One of the purposes of this blog was to record something about the food we have come across in India and although we have eaten in dozens of restaurants and have been cooking at home since February, I have given food little space in my postings so far. So now to redress the balance, but, where to start?
Well, let’s begin with the basics. There are onions and potatoes in abundance of course and it is not difficult to find cauliflower. More unusual, at least for me as I don’t normally eat it, is okra (known here as bhindi), which makes a fantastic spiced dish (any vegetable dish with oil and spices is called Subzi in Gujarat) because it softens up deliciously and soaks the spices up. There are also plump, round and deep purple aubergines (brinjal or bengen), which I have taken to cutting into cubes and adding to Toor dal when I make it in the pressure cooker. This has turned out to be the key to making proper dal (if I can call my attempts that), because the lentils never quite break down in the right way if only cooked in a pan. Yes it is potentially dangerous, but I have the hang of it now and always stay on the alert for an explosion of super hot liquid when the pressure is building, just in case.
Of course there are lumpen carrots too and oblong tomatoes. We also buy corn on the cob when we fancy a break from dal and rotis. The corn is imported from the US. We can get peas in the pod, French beans and green peppers, as well as spinach (palak) to keep up our green vegetables quota. All of this is cheap and usually good quality. Although we’ve been intending since the start of the year to buy vegetables from the roadside stalls and roving sellers (whose incomprehensible calls and creaking carts haunt me in the mornings), we’ve almost always gone to do a big shop at the local supermarket, ‘Star Bazaar’. This has everything one could ever need and so is very convenient, and what’s more is only five minutes walk from the flat. Before images of Tesco’s come to mind, remember that this is India. The trappings of a modern supermarket are there, but I’ve still seen a mouse and a cockroach in the aisles. Anyway as we can’t judge how much we get ripped off by the small sellers, we opt for somewhere where the price per kilo is displayed.
We get fruit from this local ‘supermarche’ too: sweet pineapples, at least four different varieties of melon (the local Gujarati one is the cheapest) and mushy apples that we now avoid. Until a few weeks ago it was mango season and we could choose from five different types of the perfumed fruit. The most expensive is the Alphonso, which is sweet and pungent. We have more often bought the Kesar (saffron) variety, which is smaller, green rather than yellow on the outside and more tart. These have been a regular dessert (alternating with Cadbury’s) and we sit in the living room and eat one or two, discarding the skins into a bowl on the floor that will quickly be surrounded by roving bands of miniscule ants.
The Star Bazaar, one of the Tata Group’s innumerable enterprises, is also where we get a lot of spices from. And what spices. They are not expensive, but the scent and taste is so much better than that of the stuff which arrives on shelves in the UK. Take black pepper for example. Here it’s not just an addition to food; it transforms it. There is also more variety. Cardamom (elaichi) comes in green, black or white varieties, and you can choose between large and small mustard seeds. Admittedly this last choice had me stumped the other day: what difference does it make?
Saturday, 26 July 2008
Sunday, 13 July 2008
Cheap Labour
We live a comfortable middle-class life in Ahmedabad, but it is hard to avoid coming face to face with the reality of the desperate existence many others endure. In fact, evidence of injustice and suffering is not hard to come by in India. And sometimes it is right outside your door.
Several weeks ago I left the flat on the way to work and came across a group of road diggers working in the morning sun on Tulsi Row. They were digging narrow trenches to lay a gas connection for the bungalows that surround our block of flats. What struck me, but is really unremarkable in India, was that whole families were at work in the road. There were slim women in the trench, hacking at the mud with pickaxes; boys of fourteen, who should have been in school, were bent-backed to shovel earth out of the trench and onto the verge. Either side of the trench were several children and toddlers with matted hair playing in the dirt and with bits of plastic picked up from the verge. As I walked by with my laptop bag, my shirt sleeves rolled up in preparation for the heat that was already building up at 9:00 o’clock, I noticed a women breastfeeding a baby. She was sat on a pile of earth next to a trench, her sari dirty and her feet on the tarmac of the road. But where else would she go? Manual construction workers like these are often basically homeless and build makeshift camps of wood and plastic sheeting wherever they are paid to work. Across Ahmedabad, where ever road works are taking place you can find a tattered encampment with blue plastic sheeting, where in the evening families cluster around cooking fires fed with scavenged kindling. Paid for a discreet piece of work of only a few days duration, the families on Tulsi Row must have had to travel from their homes to the Satellite area on a daily basis.
This grim scene highlights the reality that labour is cheap in India. And that must be a reason why so many projects in the construction, services and other unskilled labour sectors suffer from so much shabbiness and poor execution. Apart from the injustice of paying people a pittance to work all day at backbreaking tasks, this set up means few tasks get done properly. The trenches in Tulsi Row had been filled after a couple of days, the mud loosely packed back in and rubbish caught up in the refilling sticking out at crazy angles. A pleasant road was suddenly ugly. But then why would anyone expect those worn out mothers, young wives and children to be bothered about the quality of their work? Their working day looks like slavery, with the rest of society the slave driver.
A less extreme example of the effect of paying people very little for their efforts is the work of cleaners in India. I have mentioned before that we do not employ a cook, cleaner or washer women, which is uncommon for a household with our level of income. Apart from the unease we would feel in having someone clean and wash our clothes for us, we know the work would not get done properly. At my office the cleaner sweeps the floor in the morning with a short-handled, feather-like brush, the basic design of which forces her to stoop low to the floor to use it. We have one of these brushes at home but don’t use it because it is less effective at getting dirt up than a normal broom. After this sweeping, which is a brisk affair, the cleaner's adult daughter washes the floor with a cloth. She squats down and swabs at the floor with it, moving the bucket and shuffling backwards every so often. The job gets done but in a more painful and less effective way than is necessary. Even after being cleaned the floor looks grubby at the edges. When I asked a colleague about this, they admitted that they had to almost stand over their cleaner to make sure they did a proper job or even worked at all. A colleague of Dani’s stands and instructs her cleaner to move furniture when dusting item by item, maintaining constant vigilance. Our feeling was that if you have to stand over someone to make sure they do their job properly, you clearly have the time to do it yourself. But then this type of manual work is not something most middle-class Indians would contemplate doing themselves, despite M. K. Gandhi’s best efforts to dignify manual labour. Even in the simplest of tasks then deep rooted social conditioning determines people's action or inaction.
In India, wages for unskilled labour have no doubt always been low. But with a growing urban middle-class in the metros (Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta) and B-class cities (Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur etc) with expendable incomes, there is a convergence of a conditioned aversion to manual labour, the existence of a mass of uneducated peons willing to act as ‘staff’ and growing incomes to pay for them. This struck me when I watched a group of Delhiites having their bags carried to their carriage at Old Delhi train station. This family was perfectly capable of carrying their own bags but not even the adolescent children had their hands occupied. Instead sweating porters balanced the family’s hold-alls on their heads, their metal license discs gleaming against the red shirt sleeve of their right arms. Behind the porters the kids ambled, quite possibly having paid a small, fixed amount for their luxury. An even better example of this convergence is given by a colleague. He joked that if you have a bad back and driving your car becomes difficult, don’t pay to see a doctor or physiotherapist, just hire a driver. It’ll be cheaper.
Several weeks ago I left the flat on the way to work and came across a group of road diggers working in the morning sun on Tulsi Row. They were digging narrow trenches to lay a gas connection for the bungalows that surround our block of flats. What struck me, but is really unremarkable in India, was that whole families were at work in the road. There were slim women in the trench, hacking at the mud with pickaxes; boys of fourteen, who should have been in school, were bent-backed to shovel earth out of the trench and onto the verge. Either side of the trench were several children and toddlers with matted hair playing in the dirt and with bits of plastic picked up from the verge. As I walked by with my laptop bag, my shirt sleeves rolled up in preparation for the heat that was already building up at 9:00 o’clock, I noticed a women breastfeeding a baby. She was sat on a pile of earth next to a trench, her sari dirty and her feet on the tarmac of the road. But where else would she go? Manual construction workers like these are often basically homeless and build makeshift camps of wood and plastic sheeting wherever they are paid to work. Across Ahmedabad, where ever road works are taking place you can find a tattered encampment with blue plastic sheeting, where in the evening families cluster around cooking fires fed with scavenged kindling. Paid for a discreet piece of work of only a few days duration, the families on Tulsi Row must have had to travel from their homes to the Satellite area on a daily basis.
This grim scene highlights the reality that labour is cheap in India. And that must be a reason why so many projects in the construction, services and other unskilled labour sectors suffer from so much shabbiness and poor execution. Apart from the injustice of paying people a pittance to work all day at backbreaking tasks, this set up means few tasks get done properly. The trenches in Tulsi Row had been filled after a couple of days, the mud loosely packed back in and rubbish caught up in the refilling sticking out at crazy angles. A pleasant road was suddenly ugly. But then why would anyone expect those worn out mothers, young wives and children to be bothered about the quality of their work? Their working day looks like slavery, with the rest of society the slave driver.
A less extreme example of the effect of paying people very little for their efforts is the work of cleaners in India. I have mentioned before that we do not employ a cook, cleaner or washer women, which is uncommon for a household with our level of income. Apart from the unease we would feel in having someone clean and wash our clothes for us, we know the work would not get done properly. At my office the cleaner sweeps the floor in the morning with a short-handled, feather-like brush, the basic design of which forces her to stoop low to the floor to use it. We have one of these brushes at home but don’t use it because it is less effective at getting dirt up than a normal broom. After this sweeping, which is a brisk affair, the cleaner's adult daughter washes the floor with a cloth. She squats down and swabs at the floor with it, moving the bucket and shuffling backwards every so often. The job gets done but in a more painful and less effective way than is necessary. Even after being cleaned the floor looks grubby at the edges. When I asked a colleague about this, they admitted that they had to almost stand over their cleaner to make sure they did a proper job or even worked at all. A colleague of Dani’s stands and instructs her cleaner to move furniture when dusting item by item, maintaining constant vigilance. Our feeling was that if you have to stand over someone to make sure they do their job properly, you clearly have the time to do it yourself. But then this type of manual work is not something most middle-class Indians would contemplate doing themselves, despite M. K. Gandhi’s best efforts to dignify manual labour. Even in the simplest of tasks then deep rooted social conditioning determines people's action or inaction.
In India, wages for unskilled labour have no doubt always been low. But with a growing urban middle-class in the metros (Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta) and B-class cities (Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur etc) with expendable incomes, there is a convergence of a conditioned aversion to manual labour, the existence of a mass of uneducated peons willing to act as ‘staff’ and growing incomes to pay for them. This struck me when I watched a group of Delhiites having their bags carried to their carriage at Old Delhi train station. This family was perfectly capable of carrying their own bags but not even the adolescent children had their hands occupied. Instead sweating porters balanced the family’s hold-alls on their heads, their metal license discs gleaming against the red shirt sleeve of their right arms. Behind the porters the kids ambled, quite possibly having paid a small, fixed amount for their luxury. An even better example of this convergence is given by a colleague. He joked that if you have a bad back and driving your car becomes difficult, don’t pay to see a doctor or physiotherapist, just hire a driver. It’ll be cheaper.
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
Monkeys
It is now high summer and even the mornings are becoming difficult. Although there is often a decent cool breeze that blows in when the kitchen windows are unbolted and open, on the whole the flat stays hot and the air stuffy. Without a fan on overhead you quickly break into a sweat. Fortunately the water in the bathroom is cool in the morning, a luxury that is gone by 11:00 o’clock, but soon after drying yourself sweat is breaking out on your forehead again. I wore my blue kurtha today and that helped. The khadi is thicker than my western style shirts, but more air is allowed to circulate around the body and that adds to the feeling of comfort. Yesterday I had my hair cut short; a no.2 on the back and sides and a no.3 on top. It makes a big difference.
I had cold pasta and pesto for lunch today, the pesto from the stash Dani brought back from home. I ate it with my fingers from a tupperware box while sat at my desk.
I left work at 6.45, stopping to buy a clay bowl to serve as a bird bath on the small balcony. I’m hoping to tempt the wood pigeons and minor birds closer. When I had reached Tulsi Row I saw two grey monkeys sat on a water tank behind one of the bungalows on the right side of the road. The nearest, and larger, of the two glanced at me, its bright eyes darting here and there. But it showed no other interest in me, not even when I clicked my tongue to get its attention. Once I had walked past it bounded down to the road and across it, leaped onto a car roof with a metallic bang and sat on a low wall next to another monkey that I hadn’t noticed until then. I have seen these grey furred monkeys on several occasions since we have been in Ahmedabad. Last week I came out of ICICI bank to find two perched on the hand rail of the access ramp leading to the door. The way they squatted on the bar was exactly how a human would. Their small faces were black and their eyes darted left and right as they took in the honking traffic on the road in front of them. Like the monkeys on Tulsi Row, they showed no interest or fear for me, though I was no more than a metre and a half away. They weren’t aggressive either. I could see that around the side of the bank was the rest of the troop; half a dozen adults of varying sizes and one baby perched on an air conditioning unit. As I stood there and watched, the two on the railings were joined, in leaps and graceful bounds, by four more, until there was a line of grey mammals perched in front of the bank, their long tails trailing down almost to the ground. I have never wished I had my camera on me as much as then. I stopped to admire them for about three or four minutes, until the bank’s security guard came out and started waving his shotgun in the general direction of the animals. As this space included me I decided to move out of range and went to find an auto.
I had cold pasta and pesto for lunch today, the pesto from the stash Dani brought back from home. I ate it with my fingers from a tupperware box while sat at my desk.
I left work at 6.45, stopping to buy a clay bowl to serve as a bird bath on the small balcony. I’m hoping to tempt the wood pigeons and minor birds closer. When I had reached Tulsi Row I saw two grey monkeys sat on a water tank behind one of the bungalows on the right side of the road. The nearest, and larger, of the two glanced at me, its bright eyes darting here and there. But it showed no other interest in me, not even when I clicked my tongue to get its attention. Once I had walked past it bounded down to the road and across it, leaped onto a car roof with a metallic bang and sat on a low wall next to another monkey that I hadn’t noticed until then. I have seen these grey furred monkeys on several occasions since we have been in Ahmedabad. Last week I came out of ICICI bank to find two perched on the hand rail of the access ramp leading to the door. The way they squatted on the bar was exactly how a human would. Their small faces were black and their eyes darted left and right as they took in the honking traffic on the road in front of them. Like the monkeys on Tulsi Row, they showed no interest or fear for me, though I was no more than a metre and a half away. They weren’t aggressive either. I could see that around the side of the bank was the rest of the troop; half a dozen adults of varying sizes and one baby perched on an air conditioning unit. As I stood there and watched, the two on the railings were joined, in leaps and graceful bounds, by four more, until there was a line of grey mammals perched in front of the bank, their long tails trailing down almost to the ground. I have never wished I had my camera on me as much as then. I stopped to admire them for about three or four minutes, until the bank’s security guard came out and started waving his shotgun in the general direction of the animals. As this space included me I decided to move out of range and went to find an auto.
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