A Weekend of Food: Feb 10 to 12

By tavishf - February 19, 2017

Last weekend, I was able to eat a few more meals outside campus than usual. On Friday night I went out to Hiranandani with Shilpa and two other CTARA students, Sumit and Anameka. They had Subway and Dominos, and I of course opted for Indian food. I ate pav bhaji at the place I discovered last summer when my group from Northeastern stayed in Hiranandani. Sumit and I ended up walking back to the hostel after dinner, about a 45-minute walk. We had a great conversation about many topics including theatre and CTARA, but the most memorable piece was when Sumit said, in relation to people asking me all the time about what things are like in the US, that “this is what people ask about because there is not yet enough shared experience between us (Indians) and you, so the differences are what people talk about.” This was an interesting way to think about why this is always the first topic of conversation when I meet someone new here.

On Saturday morning, I was sorely disappointed to find that my favorite breakfast is in fact not served every Saturday, but only some Saturdays. Instead of the delicious upma and pineapple sheera, there was some sort of rice in a gravy. Later in the day, I went to a neighborhood called Bandra to have lunch with a Northeastern grad named Caitlin who is now working at a company in Mumbai that provides data services to socially-oriented organizations. I took the local train to Bandra and had a fun time getting off and on the train at Dadar, one of the busiest stations in Mumbai, to transfer trains. I arrived early, so I decided to walk the 30 minutes to the restaurant instead of taking an auto. On my way, I wandered through a Muslim neighborhood—the most obvious clue is the meat shops, a feature absent from most of India’s streets. I had a coconut from a guy on the street as two goat heads stared at me from across the road. I kept walking and had a cup of sugar cane juice before lunch. It is even sweeter than I remember, and I think I will wait a few more weeks until trying it again.

Caitlin and I had a great lunch of various types of chaat (sev puri, dhai puri, chole batura). After lunch, I walked around for a while before returning to the train station via rickshaw. I bought a guava from a street vendor; when he asked me if I wanted chili salt on my fruit, I said “yes.” I am not sure why I agreed to this because I usually do not like it. I keep trying the chili salt mixture (often added to pineapple, berries, mango, etc. when bought on the street) in hopes that I will one day grow to like it, but it is almost always overpowering and ruins the sweet taste of the fruit. I either need to get better at asking for “only a little bit” or stop asking for it at all. Maybe one day I will learn. It took me many weeks to stop taking the sour yellow dish in the mess that I know I do not like (“maybe today it will be better,” I kept telling myself), so maybe it will take months for me to stop asking for chili salt on my fruit.

I had tea and poha in the afternoon with Professor Sohoni, the CTARA department head, at his house on Lakeside road in the IIT campus. I got to meet his father, who was visiting for the weekend, and we had a great chat about my projects and my stay on campus so far. I really enjoy interacting with Professor Sohoni—he is the person I heard speak at CTARA in 2014 and again in 2016. His two lectures are the reason I became interested in pursuing my current co-op.

In the evening was the quarterfinal match for the Hostel GC football tournament. We played against Hostel 12, another building with post graduate students. It was a tough match, and we prevailed in a 1-0 victory. The only goal came from a header form our striker off of a corner kick. When he headed the ball into the goal, I was standing about 4 feet behind him, ready to try and put a header of my own in. The team ate together in the night canteen, as we do after late matches, devouring many plates of rice, chicken, and gravy.

On Sunday, I was invited to two special meals at different hostels. I ate with Anand, a first year CTARA student (first year of a 2-year Master’s program) at his hostel for lunch. They were having a special Punjabi meal, and much of what I ate tasted very similar to foods I had commonly eaten in more northern areas of India last summer. I think I have been conditioned to Mumbai food, which is somewhat of a mix of the food of many different areas of India, and eating the Punjabi food was more of a stark difference to a normal meal than I expected it to be.

I had dinner with Saikrishna and Vynateya, the two fourth-year students that I am working with on the energy audit of the Aurangabad spice factory, at their hostel. The hostel was having a celebration with a fancy dinner in the outdoor courtyard. The decoration was elaborate and there were many varieties of great food to choose from. The decoration for the festival included a green carpet on top of the dirt. The ground is relatively flat except for a square obstruction that is about 12”x12” and sticks up about 4 inches from the ground. I do not remember what this is—maybe a drain or a power connection—but regardless it was not marked when the carpet was laid over top of it. There was no square cut out for the object to poke through the carpet nor was there yellow caution tape laid on the ground to warn the many students in the courtyard of the obstacle. I did not trip on it, but it seemed like someone was doomed to at some point during the evening. It did not surprise me to see this, but it reinforced my thoughts about the differences in the ways the Indian and US populations think about public safety.

Another post coming soon about my field visits last week.