Up and down the whole hungry longitude
Published on September 14, 2023
On the corner of Rampart Row, across from Rhythm House in Bombay’s Kala Ghoda district, poet and artist Arun Kolatkar sits at a table at the Wayside Inn. It is a Thursday afternoon in the 1960s, and like every other Thursday, Kolatkar is gradually joined by friends and acquaintances – painters, poets, editors – who drop in for a conversation
From Chapati to Bread: Of New Dietary Belongings
Published on August 31, 2023
Eating food that is not prepared at home is a significant kind of eating that has risen with the growth of restaurants and cafés (Bhatia, 2022). While family meals are an interesting situation allowing us to study the relationship between food content and social setting, equally important are other situations of eating such as snacking,
The Social Life of Food in Indian Cinema
Published on August 17, 2023
In The Lunchbox (Dir: Ritesh Batra), a 2013 Hindi film about an epistolary romance in Mumbai, a series of montages shows the lead character Ila cooking a host of dishes. Not for her husband, but for a man called Sajan Fernandes who she only knows through letters exchanged via wrongly delivered dabbas meant for her husband.
A Table for One, Please
Published on August 10, 2023
It was many moons ago that I had said those words for the very first time. What had then been a herculean quest, of walking into the Odeon cinema on the corner of New Street, had my young voice quivering at the moment of getting popcorn, my knees cold as I sat facing the screen in the dark. I no longer recall the film,
Expected Time of Arrival
Published on August 2, 2023
Expected Time of Arrival AUTHOR Stuti Bhavsar With the promise of promptness, Swiggy was accompanied by other food-based apps on my phone with 10- to 20-minute delivery as their USP – BlinkIt with its compression of time into a blink, BigBasket Now, where the now is conceived as an instance, or Zepto, which announces itself […]
How Many Lives Does A Fruit Live?
Published on July 27, 2023
How Many Lives Does A Fruit Live? AUTHOR Shankar Tripathi It was always the smell that first caught my attention. A smorgasbord of musky vapours, the room would be filled with its wafting hints of banana, pineapple, and rotten onion. Riveted to the ground, I would find myself carefully examining its cleft parts, wondering how […]
Shokher Ilish : Of Nostalgia, Nation-States, and the Cultural Connotations of Food in Zones of Conflict
Published on July 20, 2023
Shokher Ilish : Of Nostalgia, Nation-States, and the Cultural Connotations of Food in Zones of Conflict AUTHOR Ankita Ghosh Two weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, contemporary artist Zhana Kadyrova was one amongst thousands of Ukranians who had no choice but to flee their homes in search of safer horizons. While her family moved […]
Imagined and Lived Spaces of the Queer Kitchen
Published on July 12, 2023
Imagined and Lived Spaces of the Queer Kitchen AUTHOR Upasana Das Rukmini Srinivas writes, in Tiffin: Memories and Recipes of Indian Vegetarian Food: “My mother, whom I lovingly call Amma, spent much time and thought in the preparation of the ‘everyday’ tiffin for me and my seven sisters…the tiffin that Amma made, usually one savoury […]
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