairings in the history of television: Peggy Olson and Don Draper.

Other non-romantic man/woman pairings I've loved:

1) Joey and Phoebe on Friends. They never sleep together (even though he kisses her once) and it seems they are the only ones free of the sexual roundabout the other four put themselves on. Even Monica and Ross, they are so weird with each other, right? Mostly this is because of Phoebe, she refuses to get dragged in, and if it weren't for Lisa Kudrow's character, I think the show would have been much less charming. I like that Phoebe acknowledges Joey for being who he is: dumb but with a good heart and the soul of an innocent. (Joey doesn't begin this way though, his character just gets more stupid as the seasons go on.) And I like that Joey is also fully supportive of Phoebe, he doesn't get her, since she doesn't fall into the traditional Monica/Rachel genre of woman, but regardless, he is never patronising of her as the other men on the show tend to be.

2) Leslie and Ron on Parks and Recreation. This is a more Peggy/Don relationship, but unlike Peggy holding herself back and being awkward around praise, Leslie pushes herself and her friendship forward on Ron Swanson, making him be friends with her whether he wants to or not. There's this one episode where Ron is all like, "I know you plan a birthday party for everyone and I hate birthday parties" and she's all "but it's your birthday!" and you think she's going to have a big thing for him, which he also thinks so he avoids her all day, but in the end, his birthday "party" is just him locked in his office, no one disturbing him, a steak and a bottle of whiskey. Even as he's eating that steak, he's smiling to himself, and you're thinking, "Aw, she really knows him!"

Last week in food and drink: Went out with my mum to a new pizza place called Evoo which has just opened up in Shivalik. Actually, I say new but a lot of my friends have not only been, they were all raving about it, so I was damn excited. However, it seemed like the whole city's friends had been raving about it, because at 12.45 on a Wednesday afternoon, we had to wait for FORTY MINUTES for a table. It's a small place, they don't deliver, they don't have a bar, but MAN, is that pizza good. (They also gave us a free panna cotta for our waiting pains.)

Every time I say I went to Evoo to someone, they're going, "Oh yes, it's fantastic, and have you been to Leo's?" Which is in Vasant Kunj and ALSO meant to have insanely good pizza, so that's next on my list. We've only had pizza home-delivered and recently, I sort of lost my love for pizza in general, it just hasn't been what I want it to be. However, now the love has been kick-started once more, which is good! Pizza for everyone!

This week in Home Hacks Inspired by Queer Eye: I've gotta thank my friend Meghna for the first hack: when we were watching Queer Eye together in Goa, and I saw the way Bobby was putting these little boxes in drawers so the underwear, socks etc would stay separate, I said, "Oooh I should get some of those" because my drawers are a grab bag of chaos. It is only through memory that I know some stuff is in there so I rootle around like a truffle pig until I find what I'm looking for. Meghna suggested using Amazon delivery cardboard boxes, and I was struck by the simplicity of that idea. Sadly, not all Amazon boxes are created the same--some are just the wrong shape, but I have two of approximately the right shape and size right now which are holding my underwear and my socks respectively in my drawer, and they look so NEAT, I spent a while yesterday just looking down at my little panty nest like a proud mother hen. I need more boxes though! Going to use the cardboard to divide up my t-shirt and skirt drawer as well.

The second hack also has to do with my closet which is literally overflowing (and yet, I spent all of this morning on the Ajio app, going through their EOSS and finally, after two hours of work, my cart had two measly items in it which I haven't even bought. Online shopping is a real addiction.) Anyway, my handbags are all over the place, I do have a drawer for them, but it's a pain to put them back there when you're using a rotation of three anyway, so I bought this set of hooks attached to a long belt thing which hooks above and below your closet door, which means all my bags are neatly hidden from public view.


This week in stuff I wrote: A new mythology for the millennial column! This fortnight: bad mother figures and what that says about the ancient Indians.

Excerpt: But Krishna wasn’t in the clear yet. Putana, pretending to be a beautiful woman, fully planned to kill Krishna by rubbing poison all over her nipple and offering to feed him for a bit to his foster mother. Back in ancient India, I suspect that having a little feed swap, where other people suckled your child as you worked and vice versa was an an obvious solution to day care, though in this case it may also function as a little warning about disease control, rather than an argument for bottle over breast.

This week in stuff other people wrote which I found interesting:

Have you ever wondered why teens on American shows just look so much more... grown up than you did at their age or were you never as naive as I was? Either way, this is a fun read on casting adults as teens.

Excerpt: This long-standing Hollywood ruse of casting definitely-not-pubescent adults as teenagers is seemingly ubiquitous; if an alien were to learn about the human aging process by simply watching mainstream film and television, she would be bewildered to arrive upon Earth's surface and realize that adolescents are not all gorgeous adults, and that many have braces, acne, or both. The fact that adults play teenagers has become such a commonly recognized trope that the internet has named the phenomenon "Dawson Casting," in reference to the much-older-than high-school-aged cast of Dawson's Creek.

How your adult friendships are different from your younger ones.

Excerpt: As they move through life, people make and keep friends in different ways. Some are independent, they make friends wherever they go, and may have more friendly acquaintances than deep friendships. Others are discerning, meaning they have a few best friends they stay close with over the years, but the deep investment means that the loss of one of those friends would be devastating. The most flexible are the acquisitive—people who stay in touch with old friends, but continue to make new ones as they move through the world.

A beautiful essay on menopause. (Hmm, I was clearly thinking a lot about age this week as I clicked on links.)

Excerpt: No matter how attractive or unattractive you are, you have been used to having others look you over when you stood at the bus stop or at the chemist’s to buy tampons. They have looked you over to assess how attractive or unattractive you are, so no matter what the case, you were looked at. Those days are over; now others look straight through you, you are completely invisible to them, you have become a ghost.

Arundhati Roy on writing in English and the moral appropriateness of this.

Excerpt: Guilt in this case is an unhelpful sentiment. India as a country, a nation-state, was a British idea. So, the idea of English is as good or as bad as the idea of India itself. Writing or speaking in English is not a tribute to the British Empire, as the British imperial historian had tried to suggest to me, it is a practical solution to the circumstances created by it. Fundamentally, India is in many ways still an empire, its territories held together by its armed forces and administered from Delhi, which, for most of her subjects, is as distant as any foreign metropole. If India had broken up into language republics, like countries in Europe, then perhaps English could be done away with. But even still, not really, not any time soon. As things stand, English, although it is spoken by a small minority (which still numbers in the tens of millions), is the language of mobility, of opportunity, of the courts, of the national press, the legal fraternity, of science, engineering, and international communication. It is the language of privilege and exclusion.

Sorry folks, there's no way to live a completely ethical life.

Excerpt: In order to develop more moral behavior, it’s much more important to focus on the things we do right, and the good we can bring about—even if that’s just redress after making a wrong. The ethicist contends that there’s no need to get “snooty or grumpy” about morality. A truly ethical life is joyful, lived with a clear conscience, “knowing that we are doing the best we can, even if that means our behavior may be unsatisfactory at times,” she writes.

Baba Ramdev and his Ramdevishness continue to make excellent longform profiles.

Excerpt: In his own way, Ramdev is India’s answer to Donald Trump, and there is much speculation that he may run for prime minister himself. Like Trump, he heads a multibillion-dollar empire. And like Trump, he is a bombastic TV personality whose relationship with truth is elastic; he cannot resist a branding opportunity — his name and face are everywhere in India. In May, he announced plans to add swadeshi SIM cards to his ever-growing list of products: packaged noodles, herbal constipation remedies, floor cleaner made with cow urine. He has a gift for W.W.E.-style publicity stunts: Last year he “won” a televised bout with an Olympic wrestler from Ukraine.

Newsletter: Grey skies, happy heart

(This went out as my newsletter this week, sign up here for the latest one!)

I have a little clock which I have set on the bookshelf facing our bed, and I glance at it before I hop out of bed, to see whether I've slept in or I'm waking up early, you know, the usual time-things that take over your life from the moment you open your eyes. Beats having a cellphone next to me though, all that horrid light, all those people clamouring to be heard, no, it's better to deal with the world when you've gotten up and made your coffee and are sitting down at your laptop. (Not that this stops me having a quick look at my notifications after I get up though. I just want to make sure no one has died or the world hasn't ended while I was asleep.) Anyway this morning, I read the clock wrong, but the good news is I got an extra 45 minutes out of this day, which I am spending writing this newsletter to you. (It takes about an hour to two hours to put together this whole thing--I make notes during the week, directly on to TinyLetter's draft page, and I collect links and then the writing of it is where I join all the dots and tell you what's been happening. Fun! But a little mind-space consuming which is why programming has been slightly erratic, I'm trying to finish the edits of my book by the last weekend of this month, and it's a chore and a half, so in procrastinating and then doing, all my brain is occupied with thinking about that.)

Obviously I was doing something else the day they had the time management class in college, because I also, in addition to doing more edits, have to finish reading a very dense (but very good!) new non-fiction book for my books column this week, and once again, my week is fully booked every single evening, so it's a grand old life, but it is a busy one, not so much room to be all like, "Oh, I'll do it in a couple of hours."

This week in memories: I went to the market the other day. I don't go to the market, I prefer the market to come to me, via Grofers or Big Basket, but we were having friends over, and I suddenly started thinking about a big bowl of sliced cucumbers and carrots with a cool dip. It's the kind of snack your friends with full-time help put out all the time, and also, your friends who PLAN these things in ADVANCE, but as you know, I am neither of those groups, but our cook had just come in and we were planning to order in for dinner anyway, so I volunteered to go get that kheera-gajar (not mooli. NEVER mooli. Mooli is always the last thing on the plate after everyone has eaten around it, all the carrot-cucumber is gone, and there's the radish, left mocking you. Friends, if you want to bulk up your veggie selection and are a little short, do a batch of french fries, put out small tomatoes with olive oil and salt, roast some cauliflower, ANYTHING except the mooli which only belongs in a paratha or in a pickle. No, don't argue with me. You know I am correct.)

There are two veggie sellers in the market: the big Safal guy and the littler, more posh, private guy. It's not a big market, as far as colony markets go. There is no ATM for example, but there are two general stores and one chemist. No electrician but a dry cleaner. Two kinds of co-ops (Mother Dairy and Safal), one momo guy, one chaat guy (eh, he's okay, I find his stuff too sweet and I haven't yet dared to try his gol gappa.) One florist who is pretty good. One cigarette shop, which is useful to know. And when I went, one bhutta guy had just arrived, cart full of corn, fire not yet lit.

I asked him to make one while I finished my shopping and when I bit into that bhutta---I can't describe it. What is that nostalgia you taste with your tongue? What is the word for a familiar food that tastes exactly the same--so few things actually do--when you were six or eight or eighteen or now, at thirty six? I was all those Meenakshis at the same time, I was aware of them like Matryoshka dolls, stacked inside of me. Even Delhi, even this city, which I don't know whether I loathe or I love, probably a mixture of those two, even Delhi suddenly became filled with Context. In the monsoon season, we eat bhutta, in the winter, we eat sweet potato chaat, in the summer; well, I never really had a summer snack, so you'll have to tell me. Jamun, maybe? Mangoes? But those are not street foods, not the way that corn is, or the ridiculously tart amrak they serve with shakharkandi.

I skipped along home, eating my bhutta, devouring it, passing people who looked at me with hostility or consternation, I ate every last kernel. (I don't know why the default Delhi expression is set to "hate." Even when you go to a bar and you go to the loo and run into another woman, she'll give you this expression of pure loathing. Why? What do I remind you of?) (Except for the little girl underneath my mum's apartment yesterday. We were pulling into the parking space and she was standing there and we waited for her to move and she looked me straight in the eye and smiled. Just a smile. For a stranger. It was nice.)

This week in cool things friends are doing: Ameya is heading up Indian Express's audio division and it is A-MA-ZING. She's hosting a water podcast herself (monsoon, rivers etc) but there are other subjects too if water isn't your thing. Check it out, they're adding new shows all the time so keep an eye out! 

This week in Cool Stuff I Read On The Internet

 

I love all of this article on #MeToo and growing up in the '90s and how the latter sort of enabled the former.

 Men in that decade’s pop culture tended to be harmless – think the goofs of Seinfeld and Friends. One of the bestselling American books of the early 90s, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, reassured readers that resolving miscommunications between the sexes was actually easy, if we just understood how to do it. Solutions were big then. A couples therapist named Harville Hendrix sold hundreds of thousands of copies of a guide called Getting the Love You Want, which unravelled “the mystery of romantic attraction” and answered “humanity’s yearning” in just 384 pages.

Who makes those very, very specific T-shirts on the internet? (I keep seeing ones that say, "It's an LSR thing." (btw, you should subscribe to The Hustle newsletter, it's great.)

There’s a whole subreddit (r/TargetedShirts) with 29k users devoted to the weirdly specific t-shirts that show up in Facebook users’ feeds — shirts like “I love ANIME but JESUS always comes first,” or “I’m a VET who EATS BEEF and sings KARAOKE.”

The internet was a fine and dandy place until BLOGS came along and totally broke it. (I miss the old blogging days sometimes, but, WOW, design was so CLUNKY.)

The Internet at the time was largely populated by academics, professionals, and college students. Not everyone had the desire to publish their angsty poetry, sexcapades, or surfing habits on a daily basis; the other limiter on chrono-content was the sheer time and energy it required. Diarying was a helluva lot of work. First you had to have something to say, then write, edit it, format it, add clip art, edit your index.html, edit any prev/next links, check those links, and lastly, upload the files.

What it's like having a luxury wedding.

Celebrity performers were novel just a decade ago, but now they’re something of a norm. John Mayer, Katy Perry, and Chris Martin have all been hired to perform at private weddings. Earlier this year, both Mariah Carey and Elton John performed at the wedding of a Russian billionaire’s granddaughter, while Mark Ronson DJed. Sarah actually blames her Russian clients for the trend “because they are the people who started hiring them for everything: 18th birthday parties, 21st birthday parties, wedding anniversaries, not just weddings. They diluted the uniqueness of that. Now we have weddings where one headliner isn't enough; they need three or four. Then you hit problems as to what order do you put them on in.” Tell a big name that she’s not the headliner, and she’ll drop out.

And what it's like being a crime reporter in Mumbai. (Sidebar: No, I have not watched Sacred Games yet.)

A police officer in Dadar once told me that his biggest nightmare is the mangalsutra theft. No matter what the status of the complainant, a mangalsutra robbery is always reported. “Because the Indian Penal Code doesn’t record emotions and relationships, only crime. We then have to listen to the stories too,” he had said, of the many times he has had to comfort a crying adult, who believed the theft was a bad omen.

I normally don't link to friendship hacks because every relationship is unique and beautiful, but I loved this guide to showing up for other people so much I'm going to be borrowing from it for my own friendships.

If they tell you about a personal experience, avoid interrogating them or taking the devil’s advocate position. (The devil doesn’t need more advocates!!!) Become known as the friend who says, “I believe you.”

eM's Quick Guide To Panjim

This went out as my newsletter last week. To stay up to date, subscribe here!

Other eM's Quick Guides here.

“Holiday? Is like, what? I’m a hyperactive girl, so it may be boring for me to be on the beach doing nothing. I just need to find a place for three weeks and work but sleep in the morning, maybe write a little bit, have a glass of red wine. That’s my perfect holiday.” - French actress Melanie Laurent

  I have a new favourite city and it is Panjim. No jokes--I used to think that the only two cities I'd live in in India were Bombay or Delhi--sorry Bangalore, your water sitch scared me, but it looks like we're all in the same boat, so joke's on me! Ha-ha? (Also the Bangalore traffic, I know we have traffic in Delhi as well, but at least the roads are wider.) Anyhow, no longer! Now my number two choice of city (number one being our default home with our flat and our friends and our resources) is Panjim! So charming, but of course, I'd have to live in the Latin Quarters to feel that charm 24/7, the apartments are just apartments on roads that are just roads in small town India, nothing super charming about them.

But of course, you don't have to MOVE to Panjim to fall in love with it. You could experience it over a weekend like we did, leaving the home comforts of our friends' villa in North Goa to hunt out some City Livin' for the weekend. As a sign up in a coffee shop said, "The beach is boring." (Roxane Gay in this terrific piece sums up what we're all thinking also.)

Here's what we did. I strongly urge you to give Panjim a few days when you're next in Goa, it's almost like being abroad for a second, except with fish thaalis.

The hotel: We stayed in the lovely Latin Quarters (Fontainhas) where there are loads of little guest houses. We found ours on Booking.com, a really old house called Hospedaria Abrigo De Botelho. I chose it primarily for the long narrow wrap-around balcony that the room had on one side, the high ceilings and the ancient old bed. We looked out over tiled rooftops and there was a bonus mama cat with her kittens frolicking on a nearby roof, two of which looked remarkably like our beloved Bruno, so that was excellent.

Since it was pelting down with rain almost every day, I think we were the only guests (except a very noisy family who joined us for breakfast on the first day, playing loud Punjabi music on their mobile phones while the baby squalled. I don't know where they went after, but we missed breakfast for the next two days and didn't run into them again. Thank god. Murder has been committed for less.)

Rain check: It's so nice and quiet in Goa now. The last time I did a full-on monsoon trip, I was in my early twenties, and two girlfriends and I went to the Cavala resort in Baga beach and got SO wasted all the three nights we were there, someone tattled on us back in Bombay and I returned to long faces and lectures from the fellow I was dating then who was a First Class Fuckface (FCF). The trip was fun though, despite two days of hangover after thirteen tequila shots--uff, I will never be that young and that foolish again, which is a blessing.

We had already bought some raincoats--a  yellow button down slicker for me from Oxford stores (very well stocked, a grocery store after my own heart) and K stopped by the side of the road and got himself an orange poncho, which unfortunately also reminds us of the RSS, which is sad, that they've screwed up such a happy colour, but we should try and reclaim it. Just in time too, it rained hard all the days we were in Panjim, puttering about on the scooter.

Coffee/cozy: If you get caught in the rain, make your way to Bombay Coffee Roasters, which is part of the Old Quarters hostel. You can't miss the building, it's got a mural outside made to look like old tiles. They do this hot chocolate which is a massive square of chocolate, about the size of a baby's fist on a stick which you dunk into hot milk. Oh my god, you guys. The sitting, the hot chocolate, the rain, you'll die of coziness.

Another great place to go for coffee (and breakfast if you're up early) is Bodega. It's up a hill and behind a temple, set inside an art institute. It's essentially a courtyard surrounded by three long galleries, and it has coffee, eggs and things AND baked goods. However, do not be fooled by the fancy siren call of Eggs Benedict. I refuse to believe anyone actually loves eggs benny for the sake of eggs benny, you know? You all just think it's a damn posh breakfast or something. And sure, it's pretty, and it's time consuming to make, all that poaching, all that hollandaise, but can we just admit it's sort of... gross? Meh at the best of times. Don't @ me eggs benny lovers! I am ON TO YOU. K ordered it, because we both were slightly hypnotised by it as we always are. Eggssss Benedictttttt. It's like avocado toast, you know? The breakfast you know you should want because it's trendy and fancy but in the end, you should have just stuck to your regular toast and regular eggs.

(That ends my lecture on Eggs Benedict.)

Fish thaalis: On the first day we were there, we wended our way to Ritz Classic. Now, Ritz Classic is the place you tell people in Panjim about and they go, "Ah, Ritz Classic, obviously." It's like when someone comes to Delhi and tells you they've been to Moti Mahal or Pandara Road. You shrug like a Frenchman and go, "But of course."

From what I found out, there are several Ritz Classics, the Classicii as it were, but we went to the one Google Maps sent us to, an air conditioned place with uniformed waiters and knee deep in tables. They had put in seating everywhere, and yet there was a long line (thankfully after we were seated) and sharing tables and people just kept coming, even close to 3 pm, when the restaurant officially closes. It was worth it. The Ritz Classic thaali should be on an Intro To Fish Thaalis course, it is the baseline thaali, it is the thaali that should set expectations, only to shatter your hopes bitterly when you realise what an exception it is. On the plate: prawn curry, TWO pieces of fried fish, each so big, you'll only be able to eat one (and a half if you're lucky), a separate fish curry in a sort of recheado sauce, crabs, mussels, sol kadi, kheer--did I forget anything? Obligatory veg and that dried prawn onion thing. I ate slowly, but I did not eat it all.

On our last day, we went to Corina, another institute, but one that was so dingy it even challenged MY adventurous spirit. It's what the Panjimians call "a taverna," like the Greek (even though Corina is one of the few places that does food), so it smells of old alcoholics, and even had several tables occupied by men drinking busily. It also had the pong of a room not aired out, so while it was clean, it was not exactly appetising, even though the thaali was very good. Go here only if you have the stomach for it and would like feel like one of the locals. There was a mural outside of a man with yellow eyes and that broken vein nose of alcoholics, which I thought was very fitting.

Not a fish thaali: Just down the road from us, a fun little ramen place called Mamarama. We had passed it the day before, in the shadow of a church. We walked in the next day for lunch and heard a loud hallooo. "Guys!" and from behind the counter emerged a Delhi/Bombay/Goa friend who managed the place! Although not biased because of him, Mamarama is super cute with fun food (miso shrimp in butter mmmm) and also breakfast and coffee options if my rant about eggs benny has put you off Bodega (which it shouldn't because it's also lovely. Plus the chef there also consults here so all one umbrella really.)

Draaanks: First: Joseph's. The trendiest little dive bar, and it should be, overrun as it is with people from 99 Springboard (or is it 91? The co-working space is what I mean anyway) and in December, the entirety of the Serendipity Arts Festival descended on it. "A 100 to 200 people," another friend said, shaking his head, "They were spilling out all over the road." As they had to, Joseph's is teeeeny tiny, and that's AFTER they got rid of their taco making tenants next door and added another little room to their establishment. Joseph's is the only dive bar I know in Goa that actually sells Black Jewel and Greater Than gin, and also has Susegad beer on tap and Simba in the fridge, so okay, not very dive bar at all, except the size, the history and the bathroom, which is GENUINE dive for all you tourists, sharing space with a storage room, damp and with a hole in the ground, ominous lightbulb swinging overhead.

Joseph's doesn't do food, so the first night we set out for Clube Nacional. Newly refurbished because a year ago the roof caved in, I remember a couple of years ago, and we were charmed by how old and dingy it was (sensing a pattern here). Now though, it's like a sports bar, everything is newly done but in a bright! loud! way, so even the old uncles drinking (so many old uncles all over Panjim wanting to explain things to us. Mansplaining, Panjim edition) looked a little shell shocked in the light. The food is still really really good though--all these little stuffed pois with things in them, especially the smoked pork, mmmm. Oh, the choriz pao. What a beauty.

One night we went to Pinto's to meet friends and eat and drink as well, and there we had an excellent meal as well, but special shout out for the feijoada, which is this Portuguese dish made with kidney beans and sausage, Goan-ed up with choriz and rajma. Pinto's has a special sausage supplier, so their Goan sausages are light on the vinegar and with a more smoked flavour, and this feijoada is brought in from a nearby home, so it's a special family recipe, I believe. SO GOOD. We also ate it with a different kind of bread than what we'd been having before (I think Clube Nacional also had it). I forget the name, but it had a hard crisp shell and a steamy soft inside, and we were quite greedy about it. Almost like a dinner roll, they served it to us piping hot and you broke the bread in half along the crack on top.

Shopping: Not this time, but when we did our Panjim day trip I went to this little boutique called OMO (recommended by a friend a while ago) and got myself this incredible skirt which I am, of course, being me, saving for the right occasion which is so silly, I should just WEAR it all the time, but I want the first time to be special, you know how it is. Maybe next week when we are in Bangalore? Or maybe the week after that, back in Delhi. I love this skirt, I love its swoopy samurai shape and its high waist, so sexy and how I feel half warrior princess half ballerina. But OMO also has incredible fusion-y type clothes, the kind that I wear often, so if you're into that, definitely go check it out. (there's a Blue Tokai in the back to sweeten your deal.)

OKAY! That's my Panjim list, as always I'd love to hear your feedback, but like, not in a needy way, just in a "oh how nice that someone is reading this thing" way. No links this week, EXCEPT two that I wrote myself.

My mythology column! Last fortnight's theme (and my first) was on Mohini, Vishnu's female avatar. (New one coming out next week.)

Excerpt: How hot was Mohini? So hot that she had an off-again, on-again thing with Shiva in several tales — not quite Ross and Rachel but definitely some Jamie and Claire from Outlander vibes, where Claire's husband left behind in present-day Scotland is Parvati. There are at least three different stories where Shiva either spots her or asks Vishnu as a very special favour to produce her. In most of these stories, he's so overcome that he ejaculates immediately and his semen falls on the ground.

My book recommendation column! This month: privilege and its consequences. Very exciting books.

Excerpt:  I read one-and-a-half sports books for you, dear reader, even though the Organised Sport genre bores me to tears. Early on in Nick Hornby’s football classic Fever Pitch, I was yawning so hard I almost dislocated my jaw. [...] Here is my takeaway: Life is too short and there are too many good books in this world to bother ploughing through something that refuses to hold your interest. Move on and abandon it with, well, abandon.

Newsletter: Goa, baby

 (A little behind on posting here, so this edition is two week's old. For the latest, subscribe!)

What can I say about Goa in the monsoon that you're not already picturing in your head? It's slow, slower than usual. There are fewer people on the road, and most faces are brown. I'm just eating and sleeping and working--a lot of deadlines this past weekend meant that this newsletter is a late one--but I feel more relaxed, just by being somewhere cool and rainy. It's funny how even as a modern day human, we're as affected by the weather as our caveman ancestors. Delhi is a boiling circle of hell, at least it was when I left it, and that definitely knocked on to my mood and my energy levels. Constantly an Irritable Sloth, basically.

It's not even raining that much yet, just a few showers to punctuate the day. Over the weekend, we've booked a hotel in Panjim, and we're going to spend a few days there, but for now, we're staying with friends, lounging about on their sofa, watching the World Cup.

Yes, I am watching football! I don't know why the World Cup is the only exception I make to watching a sport game match on television, because sports = boring, there's only two outcomes: you win or you lose. There's no middle ground with sports, no shades of grey. I find that very dull. But with the football world cup, I think I invent little stories about the teams, imbibe each time with qualities of the country, plus it's quite a quick game, so you can use it to while away an hour and a half, building camaraderie and all the things one builds when one is watching a team sport. I also have made it more fun for self by picking a team out of each group, and have an ALMOST perfect score (Germany let me down). (My picks are on Twitter!)

This week in my occasionally pish-posh life: The first week we were here (last Monday? Gosh, time really HAS slowed down) K's mum was here as well. My mother-in-law, that makes her, but that is such an adult relationship--a HUSBAND, a MOTHER-IN-LAW, holy shitballs, and me only nineteen years old! (I don't think I'll ever be old enough in my head to have actual children.)

She had booked out this amazing Airbnb called Villa Josephine, somewhere in Mapusa. And if you're familiar with Goa, you're going to be like, "Mapusa? Really?" but evidently the area has some quiet roads besides the teeming main market, and Villa Josephine is one of those homes. Part of it is an old house, renovated, the other part is new made to look like old, and there are four bedrooms, which include two ENORMOUS suites, and a palm leaf shaped pool outside, and it was all very pretty and delightful. (Zero internet though, so finish your deadlines and go.)  K's mum specifically picked it because it accepted pets, so began my Month of Dogs, with Lily The Rescue Spitz, who is now a pish-posh dog in her own right.

[The other two dogs are Meghna and Ralf's--Simba the Rottie-Doberman (Roberman? Doweiler?) and Jango the indie. We have all grown very fond of each other, although I am still *slightly* intimidated by Simba, she's just so powerful looking, and her face has this stoic expression that means you can't really tell how she's feeling. However, she does like to sit next to us when we work, and she does that dog thing of sticking her tongue out and then pulling it back into her mouth, which I always associate with great contentment.]

[How are the CATS amidst all this? Well, we have left them to Najma, our housekeeper, who loves them and is used to them, so she pops by once a day to see that everything's cool, no one's starving or dying from lack of water etc. I think they'll be fine, I left TC, my old ginger cat, alone by himself for two months while I went to England with just a maid popping in and occasional friends to see that he hadn't died or anything. He was fine too, and these three have each other, although Bruno and Squishy do fight, I hope our absence means there's less to fight over.]

This week in fish thaalis: Vinayak fish thaalis, though once beloved, have seriously gone down in quality. NOT very nice. I assume the rest of the food is still good, and we are planning on going there for lunch today and trying something else, so let us see. And hope. BUT! Thanks to a prior recommendation from friends Mrig and Akshay, I remembered that there was a place in Mapusa called Spice Goa that was meant to have amazing food. ("Like Goa's Swagath," was Mrig's description.) So we went, it was super busy, but the fish thaali was elaborate and large and delicious and introduced me to the delicate lady fish in a rawa fry which was delectable.

 Eldou's while pretty has also got a not great thaali, but Goan Spice (like Spice Goa but reversed!) continues to be amazing. We have not yet ventured to Catherine's Corner, it being too rainy to go very far--also we'd have to drive by our old house and I feel this pang of jealousy when I think of someone else living there, even though we broke up with it FIRST--but we did go to Mum's Kitchen in Panjim when K's mother was here, and that was really good food too.

Panjim, on the whole, has some interesting food options, and I look forward to exploring them all over the weekend, most especially a place called Pinto's, which has not one single vegetarian item.

This week in stuff I wrote: I was hoping that my new column (!) would be up by the time I wrote this, but alas, it is still not published. I'm doing a series called Mythology for the Millennial (or something along those lines) where I take ancient stories and look at them through a modern lens, but in a chatty, pop-culture sort of way. It will be out on Firstpost! So look out for it there and I'll share a link next week.

Also my review of Sumana Roy's Missing is out in Open magazine.

Excerpt: If it is possible to make someone vanish by just talking around them, that is what has been done to this character. The more the reader learns, the less, paradoxically, do we know. It is as if Kobita is being bricked up behind a wall of description. Who is this woman, why did she leave, will she ever return? We are as helpless as Nayan, waiting for news to be spoonfed to us.

This week in stuff other people wrote

Very tempted to become an Instagram Influencer but a) don't actually want to approach people with a "HEY PLEASE GIVE ME FREE SHIT" b) it's probably not as easy as just messaging people for free shit and c) it sounds like it's damn annoying. (Also hidden caveat d: you can never bitch about anything if it's been given to you for free.)

Excerpt: “Everyone with a Facebook these days is an influencer,” she said. “People say, I want to come to the Maldives for 10 days and will do two posts on Instagram to like 2,000 followers. It's people with 600 Facebook friends saying, ‘Hi, I'm an influencer, I want to stay in your hotel for 7 days,’” she said. Others send vague one-line emails, like “I want to collaborate with you,”with no further explanation. “These people are expecting five to seven nights on average, all inclusive. Maldives is not a cheap destination.” She said that only about 10 percent of the requests she receives are worth investigating.

Good solid writing advice. I don't know why people get so pissed with advice articles. Just don't take the damn advice if it doesn't apply to you, no?

Excerpt: Many people are familiar with this kind of procrastination pattern — suddenly, the chores we’d typically die before doing become irresistible and urgent, because there’s one thing we’d rather do even less: work. I think people in most careers experience this, but writers tend to pathologize it, claiming “writer’s block” and, like, an absent “muse” or whatever.

The ugly Indian tourist. Much has been said about this phenomenon, but while much of the article is true, I think the onus of change lies with the Goa government and not with the tourists who are just coming to have a good time. Don't want people shitting everywhere? Put up free public toilets. Don't want dirty uncles on the beach? Put more cops on patrol. I mean OF COURSE the Indian tourist also has to change, but sometimes these changes have to be forced. There's no way a lot of these behaviours are going to change from within.

Excerpt: Many domestic visitors these days are what Sardesai calls ‘drive-in’ tourists. Arrivals in buses and jeeps are increasingly common for long weekend holidays. They eat food they cook themselves on stoves brought along, sleep in their vehicles or on the beach, and use the fields as toilets. “These people don’t contribute one bit to the economy,” says Sardesai, “They only clog up the beaches and streets and dirty everything. We have to stop this sort of tourist from coming in.”

Delhi's gold diggers. Um, not quite as glam as you're expecting.

Excerpt: “The gold dust gets mixed with the mud outside the workshops. We earn our living from the gold that was otherwise going to be wasted. It is quite similar to a barber’s shop. When the barber walks out of the saloon, he is bound to carry some hair on his body,” said Mohammad Salil, one of around 200 men engaged in the occupation.

A football player on being poor in his childhood. (It reveals how little I know about football by saying "a football player," he's probably really famous.)

Excerpt: I wanted to be the best footballer in Belgian history. That was my goal. Not good. Not great. The best. I played with so much anger, because of a lot of things … because of the rats running around in our apartment … because I couldn’t watch the Champions League … because of how the other parents used to look at me.

Newsletter: Rage, rage against the dying of the light

As always, you can subscribe to my newsletter here for it to arrive into your inbox instead of waiting for me to post it here! 

This week in further signifiers of my old age: I taught myself to type. I learned online--the best way--by going on chat rooms and talking to people around the world. Age 14. The internet was brand new in India, my dad needed to amuse me one long summer, so he took me with him to work every now and then, where there was an internet enabled computer. Everything took several minutes to load, but worth it. We got the internet at home, eventually, and soon the speed picked up and so did my typing skills. (You can read all about my early experiments with the internet on this longform piece I did for Yahoo Originals a few years ago.)

So, I wrote everything--six years of journalism, ten years of freelancing, almost ten years of book writing--using my two index fingers. The hunt and peck style so favoured by grannies around the world, except I can go damn fast with my hunt and peck, at my prime, I was averaging five thousand words a day without breaking a sweat. (Now I am old and my words are more considered, so it's down to 2000 including sweating.) Alas, friends! Alas for everything, because now my money makers, my two index fingers, have been FELLED by old age and greed! I started developing a TWINGE in my right forefinger which quickly became an ache which quickly became so bad that I couldn't open things or pull tabs off packets or do all the motor skills stuff you depend on your forefinger and thumb to do.

K is sadly familiar with carpal tunnel syndrome (also known as repetitive strain injury or RSI) but I was foolishly hoping to wait until I finish my next manuscript before I mentioned it, because even as I'm writing this, I'm forcing myself to try and use other fingers but I feel CRIPPLED. Anyway, the pain got too much to ignore and I started to worry about seriously doing myself an injury so now I'm wearing his old wrist guard and I've swapped my mouse around so that it's on my left side (very hard but you have to begin using your left index finger) and I'm trying to type this half on an external keyboard and half on my laptop. In the meanwhile, if any of you have done exercises for your hand and wrist with good results, please share them.

This week in VOGUE VOGUE VOGUE: Went to Sarojini Nagar with my mother--an outing we do quite a lot. I have some secret shopping places both within the large Sarojini Market, some stalls to hit which always yield good results, as well as one more export surplus-y place in East Delhi quite near her house where I always score pretty incredible accessories. I have a rule of thumb when buying stuff off the road: mostly it's about fabric. The synthetic stuff always looks cheap, unless it's got a nice geometric or some such pattern--and you're looking for BIG prints not small. Fitted dresses are tricky to figure out size for, I bought a lovely white cotton dress, but alas, it doesn't zip up all the way, so we had to go to the tailor this morning and get him to add a panel to the sides so it expands a bit. This time though, there wasn't such an embarrassment of riches as there usually is, so I think I'm going to need to make another trip soon. *yay*

Oh, the tailor! It is a temperamental shop with a revolving cast, one masterji, who I barely see and instead deal with a tall, handsome young fellow who appears to be second-in-command, but it is right down the road from me, so I go often and I am ALWAYS optimistic. There's always some dress I used to love but is now too old, too faded, too worn, and I want to revive it by giving it an all new cast and crew as it were. This time I'm aiming for a lovely grey kimono/kurta/dress thing with an orange embroidered panel at the back, and it'll either be AMAZING or.. well, it HAS to be amazing because I am paying seven hundred bucks for it, which may not sound like a lot to you, but is roughly double of what he normally charges because of the complicated sleeves and pockets and what not.

Also last week I bought a lovely dress off Olio Stories. I've been wanting to buy a dress from their website for a while, because it all looks so airy and COOL, like with-sunglasses, not temperature, but it's always been ridiculously expensive (you see how I'm wailing about 700 rups also here, so you get my general spend on clothes) but they're having a clearance sale, so you should check them out while the going's good. (Tip: everything is a bit big so even the small which I ordered is slightly loose on me, but in a nice way.) (I normally wear a medium.) (Check the size charts before you buy ANYTHING on the internet.) (The dress was cheaper when I bought it.)

This week in food and drink: Have all the men left after all that chat about clothes? WELL ANYWAY, I am now going to talk about sausages which is a very manly food--both in shape and in cooking techniques, so come back, men!

Vir Sanghvi just wrote a long wailing column about how there were no good sausages to be had in Delhi, unless you go to the OBEROI, DAHLING, but only because they export everything. Now, Vir Sanghvi is very posh and I am not, so I have ONE WORD to say to him, and that word is Pigpo. Pigpo continues to knock it out of the park in terms of sausages. I am no connoisseur, unlike certain Germans in my life, but the teeny Pigpo sausages, about the size of your thumb, are delicious, freeze well and are incredibly easy to just pop into a pan. With them, last week, I made Instant Pot Mashed Potatoes off this recipe from Lifehacker, which you can also make in your pressure cooker. I substituted the half and half mentioned with coconut milk, and they came out just as creamy and no lingering coconut flavour also. (I seriously pop coconut milk into so many things these days that I've just begun buying loads each time I do.)

Sadly, Pigpo is very far away from me, and while the meat delivery website Lionfresh looks nice and all, it is really only Pigpo I crave. Next time I'm just going to buy two kilos and freeze all of it. Instant sausage fest! Perfect for Sunday night with Netflix.

Wednesday Link List!

When Harry Met Sally is definitely on my top five list of best movie of all time. ALL TIME!

Excerpt: Perhaps because Ephron took so much from real life, When Harry Met Sally is a surprisingly grounded romantic comedy. It’s made up largely of low-stakes hangout scenes that have more in common with today’s more realistic rom-coms than they do the glossy rom-coms of the 2000s. For instance, the film contains perhaps the most hilariously accurate depiction of a game of Pictionary
ever captured on screen. Although the dialogue often has the patter of a play, Reiner and Ephron anchor those well-written conversations in the natural milieu of New York City life. Harry and Sally discuss their dating lives while unrolling a rug or wandering through Central Park or spending a day at The Met, delivering silly banter in goofy voices.

Basically: eat your vegetables.

Excerpt: The body detoxifies itself daily; that’s a primary job of the liver and the kidneys, and they are really good at it. (The intestines, spleen, and immune system are in on it, too.) So, you want to take good care of your liver and kidneys, gut, and immune system. That’s a far better “cleanse” than any juice. How do you take good care of all your detoxifying organ systems? By taking good care of yourself, of course. That means eating well, not smoking, exercising, sleeping enough, managing your stress, and so on.

Why should you care about all that Facebook stuff?

Excerpt: If you keep secrets about yourself, even innocuous ones, Facebook is likely aware of them in some capacity thanks to the sites you visit, the profiles you linger over, the comments you leave. And it’s not comforting to think that you’re not in charge of that data. Remember when we found out the NSA was spying on everyone, and people argued that “if you have nothing to hide then you shouldn’t be worried”? This feels kind of like that. You should care about what companies can learn about you without your permission, and what data they can retain against your wishes.

Three links about pets this week because I will read anything domestic companion animal related. (Sadly, these are all about dogs, but they should get some internet love too.) (Dammit, I want a dog for my collection.)

Who is my dog? This writer did a DNA test on her mutt.

Excerpt: Oh, you would like to know even more about Peter? If you insist. He has velvet ears. He has a spotted tongue. When he walks down the stairs, at his moderately paced gentleman’s trot, you can tell he’s a bit bow-legged. He has the heart of an angel and the soul of a poet, and there’s a hint of sadness to him that makes you want to protect him against all of the world’s harshness. He has whiskers that are so prominent they make you second-guess whether whiskers are a typical dog trait, or whether he could potentially be part mouse. He will sit his big, fat butt on your lap like he’s tiny, when he is actually 25 pounds. He’s affectionate, but not needy. “He’s just so...kind,” is how a cousin of mine once described him, and it’s true: he’s just so kind. Also he loves to burrow under the covers, and he loves to sleep with his head on a pillow like a tiny little man.

We treat our pets around the same way ancient cave people treated THEIR pets.

Excerpt: As civilization proceeded and small-scale hunter-gatherer societies gave way to urban elites and subservient rural populations, pet keeping entered a completely new phase. In the generally egalitarian communities of the Paleolithic everyone could keep animals as companions, whereas in the highly stratified societies of the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman empires, right up until the twentieth century, the poorest had little opportunity to acquire pets for their own sake. That’s not to say that they didn’t feel affection for dogs and cats, but those animals had to earn their keep. The surviving evidence generally suggests that from the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries bce) until the end of the nineteenth century, pets played a part in the lives of the wealthiest members of society. As the less well-off inevitably left fewer traces of their lives, we can only guess at how they interacted with their animals; no doubt they had less time and fewer resources to devote to them. Not until the nineteenth century, with the rise of the middle classes, did the keeping of pets for their own sake become widespread once more.

The long and complicated relationship between humans and wolves.

Excerpt: It is alarming, although perhaps predictable, that in the US attitudes toward wolves are becoming divided along political lines, with Republicans continuing to introduce and support laws that restrict or persecute them, while First Nations people and many Democrats are much more tolerant, or even encouraging, of the animals. In Europe, by contrast, a more easygoing relationship is being established, as was demonstrated in 2016 when one of the first wolves to enter the Netherlands in centuries crossed the border from Germany. It wandered the streets of a village for several days, the sanguine Dutch displaying little more than minor concern. Elsewhere in Europe, however, where wolves cause more harm to livestock, schemes are in place whereby farmers are compensated by the EU for losses to their flocks. Conflict between wolves and humans in Europe will doubtless continue, but in Europe wolves have a bright future, in part because most landowners seem willing to abide by laws and regulations formulated to address their interactions with the animals. In the US, however, wolves continue to be shot whenever they encroach onto private land. As a result, today more wolves can be found in Europe than in all the US, including Alaska, despite the fact that Europe’s human population is more than twice as large as that of the US.

Hello, Khaan E Khaaaaas?

(This appeared in The City Story a while ago)

(Here's another post (sorta) about Khaan e Khaas as well)

I've always been a Delhi-ite by fate and geography. A “Delhicacy” if you will. I never had my year abroad like all my friends seemed to do straight from undergrad to a post-graduate degree somewhere cold, where they learned life skills and how to speak precisely when they wanted something. I stayed fluttering and vague, making long jazz hands mixed with ballet arms when I couldn't correctly express what I wanted to convey. Delhi was where I moved to at three weeks old, after having been born in my mother's hometown in Hyderabad, and Delhi was where I stayed ever since—till the time I was twenty five.

And then I moved to Bombay on a whim. This was my “year abroad,” as foreign a place to me as Warwick or Hamburg or New York were to my friends. I entered the city with my eyes wide, gazing up at the big buildings where someone's light was always on, no matter what time of night. I learned to navigate a system completely alien to the one I knew. I was only one thousand three hundred and eighty four kilometres away from home, but it felt as new to me as it must have done for Vasco Da Gama arriving south of where I was a few centuries ago.

Of course I loved it. What 25 year old woman wouldn't? I was free, anonymous and cavorting about the city at a rate that belied my rapidly dwindling finances. (Turns out journalism isn't the kind of job that lets you not only live without roommates but also eat in fancy places, so Carrie Bradshaw lied to us all.) However, I had moments of abject loneliness. I dreamt real estate dreams—where one of the rooms of my tiny shared flat had a hidden door, and when I opened it, I saw more rooms, more space. Sometimes, I ordered kaali daal three days in a row, just for that Delhi feeling, only to get a Gujju, Maharashtrian or foreigner-spiceless version of it. I wanted the food I had grown up with, because sometimes you long for comfort food, and the only thing that can ease your homesickness is a kebab roll without a whole lot of masala in it—just a smear of green chutney, onions on the side, thanks.

It was one of those Sunday afternoons, on a particularly blue Missing Delhi day that I discovered Khaan-e-Khaas. Maybe “discovered” is the wrong word, after all, friends had been feeding me their prawn biryani in the middle of the night for several months. What I wanted though was a Sunday afternoon feeling, and how do you translate that into a menu? Turns out you can. While perusing the dishes on offer (long before Zomato, I used the paper version that came with a bag of home delivery) I found Punjabi mutton curry. Two years of finding kari-patta in all my curries, whether North, South or Chinese had made me wary, but I decided to give it a go anyway.

Reader, I married it. Okay, not quite literally, but this, this was what my soul and my stomach had been crying out for. It was so authentic, I had probably only eaten versions at friends homes, it came with hot steamed basmati rice, and plump potatos cooked in the gravy, the mutton so tender, it fell off the bone. I ate a big lunch, all on my own, and then napped all afternoon, the humid air outside feeling almost like I was in the middle of a Delhi summer with a water cooler rumbling in the corner of the room, the evocative smell of khus making dreams even sweeter.

I held that mutton curry as a secret weapon when Bombay got too much, and if you've lived there for a long time, you know the too much I refer to. I grew to love the sound of the male voice on the other end of the phone when I called to order, “Hello Khaan-e-Khaas?” saying it almost musically. My friends stuck to the rolls and the biryani, and I didn't think that mutton curry was for sharing anyway. It belonged to my own personal private store of memories, home food when you're away from home, a South Indian lady with Punjabi cravings in Maharashtra.