FOOD

Imagine you are standing in your kitchen. There aren’t enough vegetables and you are wondering what to cook. You step out into your backyard or a nearby open space, return…

I remember it being a summer day when I called my mother in a panic. “Ma, I burnt my dal!” I exclaimed. “How?” She asked, laughing about how she could…

Like every year, in the week leading up to Onam, my social media feed has been inundated with white-and-gold kasavu sarees, Onam sales, recipes for payasam, and recommendations for the…

On cooking, memory, and the styles we inherit Of all the things that distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom, perhaps none is more quietly radical than this:…

Growing up, as it is for most children, green vegetables were my most dreaded enemy. For a long time, I survived solely on butter, seni (sugar) and bhat (rice), and…

Inside the sacred pit, weapon practice, and daily discipline of the form. My day does not begin with the sharp buzz of a phone, but with an internal rhythm that…

Where appetite follows ritual, and a town learns to wait together At 10:45 each morning in Rajasthan’s temple town of Nathdwara, about an hour from Udaipur, the bazaar continues as…

The simple meal of rice and moong dal, cooked with vegetables and served alongside fried plantains, was devoid of color. The boy’s eyes met mine with a look of hesitation,…

Against the backdrop of rivers that skirt the highway, snack foods between temple towns appear like edible chronicles of culture, carrying imprints of pilgrimage, agricultural produce, and kitchen instinct in…

Cosmopolitan cities build their food canons in strange ways. Some parts are written – into cookbooks, formalised into recipes, or documented as part of history, appearing to be the very…

Sometimes the route you take regularly, day after day, reveals newness in ways you don’t expect. I was walking my dog, Ladoo, in a Hauz Khas district park . It…

Smoke billows from the image my Dad has sent me from his paternal village near Navsari, which I am looking at on my phone on a cool January morning in…

My Amma (mum) was born in this tiny little house (top right) where she lived with her mum and 6 siblings. Her dad was a taxi driver in Bombay back…

A culinary exploration of tradition through ancestry, loss and experimentation The pleasant chill surrounds the city and welcomes a tolerable winter, relieved from the painful rain that still transpires unexpectedly…

The fall of the Mongol empire began, if the amalgamation of legends is to be believed, with a pastry. By the late 14th century, after nearly ninety years of Mongol…

On social media, there exists a multitude of videos where people share their culinary heritage in the form of a much beloved recipe that has been in the family through…

Of all the aspects of a journey that linger long after the moment has passed, why is it that food take on such a disproportionately prominent role? Siddharth Dasgupta allows…

The figure of maternal grandmother is no nostalgia or a memory of holidays to me. She is intrinsic to my everyday from childhood to hitherto. She is the cornerstone to…

How? You’re thinking— How can there exist a manifesto of inflorescence? Manifestoes are nothing like flowers. They are loud, histrionic, didactic, ideological; they chronicle wrongs, they make revelations, tell truths,…