Tea sets at Nizamuddin

These metal tea-sets are popular with those who visit Nizamuddin dargah. Check them out next time you visit the dargah. They are sold at small road-side stalls.

Beating the heat - Shikanji-seller near Red Fort

Summer is here! So I thought I'd post a cooling image for the hot days ahead!

Shikanji is hugely popular in Delhi, you will see hand-carts selling Shikanji everywhere. The drink is primarily lemon-juice and water, to which sugar, black salt and mint is added. Often there is cumin and ginger also. Each shikanji seller has his own balance of ingredients, making for a non-standardised but always yummy taste. It's a great way to replenish the electrolytes that you lose in the heat. In some larger stalls, it is served with soda, instead of water.

If you want to try making it at home, you can go to the market and ask for Jain Shikanji Masala. All you need to do is add lemon-juice and water or soda to it, and adjust the sugar levels to your liking. Garnish with mint.

Stuffed and baked capsicum (green bell peppers) - desi-style

Yesterday I made these stuffed capsicum (green bell peppers), and they turned out pretty yummy, so I thought I'd post the photo here.

These are perfect when you have guests for lunch and you want to make something that looks fantastic, but is really quite easy to execute. And they're baked, and have very little fat/oil, so it's guilt-free too.

Before and after baking

For the base:
3 or 4 bell peppers, sliced in half, and the inside scooped out

For the stuffing: 

• Boiled potatoes (about 2 large potatoes)
• Cottage cheese (we made it at home, but you can buy it at the store) - as much as you like, but around one-third the amount of potatoes is good.
• Green chillies - 1 chilli, sliced into tiny, tiny, bits
• Fresh coriander - a handful, including stems, again sliced into tiny bits
• Cumin powder, Coriander power, Red chilli powder - to taste (I used about half tea-spoon of each)
• Amchur (dried mango) powder - half tea-spoon
• Salt - to taste

I've seen recipes with more ingredients in the stuffing - typically, ginger and onions. Some recipes have peas. There are no rules, you can pretty much experiment with whatever you like.

How to make (easy-peasy):

Crumble the cottage cheese, potatoes, add all the stuff above to it, then pack it inside the bell pepper. There's no need to pack super-tight. Put some oil or butter or ghee on top of the stuffing (I didn't do it). Pre-heat oven at 180 C, and bake for 15-20 minutes or until the skin of the pepper becomes wrinkly, the way it is in this photo. Serve immediately, when it is hot.

You can garnish with coriander or sprinkle chaat masala before serving. Also towards the end of the baking, you can sprinkle cheese on top and melt it if you like. We ate it with triangle-shaped parathas, dal spiced with jeera, garlic and red chillies, kachumer (salad of cucumber, onion, tomatoes), rice, yoghurt and pickle.

Conflicts in the Thar

At sunset, the Thar desert is golden and the colours are surreal. It reminds you of a water-colour painting.

This is a group of female neelgai antelope with young ones.
I clicked this photo at the Samsaara Desert Camp near Jodhpur.

We were ooh-ing and aah-ing when our guide explained to us that the neelgai were a major threat to his farm crop (millet and mustard are grown in the Thar, apart from many other things). 

Mustard crop in the desert terrain, typically seen in winter

The negative feeling in our guide's voice was clear: he did not like the neelgai. His tone made me stop and think about man-animal conflict, and how groups of people who traditionally have coexisted with animals are now losing their tolerance. Traditionally the neelgai has not been hunted in India because it is believed that this is a type of cow. But attitudes are changing.

A farmer with small land holding near Jodhpur.
I met him on my last visit, he explained his
crop cycle to me.

I don't blame farmers for disliking the neelgai. Life is precarious in the desert, and farming is not easy. Once the crop is sown, it must be guarded from being eaten, which is of course, taxing for small farmers (since the labour usually is sourced entirely from the farmer's family).

Farmer's family taking mid-day meal break in the field.
Farming is largely manual labour, it is back-breaking work.

Unfortunately, there is no systematic, nation-wide approach towards managing man-animal conflict. The root causes of the problem are well known: widespread loss of natural habitat and food sources, changes in land use and cropping patterns, cutting off of wildlife corridors, and so on.

What is to be done? We need comprehensive policies that treat land in a holistic manner irrespective of state boundaries; we need to think about our 'development' model. We need to reduce the population growth rate, so that whatever progress we make is not eaten away by the huge new numbers. 

None of it is easy.

A sleepy afternoon in Khirkee Village

Khirkee has been in the news recently, and it reminded me that I have not written about my visit there.

It was much before all this brouhaha happened.

I went to check out Khirkee some 4-5 years ago, while I was designing our Delhi - A Tale of 8 Cities tour. I was trying to showcase the many different settlements in Delhi, each from a different era, built by a different ruler, and with a different set of characteristics.

Khirkee is part of the very poetically named Jahanpanah (Shelter of the World), the 4th City of Delhi that Mohammed bin Tughlaq built in the 1300's. I wanted to add Khirkee to the Tale of 8 Cities tour because it shows how the city of Delhi is growing and literally sucking into itself, the villages that used to exist here. By the way, I am calling it the 4th city of Delhi, but depending on where you start the city numbering, it could be literally anything! :) 

The major monument in the village is the Khirkee Masjid (Window Mosque). We wandered into the village, hunting for it, and were helped by local residents to find it. When I first saw the mosque, I was immediately struck by how robust it looked. There was no femininity or grace; instead I saw a strong building that looked more or less like a fort.

Khirkee Masjid - with a forbidding looking entrance

Khirki Masjid was built after the death of Mohammed bin Tughlaq, under the reign of his cousin Firoz Shah Tughlaq. Firoz Shah was the sort of ruler who trusted his wazirs and gave them a lot of wealth and independent authority. There were two important wazirs, a father-son jodi, who were responsible for many of Delhi's buildings in that era. Khirki Masjid was commissioned by the son, Khan-i-Jahan Junan Shah.

Although the mosque looked like a fort, when we wandered inside, we found these beautifully balanced pillars and arches, with a graceful strength that delighted me.

Khirki Masjid doesn't have a single large open courtyard for congregation. It is a square mosque, subdivided into quarters; and each quarter has its own inner courtyard. As you can see from the photo above, there are internal arcades which divide the mosque into aisles. These arcades are formed by 180 columns.

Here is one of the khirkis, the famous latticed windows that give the mosque and the area its name.

The 'khirki' of Khirkee :)

In the photo below, you can see the arched khirkis from the outside. The ASI has built a fence to prevent encroachment, and had dumped some rubble there; I think as part of their conservation effort (I saw scaffolding inside the monument, although it was deserted when we got there). Like many such settlements in Delhi, in Khirkee also, modern buildings as well as ramshackle structures are in evidence in the vicinity of the mosque. We debated climbing to one of these terraces to photograph the multiple domes of the mosque, but it was simply too much effort :)

The area around the mosque still had lots of village-like features. This photo of a grandmother with her granddaughters could be from any of UP's villages.

It was afternoon so people had finished their lunch and were in a relaxed mood.

Shivji temple in a clearing, with a lingam nearby: Shivji was also relaxing, with no devotees hounding him for anything :)

I saw a tabela (cowshed) with buffaloes, some inside, some outside:

Back of the tabela, with cowdung patties drying in a heap.

I want to go back and see if the Khirkee of my memory is the same or whether it has changed in the last 5 years. I have to wait for this current political mess to settle down, and for it to fade from people's memories. Then once again I can go in search of a sleepy afternoon in Khirkee...

Winter greens in Delhi - and a date with palak bhajiyas!

As soon as winter appears, we begin to see lots of greens in the market. Sarson (mustard) is very popular right now. It is a rabi crop, and harvested typically from December onwards. 

Sarson

The next photo is of a less well-known winter green: bathua. It is a wild relative of the spinach family, and can be used just like spinach in curry dishes. It is sometimes combined with sarson to make saag (a sort of pureed curry eaten with parathas). One of the popular dishes made with this is bathua raita. 

Bathua

Spinach (palak) is also part of the regular winter diet. Today we made palak bhajiya (spinach fritters), and I remembered to pull out my camera and click some photos before we ate it all!

Step 1: Fresh spinach leaves, cleaned and stems removed.
The batter is of chickpea flour, salt, chilli powder, cumin and coriander.

Step 2: Heat vegetable oil in a kadai (Indian wok). Dip leaves in batter until
it is fully coated. The batter has to be thick or it won't stick.

Step 3: Make sure the oil is sizzling hot before you pop in the leaves.
To test the oil, you can drop a little bit of the batter and see if it
immediately sizzles and rises to the top.

Step 4: Ta da! Palak bhajiya served!
It has to be golden and crisp before you take it out of the oil.

Serve hot with spicy green chutney and tomato ketchup. Or with a sweet and sour date-and-tamarind chutney. Sprinkle a little chaat masala for added tang; and make sure you have hot masala chai with it! It's the perfect antidote for a winter evening.

My new jacket

It is winter now, and Fab India has started to stock several jackets for women. I bought a new blue jacket a couple of days ago, and yesterday I wore it for the first time. I teamed it with an orange linen kurta.

As soon as I wore the jacket, I fell in love with it. Especially the easy laid-back yet formal look! And the pockets, lord, they were super useful!! As the day progressed, my phone, my pen, money, little chits of paper, coins...everything found its way into two spacious pockets.

By evening, I was hooked good and proper.

I was going to become a Jacket-Wearing-Person.

I would be just like my friend Debashish from Ahmedabad, who works in heritage conservation, and wears the kurta-jacket combination often on walks and lectures. This was going to be my new look!

And then came the rub. I discovered that the jacket was Matka Silk.

Matka is the local term for rough hand spun silk fabric. It feels and looks a bit like tweed, except that it is single-colour. It's a soft fabric, so if you provide inner lining cloth, you can make great jackets with it. Often there are rough irregularities in the fabric, which gives it a charm all its own. The best thing about matka, though, is that it always drapes softly and adapts to the contours of the body.

So what's the problem, you ask? The problem is that I've more or less given up buying silk. Especially after I visited the silk making village near Bangalore and saw the moths being boiled to death. Not a pretty sight.

The jacket was a quick impulse buy, I didn't even stop to see what the fabric was. I just assumed it was cotton. But I've bought it now, and I'm a little bit stuck here. Should I give it up? Aaaaagh, No! Maybe I should just gift it to someone. I'm telling you, parting from this jacket is going to be a very difficult thing :-)

Here's a closer look in sunlight, clicked in my car.
You can see the Matka fabric more clearly in this one. 

The Note-walla, Old Delhi

If you're stuck with a torn rupee note, head to the nearest note-walla. You'll see them in many places in Old City, sitting with a display of crisp 10 rupee notes. 

It's not as if there are no formal channels available for the exchange of soiled and mutilated banknotes.  The Reserve Bank of India has provided clear guidelines for it. If a note is old or damaged, you can take it to your bank, have it assessed based on the RBI guidelines, and then changed. Not all notes can be exchanged, especially those which are too brittle or damaged. 

But who wants the hassle of going to the bank and dealing with the bureaucratic procedure? And really, no one has the expertise to assess whether the note meets the Reserve Bank guidelines. So this little note-walla stall works as the instant alternative. It's queue-less, painless, and quick. For this kind of service, people are willing to pay the note-walla a commission. 

Apart from exchanging soiled notes, the note-walla also provides other services. If you have a wedding or other function in the family, and want new crisp notes to gift during the event, you can come to the note-walla. He has a "setting" with his bank clerk, and can get a bundle of new notes for you. If you're a shopkeeper who wants to provide change to his customers, you can get notes in smaller denominations from the note-walla. You can bring a stack of coins and exchange them for notes (a useful service for beggars, I'm sure). If you've been conned with a fake note, you can try asking him for help.

The note-walla's business operates in the grey zone. He has no permits or licenses to do what he is doing. But he meets a specific need, especially among less educated and less privileged people who are outside the formal banking system.

Whenever I see small businesses like this, I feel a sense of admiration for the sharp business instincts that the owner has (maybe because I totally lack this kind of instinct). This man has set up a service business based on his expertise, risk taking ability and negotiation skills, and by providing instant customer service. His stall is a simple wooden box; the hollow inside portion serves as a stool for him to sit. There's a drawer with a set of crisp new currency notes; those are his stock in trade. I'm sure he has to pay off the cops every now and then. It can't be comfortable, sitting like this in Delhi's hot summers and cold winters. But he does it, all through the year, and puts food on the table for his family.