Delhi: lunch and animals

December 29, 2014 • 7:28 am

I’ve managed to download my photos up to today’s batch, but posting them here is interminably slow. What I’ll do, then, is just show you what I had to eat today when I took the bus into Central Delhi for shopping, and the animals I saw along the way.

First, of course, the noms, which I had at one of my favorite restaurants in central Delhi (Connaught Place): the Vega restaurant in the Alka Hotel. It’s upscale vegetarian, absolutely scrumptious, and the place makes a great thali, which is what you’ll see in the second photo.

First course: a tasty savoury tomato broth served with a glass of sweetened and spiced buttermilk. (Note: the food photos aren’t sharp because I took them hand-held without flash, it was dark, and the exposure time was about a quarter of a second.)

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The main meal is a thali: a typical Indian meal served on a flat metal tray (the thali itself) containing numerous portions of different dishes served in metal bowls called katoris. In the center is your starch: usually breads in northern India and rice in Bengal and the south. It’s all-you-can-eat: servers come by regularly asking you if you want this or that katori refilled.

Here are the dishes in this thali, starting at 1 pm and going clockwise: a dahi vada, a southern Indian lentil dumpling in a slightly sweetened yogurt sauce; dal (lentils); sag paneer (spinach with Indian cheese cubes); stewed tomatoes in a spicy sauce; mattar paneer (peas in tomato sauce, again with cheese cubes); above that katori is a pakora (fried vegetable fritter); at nine o’clock is a gulab jamun, a deep-fried sweet in syrup that is part of dessert; fruits with spices and a bit of salt; tomato, lime, and onion garnish; and, in the center, three kinds of bread, including a crisp papadum (they offered me rice, too). As I said, you can get refills on everything but the sweet.

As always in India, I ate it with my hands—or rather the right hand only, for reasons that will be familiar to those who travel in this land. You use the bread to scoop up the other stuff. It’s a bit messier if you have rice!

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And the best part for me of the thali at the Vega: a village-style kulfi—Indian ice cream made in small, hand-thrown clay pots (sealed with a strip of dough), and frozen by being agitated in a bath of ice, water, and salt. It’s flavored with cardamon and other spices, has a slightly granular texture, and to me is the world’s best frozen dessert—aside from the burnt-sugar ice cream at Christina’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This kulfi is scooped out of the clay pot with a sturdy sliver of bamboo.

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Walking to the bus I saw three species of animals all together. Can you identify them? (Don’t overlook the mammal.)

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How about this bird?

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The campus at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where I’m staying, is a large patch of forest surrounded by urban Delhi. But it’s big enough to harbor substantial wildlife, including the parrots above, two species of deer (including the sambar), and the species shown below, which, though blurry, is not introduced—it’s native to this area. These are real endemic peacocks, and they (like the deer) play hob with my host’s garden. It’s hard to photograph them as they don’t appear often and they’re quite skittish. But I’m told the males do fly up pretty high and perch on branches.

This guy’s tail looks a bit frayed; I doubt he’ll be getting lucky any time soon:

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Finally, another blurry songster, which I’m sure some readers can identify but to me is just “another brown bird.” It could be the same species shown three photos above. Enlighten me!

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59 thoughts on “Delhi: lunch and animals”

  3. “How about this bird?”

    I think this is a ring-necked parakeet (in German: Halsbandsittich), Psittacula krameri, a girl.

    We have a stable population here in Cologne, Germany.

    1. You beat me to it, that’s exactly what it is. They are very common in the pet trade. They come most commonly in green and blue, although there is an albino mutation available as well.

      2. “Little brown jobbie”.
        There is scatological content there, but the under 10s probably wouldn’t recognise it. Unless they grew up in Glasgow, in which case they’re probably firmly beyond redemption already.

          1. The Yin himself.
            And he gets to go bubble-ubble – Bible (Autocorrect strikes again!) without flashing his AmEx card. Jammy wee weegie.

  5. As already mentioned, the parakeet is a Ring-necked Parakeet, Psittacula krameri. The two birds behind it are babblers and could well be, as you say, the same species as in the last photo. Afraid I can’t help with the mammal.

    The next photo is of a Common Myna, Acridotheres tristis. The last photo is of a babbler, probably Jungle Babbler, Turdoides striatus.

  7. The rose-ringed parakeet can now be found in many cities around the world, including London. The mynah bird also has feral populations in various places and is a bit of a pest in some.
    When I worked in Saudi Arabia we had both rose-ringed parakeets and common mynah birds in the eucalyptus trees in the garden. All three species introduced.

    1. Jerry’s quite fond of biogeography as being some of the best evidence for Evolution…but your example makes it pretty clear that that evidence is being obliterated by humans. One can only wonder what a paleontologist will think of the current period an hundred million years from now….

      b&

        1. And with that comment, you finally stirred me to look whether they originated in Norway. The thought had occurred that that might have been a way for Linnaeus to cast aspersions on Norway, but seems the British are responsible for the misnomer a few decades earlier (and they’re thought to have come from China).

          1. Similar mis-naming is found in various species of roaches. The American, German, and Oriental roaches do not originate from where their names suggest.

      1. Yup. Chipmunk in size and coloration, squirrel in every other respect (bushy tail, nests in the trees). They are super duper cute and the Hindus hold them sacred.

  10. OMG a chippy-like squirrel? I never think about those animals being in India! How cute to see all those birds together with him!

    I love the last brown bird that Stephen identified upthread. Looks very thrush like & the way it is sitting suggests a rather ho-hum attitude toward its day. 🙂

  11. Today’s Cryptoquip in the Denver Post:

    “Embroidered mats created by a Spanish impressionist in an Indian city:

    Dali’s Delhi Doilies.”

    Be well!

      2. I attended a lecture by the famous Leon Krier this year at the University of Colorado – Denver School of Architecture. I had an opportunity to meet him and spend a few minutes talking about our shared Luxembourger heritage. It was an exciting moment for me. I even had my picture taken with him.

  12. Saw mynahs in Australia and experienced an amusing confusion. A Sydneysider friend insisted there were native and exotic mynahs in Oz but I knew that mynahs were introduced and there were no native species. Eventually I realized that he had heard the name ‘miner’ in regards to the native Noisy Miner (a kind of Australian honeyeater) and because Australian is a non-rhotic lamguage the names had sounded the same to him.

    1. Huh, fancy that, I had no idea the native and imported miners/mynahs were spelled differently, or that they were not closely related. Learn something new every day!

  14. Oooh, noms & critters together! Nice treat.

    Afraid I would hate eating with only my hand, though. (Nor do I like chopsticks–such a philistine.)

    1. I’d love eating with my hands but note the plural. I really hate leaving Sinister out so I know I’d try not to but I’d probably end up using my left hand by accident & offend people. I am not strongly right dominant to choosing a hand is difficult for me.

      1. I had a crazy math teacher colleague who would freak out the kids by writing on the board with both hands at the same time and meeting in the middle.Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 02:59:25 +0000 To: merilee@sympatico.ca

        1. Now that was done, in the legalistic language, with malice aforethought. Kudos!
          I taught myself to write right – handed, all 4 ways one summer between mapping and Mull. But I’ve rarely used it since. Last week I was ha – ha considering doing a Houdini and using my feet.

          2. Right handed plus both of left-to-right and right-to-left (the da Vinci options) and right-side-up versus upside-down (the “I can read what the boss is writing” trick, but for writing). 4 ways by 2 hands for 8 possibilities. 16 if you take the Houndini option in, ermmm, foot.
            I stopped when I had for them all to similar degrees of legibility to my main script. Which is as legible as a pre-computer medical doctor’s prescription – notoriously bad.

      2. I grew up in India, and I can assure you that almost no one in India would get offended if you use your left hand to eat most food. It is considered a part of formal dining etiquette to use your right hand to eat rice and bread, but when it comes to snacks and finger food, all bets are off.

        Also, there is a much more prosaic reason (compared to the tongue-in-cheek one mentioned in the post) to use the right hand: most of the population in India (as is the case elsewhere) is right handed, and I can tell you from personal experience it is really hard to break rotis using only our left hand if you are not left-handed.

      3. To add to my last comment, in the part of India I call home, the formal etiquette in fact demands that you you use your left hand to pick up your glass/pot of water (and not the right hand, which in the meanwhile is presumably busy handling rotis and rice).

    2. I recently spent two weeks on Mauritius attending a Hindu wedding. These things go for days and days, and there is food after every ceremony, usually with no utensils provided so eating with the fingers is unavoidable. I am not a fan of eating with fingers I have to say, though I did get better at it. Fortunately the Mauritians are not too bothered about only eating with the right hand, and were prepared to use both hands to break up the bread. It’s really hard to tear bread up one-handed. I think I’ll stick to at least a spoon or chopsticks.

      1. As I said in my comment above, no one in India either is bother too much by eating with your left hand—it is just considered formal etiquette to use your right hand for rotis and rice.

        Also, while I can easily break Indian breads (rotis and naans, for example) with one hand, I would be at a complete loss to do that with a knife, spoon or chopsticks.

  17. I really enjoy your website; food, cats and utter godlessness! You’ve made me incredibly hungry for a curry today though. We live in Dubai so that isn’t too difficult a problem to solve.

    Happy (belated) Birthday, and a happy and healthy New Year!

    Rhonda

  19. I’m an ex-JNU person, got my phD this year from there (in computational biology), a cat-lover and regular lurker here. Some of my friends regularly photograph the wildlife here ( example : https://www.facebook.com/AtulJaiswalPhotography ). The brown birds are jungle babblers, called Saat behna or ‘Seven sisters’, because you always see them in groups of seven or more, continuously arguing, in an extremely comical way. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_babbler ). The other brown bird is a common Mynah, rose-ringed parakeets, and the mammal, northern palm squirrel, I think. No need to introduce the peacock. Wonder if Jerry has seen the Nilgai, which lurk unafraid in JNU. There are also jackals, porcupines, mongoose-like critters which are seen at night, if you are very lucky.

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