On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 9:07 PM, Charles Haynes <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 1:21 AM, Venkat Mangudi <[email protected]> wrote: > > > And that, my friend, is the biggest problem the Indian (techie) faces. > > We are not prone to experiment and want the food that we ate all our > > lives. > > This was one of the biggest shocks to me of living in Bangalore, and > travelling around India. The lack of diversity in the cuisine. Now > before you all start shouting and pillory me, India as a whole has an > amazingly diverse cuisine and I learned a lot and learned to > appreciate a lot while I was there. (I still miss Meen Pollichathu, > Andhra chilli chicken, hyderabadi biryani, and brain fry.) But! The > lack of diversity I'm referring to is in what I observed of what most > of the Indians I knew ate! They mostly eat the dishes they were raised > with, and they complain if they aren't prepared exactly the way their > mother did. It was crazy!
The present day 30 year old Indian grew up in a country that was dirt poor, where travel was expensive, and made still more difficult by the myriad of languages and cultures. He is not used to diverse cultural stimulus. That is not to say it was much different in the glorious past. To this day India is not very accepting of a mixed culture dwelling. My neighbor in Hyderabad sauntered by once to remark that he could trace his roots to that very plot of land by some 300 years when his ancestors had farmed for the Nawab. In other words what he meant was that he was a son of the soil, and I was an errant soul drifting far from the land of my ancestors. In truth he was rather perplexed by me - he couldn't figure our why I had wandered that far in search of employment when I didn't have creditors hounding me, and nor was I an orphan or a low born who had to elevate his station in life. This is also evident in how difficult it is to be mobile in India. Moving a telephone line, and the gas connection, and the ration card and the voter id card, and the bank account are such onerous chores that make one want to never move more than a few feet from where one was born. India doesn't like change - so change has to sneak in. The analogy I use between America and India is of salad and soup. The US is like a salad where you can tell apart the individual components that make it up - you walk into China town and you are in China, you walk into the Hispanic district and you are in Latin America and so on. In a soup it's hard to tell apart the individual ingredients, but they each add flavor. The tamil rasam for example really came from Maharashtra, but it is now a celebrated dish of Tamil Nadu and doesn't exist up north, not that any Tamil would be aware of it. India absorbs and expands. See similar examples in how hinduism embraced and extended regional religions and demi gods but modern Hindus are rarely cognizant of it. The US and most western countries have a dizzying variety of global cuisine because they have been immigrant magnets for the last 100 years. India's magnetic powers wore off a few hundred years back, so the dish has cooked a bit. There is plenty of saracenic and mongol influence in the Indian dishes of today, not that you would be able to tell now. Indians are not adventure seekers - history is filled with accounts of travelers seeking out India; the Greeks, Hiuen Tsang, Faxian, Ibn Battuta and so on. OTOH one would be hard pressed to list the names of Indians who ventured far into other lands on account of curiosity. Even records of history indicate that the Indians of Faxian's time were rather perplexed and bemused that one would trudge all the way from China leaving behind the comfort of home food and known friends and family. The panchatantra story about the crow that went to live with the peacocks would be appropriate here. I had dinner just now at Chelsea's highest rated Chinese restaurant, the line stretched outside the place by the time I had finished dinner. I love New York for its sheer diversity of choice in food, but I digress. What was (un?)remarkable was that the wait staff was entirely Chinese (ahem, equal employment laws), they spoke Chinese with each other (but of course), and the touch screen order taking and billing system was entirely in Chinese characters. Therefore it is also possible to live in close touch with your roots even in a melting pot like NYC and certainly not unique to Indians. Cheeni
