Indian food is addictive. To start with it’s like ‘curry for breakfast,lunch and dinner’ – hmmmm…. But Indian food isn’t really about just eating for the need of it. It’s an experience of taste bud adventure pretty much every meal. In fact the whole Indian experience is a bit like a macrocosm of the eating experience.
Imagine one night I stayed with the police near Bikaner (I ended up sleeping next to the sargeant who farted for a good 10 seconds after he hawked up a good wad of phlegm and got into bed with me). I was told I could eat in the mess area. I got my sleeping stuff sorted, had a wash and headed over there. I was presented with a meal that consisted of a bowl of spicy creamy soup, chapati, a dish with freshly cut radish, lime,and raw onions, salt, a bowl of mango chutney, a glass of whisky, a glass of douk (yoghurt drink). Smooth, spicy, pungent, hot, aromatic, rough, tangy, nutty, creamy.
My clearest memory of eating this concoction, along with the vision and thoughts of what it would do to my stomach (then reassuring myself that it was sure to have some kind of cleansing, or detoxing effect), is of each mouthful pulling my taste buds to extremes, riding a wave of sour, hot, burning, cool. I was a sailor on the high seas of a randonee gastronomique. Whisky shouldn’t be taken with food should it? Is this normal? Radish and whisky? What? I wasn’t dead or comatose yet.
India is sometimes a bit like this. Some situations make my brain spout so many questions and seem to break so many rules of accepted concepts that it goes clean into overload, spitting me out into a place of passive observation, careless acceptance, helpless wonderment, happy entertainment. A bit like Donnie Darko’s face in the film of the same name when he is being questioned during hypnosis on the couch by the psychiatrist. Smug, childlike, gormlessness.
Sometimes I am tempted to try and understand. My brain starts offering too many linkages and to attempt to record the thoughts would pulverise many a pen and collapse many a keyboard. I stop and just accept the best thing is document whats going on at the time and maybe try and make sense of it later. Experiences are so varied and often unique to anything I’ve experienced before.
For example, being on a holy mountain, meeting an ascetic smoking opium with his colleagues, giving a packet of pineapple biscuits to Jain pilgrims making a very fast walking pace up the 22km climb to the town of Mount Abu (he actually overtook me at one point), being in wonderful awe of the exotic palm trees and tropical plants and trees, watching the monkeys frolicking by the road side, becoming uttering euphoric at the loneliness and freedom of slowly crawling up the climb, high on caffeine, fresh air, stunning scenery, Richie Hawtin, a tractor with a trailer containing a man in an orange sheet waving at me puffing away at his pipe.
Then arriving and realising that the town of Mount Abu contained hotels, Buffalos lying in rubbish, a river so polluted that it looked like treacle, with paint chucked in for good measure. Reams of wide boy touts asking me if I wanted a room, poorly designed hotels (disgustingly bad yuuuuccckkk – one looked like a miniature office block- I’ve never seen anything look so out of place with gaudy red and big reflective windows). Piles of rubbish, begging children with tangled matted hair asking for shampoo, dirty and wild.
The sun was setting on my hopes of finding a quiet place to put my tent next to the holy lake Nakki which was apparently scraped out by the fingernails of a god. Feeling confused and unsettled, I asked at the police station. This ended me up in a free hotel room and in a fancy restaurant scoffing piles of Gujarati Thali which involved being given a plate with around 8 dishes on it,sweet, sour,veg, salty cake, chutney, chapati, rice, chocolate brownie, soup, daal, aloo, sabzi etc.
As soon as you make a dent in the food it’s immediately refilled with a joyful-vengeance-like-efficiency. The restaurant owner was friends with the police sergeant who put in a good word for me. Incapable of cognitive thought I ate until I realised that if I ate any more I would vomit.
Then I realised I could not allow myself to waste food. I had been so greedy. I had seen children who looked hungry, people who were fasting for their own reasons, people trying to make a few rupees.Relatively rich tourists who I imagined thought nothing of consuming the swathes of food and cooing over the different dishes and the exotic flavours and the shear range of stuff- me included. Young Indian couples schmoozing together. I imagined they had escaped the watchful eye of their parents. In fact attitudes and traditions are vastly varied in terms of Indian’s sticking to them.
So I finished my food feeling like the Vicar of Dibley in the Christmas episode when she is packing in the brussel sprouts.
Some of the child beggars are half naked and I look at them with complete inability to process what I am seeing. Like I am watching Oliver Twist at the theatre or an extra from a film set. Is this real? My brain has seen sights like this on television. How do I react to television? Do nothing.
Turn it off. Wheres the standby button? Spoilt child kicks in. Why can’t I rid myself of these realistic visions? Anger. Leave me, you are confusing me. What are a few rupees going to help you with anyway? Shouldn’t someone be doing something about this? Is this all organised by some kind of Fagin character?
Another facet of the Indian experience – frustration, controlling one’s reaction, bringing out your inner demons and tolerating the reams of people and the idiosyncracies. Tolerance is preached and a necessary requirement in a country with the second largest population after china at just over a billion.
Indian Food
Indian food is addictive. To start with it’s like ‘curry for breakfast,lunch and dinner’ – hmmmm…. But Indian food isn’t really about just eating for the need of it. It’s an experience of taste bud adventure pretty much every meal. In fact the whole Indian experience is a bit like a macrocosm of the eating experience.
Imagine one night I stayed with the police near Bikaner (I ended up sleeping next to the sargeant who farted for a good 10 seconds after he hawked up a good wad of phlegm and got into bed with me). I was told I could eat in the mess area. I got my sleeping stuff sorted, had a wash and headed over there. I was presented with a meal that consisted of a bowl of spicy creamy soup, chapati, a dish with freshly cut radish, lime,and raw onions, salt, a bowl of mango chutney, a glass of whisky, a glass of douk (yoghurt drink). Smooth, spicy, pungent, hot, aromatic, rough, tangy, nutty, creamy.
My clearest memory of eating this concoction, along with the vision and thoughts of what it would do to my stomach (then reassuring myself that it was sure to have some kind of cleansing, or detoxing effect), is of each mouthful pulling my taste buds to extremes, riding a wave of sour, hot, burning, cool. I was a sailor on the high seas of a randonee gastronomique. Whisky shouldn’t be taken with food should it? Is this normal? Radish and whisky? What? I wasn’t dead or comatose yet.
India is sometimes a bit like this. Some situations make my brain spout so many questions and seem to break so many rules of accepted concepts that it goes clean into overload, spitting me out into a place of passive observation, careless acceptance, helpless wonderment, happy entertainment. A bit like Donnie Darko’s face in the film of the same name when he is being questioned during hypnosis on the couch by the psychiatrist. Smug, childlike, gormlessness.
Sometimes I am tempted to try and understand. My brain starts offering too many linkages and to attempt to record the thoughts would pulverise many a pen and collapse many a keyboard. I stop and just accept the best thing is document whats going on at the time and maybe try and make sense of it later. Experiences are so varied and often unique to anything I’ve experienced before.
For example, being on a holy mountain, meeting an ascetic smoking opium with his colleagues, giving a packet of pineapple biscuits to Jain pilgrims making a very fast walking pace up the 22km climb to the town of Mount Abu (he actually overtook me at one point), being in wonderful awe of the exotic palm trees and tropical plants and trees, watching the monkeys frolicking by the road side, becoming uttering euphoric at the loneliness and freedom of slowly crawling up the climb, high on caffeine, fresh air, stunning scenery, Richie Hawtin, a tractor with a trailer containing a man in an orange sheet waving at me puffing away at his pipe.
Then arriving and realising that the town of Mount Abu contained hotels, Buffalos lying in rubbish, a river so polluted that it looked like treacle, with paint chucked in for good measure. Reams of wide boy touts asking me if I wanted a room, poorly designed hotels (disgustingly bad yuuuuccckkk – one looked like a miniature office block- I’ve never seen anything look so out of place with gaudy red and big reflective windows). Piles of rubbish, begging children with tangled matted hair asking for shampoo, dirty and wild.
The sun was setting on my hopes of finding a quiet place to put my tent next to the holy lake Nakki which was apparently scraped out by the fingernails of a god. Feeling confused and unsettled, I asked at the police station. This ended me up in a free hotel room and in a fancy restaurant scoffing piles of Gujarati Thali which involved being given a plate with around 8 dishes on it,sweet, sour,veg, salty cake, chutney, chapati, rice, chocolate brownie, soup, daal, aloo, sabzi etc.
As soon as you make a dent in the food it’s immediately refilled with a joyful-vengeance-like-efficiency. The restaurant owner was friends with the police sergeant who put in a good word for me. Incapable of cognitive thought I ate until I realised that if I ate any more I would vomit.
Then I realised I could not allow myself to waste food. I had been so greedy. I had seen children who looked hungry, people who were fasting for their own reasons, people trying to make a few rupees.Relatively rich tourists who I imagined thought nothing of consuming the swathes of food and cooing over the different dishes and the exotic flavours and the shear range of stuff- me included. Young Indian couples schmoozing together. I imagined they had escaped the watchful eye of their parents. In fact attitudes and traditions are vastly varied in terms of Indian’s sticking to them.
So I finished my food feeling like the Vicar of Dibley in the Christmas episode when she is packing in the brussel sprouts.
Some of the child beggars are half naked and I look at them with complete inability to process what I am seeing. Like I am watching Oliver Twist at the theatre or an extra from a film set. Is this real? My brain has seen sights like this on television. How do I react to television? Do nothing.
Turn it off. Wheres the standby button? Spoilt child kicks in. Why can’t I rid myself of these realistic visions? Anger. Leave me, you are confusing me. What are a few rupees going to help you with anyway? Shouldn’t someone be doing something about this? Is this all organised by some kind of Fagin character?
Another facet of the Indian experience – frustration, controlling one’s reaction, bringing out your inner demons and tolerating the reams of people and the idiosyncracies. Tolerance is preached and a necessary requirement in a country with the second largest population after china at just over a billion.
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