TV that’s lost the plot

Tired of watching reruns of American sitcoms on my cable network, I recently switched services and chose the deluxe package.

After 24 hours of waiting for the feed to be beamed into my living room, I was delighted when the Indian television stations started playing. There were 24-hour non-stop old and new Bollywood music videos, Indian reality television shows, sitcoms, movies and, the best part, news from India and Pakistan and a host of other countries whose languages I could not properly follow.

I caught up on the fact that this year, the shortage of rice was so bad in India that the government was importing it for the first time in 20 years. That wheat was going to be subsidised but not lentils. That the production of sugar was at an all-time low and the government was monitoring certain factories to prevent stockpiling. It was better than hearing the American stations debating about how low Obama had bowed in front of the Japanese emperor. I could relate to this kind of current affairs.

Of course, the music videos were a treat. I started to make a mental note of all the upcoming releases. There were the oldies too, an ode to my aunts and my mother and their hairstyles.

I even watched one of those 1990s Bollywood films, which brought back memories of friends laughing at the ridiculous lyrics and plot. It was Hero No 1 with Govinda, the original star of satire, dressed in orange and blue. He was considered passé when the film was released, but after a decade he was retro-cool again. It made me cherish the memories of a time gone by.

But the reality shows and sitcoms do not bear watching. Is this what opening up the market has done to Indian entertainment? There was angst, family drama, even comedy, but none of them seemed to resonate with what Indian life is like any more. AR Rahman, the Oscar-winning music director, told me during his recent visit to Abu Dhabi for the Middle East International Film Festival that bad plots were no longer tolerated in Indian films because of what the Indian audience was being exposed to, thanks to globalisation. Instead, he said, “those plots were playing out on television”. He was spot on. It was like a bad Eighties Bollywood film playing out in 13 parts on TV, while the recent films explored more relevant social topics such as terrorism and the recession.

Which all goes to say that there is very little on television, and a lot more promise in the movie theatres.

Lives changed in wake of terror

It was supposed to be a fine dining experience, sitting by the pool of the Taj Residency in Bangalore, sipping a cocktail alongside well-heeled Indians and foreign tourists, enjoying the cool evening breeze, music playing in the background. But it felt eerie.

A year ago, terrorists had come barging through the pool area at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, shooting indiscriminately at guests, and leaving in their wake upturned tables and chairs, and among them, the dead lying in pools of blood.

From one corner lay the partially hidden body of a man, probably a foreigner, in his white linen pants and blue shirt, one sandal by his side. I remember because I had scanned the photographs in print and online with dread, looking to identify friends. A group of them had planned to be at the Taj that night, but had been stuck in traffic and never made it to the hotel.

Across six locations, three days and with almost 200 dead, a nation held its breath waiting for it all to end. It was one of the most spectacular terrorist attacks in the country’s recent history.

It wasn’t an anonymous blast in a crowded market place or explosions on a crowded train. If the terrorists were looking to make an impact, they certainly did. This was brash, suicidal and prolonged.

With their targets – whether middle class Indians at the rail terminal, affluent Indians in hotels or Jews in the Mumbai Chabad House – they made sure the world noticed as well.

When the financial capital of India, the linchpin of its surging global economic power, is under siege, it is hard not to feel especially helpless. Or outraged. Perhaps it finally drove home the futility of pointing fingers and playing the blame game with neighbouring countries; it was past the time to look inwards for a solution. The attack on Mumbai single-handedly changed how people viewed their own safety within the country.

Now, the common man’s security was on everyone’s mind, including the politicians. Hubs of anti-terror elite forces have been set up across the country so that if there were to be another attack, a city of beleaguered people would not have to wait for paperwork to be cleared in New Delhi before a plane load of commandos could take off from a distant base.

Since India’s version of 9/11, now popularly referred to as 26/11, sweeping security changes have also affected daily life.

You can no longer enter a hotel, mall, or temple without being frisked or “bleeped” through a metal detector or having your bags scanned.

In urban centres or small towns, anyone who can has invested in some form of security service. If there is an asset to be protected, it is now likely to be protected by anti-blast walls, private security with AK-47s, or surveillance cameras.

You can no longer take a romantic stroll down India Gate in New Delhi, buy a pack of roasted peanuts and watch the setting sun. Instead, you must watch it all from behind barricades set up two kilometres away, while a policeman impatiently taps the bonnet of your car and tells you to drive along. And when you bow your head at a temple in Hyderabad, you can also pay your respects to that soldier with a large automatic weapon who stands idly beside the deity.

Before you enter the Taj Mahal in Agra, they take away your cigarettes and lighters and inspect the batteries of your camera. Now, when a nation of a billion moves, it does so with even more hiccups than typically occupy daily life.

A year has passed and talk about the immediate shock and horror has died down. Instead, at dinner parties, friends speak of how they are more patient while waiting for security checks yet complain about the shoddy protocol in most places.

What was put in place with great zeal a year ago is already falling apart (consider the wear and tear when a few million pass through your checkpoints each month). Some checks are merely symbolic while others are flimsy security drills.

My college-bound nephew in Pune called the security arrangements in his city “old, casual and careless”.

But terrorism is nothing new in India. There were other attacks before Mumbai that rattled the nerves of my friends and family and made them pick up their phones and call loved ones to make sure they were not caught in a bomb blast.

Beginning in May 2008 there was a surge in terrorist strikes, with a series of blasts in the cities of Guwahati, Jaipur, Delhi, and Ahmedabad. This year has seen attacks in Kashmir, Assam and, by Maoists, in the heartland of India. And no one is convinced by the new security arrangements.

Yet, the country carries on, broken scanners and all.

Enough said? Probably not

After reflecting last week on the one-year anniversary of the Mumbai attacks that killed 172 people, including the nine who laid siege to the city for three days, I wonder if enough has been said and done.

Not quite, say some of my friends. While some have grown more patient with the security procedures that have sprung up in even the smallest towns, others say the measures are merely symbolic and will not prevent another attack.

Some of my friends lost loved ones. Some survived to tell of their harrowing experiences. And then there is us, the friends and family who live far away and were glued to our television sets and laptops during those three days, redialling telephones at a frantic and frustrated pace in order to reach those we knew in Mumbai.

I was in Chennai last year when I woke to the scenes of mayhem on television. At first, like the rest of the country, I thought it would end in a few hours. I was supposed to take the evening flight back to Abu Dhabi to celebrate American Thanksgiving with friends. But I was asked to book a flight to New Delhi to help support The National’s coverage. In the capital, the bigwigs held impromptu press conferences. Ministers struggled to explain the ongoing madness, while embassies and the Taj hotel franchise were on high alert. And, of course, the army scrambled to send elite forces to Mumbai.

As I drove from the airport to the nearest hotel to drop off my bags, I felt the sense of dread that had filled Delhi. The city was not a stranger to terrorist attacks, but they had mostly been bomb blasts.

This was new. Never before had the nation stood at standstill and waited for an attack to be over. It made everyone vulnerable. Even my driver fumbled with his phone as he tried to call friends in Mumbai. It turns out that in a country of a billion people, everyone has some ambitious friend or family member who left a town or village for the bright lights of Mumbai.

By the last day of the attack, text messages and e-mails started pouring in from friends and family who confirmed they were alive, that they had not been anywhere near the targeted sites. One person I know had simply been delayed in heavy traffic on the way to a dinner party but was still shaken, having lost others to the tragedy.

In a few weeks, I will travel to Mumbai again to reconnect with friends. We rarely talk about those three days but they will be on our minds.

The eats on the streets

One of those basic pleasures in life, perhaps dictated by evolution, is foraging for your food. And when you find it, in this day and age, it better be worth the hunting.

One of my favourite pastimes is searching for that elusive hole-in-the-wall restaurant that delivers. The one where, with every bite, you cannot believe your luck of finding such a gem in the rough.

New York or New Delhi, there are dark and dank alleyways where one finds some of the best cooks, hard at work, behind makeshift trolleys. Their concoctions so well regarded that they are local legends. I remember my experiences of feeling like I was one of the locals in Delhi, when feasting on succulent kebabs in the middle of the night, and wiping the grease from my hands on my denims (for the obvious lack of seating, cutlery or napkins).

Similar treks around Abu Dhabi have been hard, simply because most of the best places in town have now been consumed by the chaos of the construction in the downtown area.

But last week, with three days to spare and enough time to explore Dubai, I launched once again a plan to map some of those places that friends wax eloquent about.

Surprisingly not so hard to find was the Chicken Tikka Inn in Jumeirah 1 on Jumeirah Beach Road. Less than 50 metres from the Village Mall, the so-called-inn offers the best behari kebabs in the business. Not to mention their delicious haleem (which I ordered two of). Even their nan, stuffed with keema (minced meat), was a meal in itself. It is, however, located in an elusive corner of a strip mall beside another posher mall, and if you drive too fast, you will miss it. Like all such places, it is best found on foot.

As if finding one such haunt wasn’t enough, an American friend directed me to another dubious-sounding Indian restaurant. By now, having enough faith in the street fare of Dubai, I agreed to tag along. In a place called the Chalet Restaurant (it turns out that restaurants with names that make them sound more upscale than they really are always offer the best dishes), there was another delicious meal to be had by the Jumeirah Beach Hotel.

First they sit you on makeshift tables and chairs on the pavement, a venture that rapidly turns into al fresco dining for the daring. Service is best attempted with hand gestures, unless you know any Indian languages. In our case we did, so the food arrived perfectly seasoned and in perfect sync with each person’s order. Who knew you could roast cauliflower and paneer to such perfection?

Movies move forward

Even in its sixth year, the Dubai International Film Festival still manages to excite. As with the Middle East International Film Festival, the event’s Bollywood quota is always significant. Often, the biggest blockbusters, and their star-studded casts, arrive in these cities, playing to audiences hungry for the latest in Indian cinema.

These fans are so enthusiastic that, last year, the actor Govinda, had to retreat from a mall in Abu Dhabi during an impromptu shopping spree. Evidently, he thought that he would not be mobbed, as would be inevitable in India.

Clearly, the star underestimated the presence of Indians in the city. He was in town shooting Do Knot Disturb at Emirates Palace – a comedy about mistaken identities and hotel rooms. Although this particular movie did not premiere here, many of the films shot in the UAE often return for red-carpet screenings.

In fact, a number have their world premières in the Gulf. The region is only a three-hour flight away from Mumbai and its Indian expat population is eager for cultural products from home. This makes the GCC a significant market in its own right. However, it also provides a good gauge of how a film will fare when it travels around the world to other theatres where homesick Indians gather.

Last week, at Madinat Jumeirah, a crowd of teenaged girls gathered to get a glimpse of their favourite actor, Ranbir Kapoor. At 27 years old he is young and has a career of just five films so far. His latest movie, Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, also breaks the Bollywood mould. Kapoor does not play a classic romantic lead and the action features none of the song and dance sequences typically associated with Bollywood.

No one appeared to mind the lack of love interest and musical interludes. (The film has a soundtrack, but it is one that plays in the background.) They simply wanted to see Kapoor act and to get an idea of what it is like to be a salesman in the fiercely competitive environment of 21st-century Mumbai.

It appears that the straight-up love story no longer works in Bollywood. That is not to say that the biggest producer of films in the world called a total halt on such narratives.

However, it is true that filmmakers eager to reach out to a new audience have had to incorporate romance inside bigger ideas that more accurately reflect life in modern India.

Considering that only a decade ago, a move away from musicals in Bollywood would have been unimaginable, it shows how far the industry has come in recent years.

The tigress awakens

You will not believe the kind of ribbing I faced when I moved to Canada. There I was, a product of an Indian boarding school where the syllabus was still dictated by the British. Spellings, pronunciation and even enunciation – all British-bound.

When you land in another Commonwealth country, you expect things to be similar. They still had the Queen on their currency. So why the curmudgeonly insistence on omitting vowels that were put in for a purpose? Color instead of colour.

And the ludicrous use of the letter z, as in zed, not zee: analyze or analyse? Why would a country that still held on to so many other British-isms do such things?

It was the proximity to the United States of America, the land of Americanisms. Practices south of the border had spilled into its northern neighbour.

For more than a decade, after I arrived in Canada in 1997 on a scholarship to study journalism at university, I slowly converted my lexicon. Working in the print media, it was a painstaking process of uprooting every spelling and sentence formation to include the new style that was obviously a shortened, less sophisticated version of what I had been taught (in my opinion, anyway).

I still reach for the learning from my youth and call a swimsuit a swimming costume, a stroller a pram, and an eraser a rubber.

Then there are football and American football. (Soccer is a term best left to the new world. We do things the good old-fashioned way. )

The other day I was watching a National Football League (NFL) match of (American) football. A team called the Cincinnati Bengals were playing against the Baltimore Ravens.

The Cincinnati Bengals fashion themselves after the royal Bengal tiger. In the middle of the field lay a giant image of an orange tiger with black stripes. I wanted to point out that the endangered species is actually yellow, dark brown- and white-striped, but in the spirit of things and knowing how Americans like to redefine everything, I held my peace until the announcer pronounced Bengals as “Bengels”.

It was sheer butchery of a word known the world over, and not just for its association with the ferocious beast.

“You know, even the tigers are called Bengels in America,” said my friend.

Really? That much defiance over a 1,000-year-old word that also describes an Indian state and a few million people who call themselves Bengalis. All now reduced to an Americanism that primarily defines a sports team in the US?

Somewhere, out there, I hope they hear my cries of protest. Pronunciation, indeed.

The meaning of the word

Being multilingual in India is no big deal. Pretty well everyone I know, from my grandparents to my nephews, speaks more than one language. Of course, for any ambitious Indian, English is a must (no matter how warped the accent may be), and then there is the mother tongue (for my family, that is Bengali), and thanks to the omnipresence of Hindi – from television and cinema to advertisements – that rounds out the top three in most cases.

I didn’t think it was a big deal that I spoke more than three languages until I started travelling. In New York, when I applied for a mundane job with the UN, the first question they asked me was about the number of languages I spoke and how well I spoke them. It has been the same with every job I’ve had in journalism.

I speak English (of course), Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and a smattering of Nepali and French. While I can read and write Hindi, Bengali, Nepali and French, I can not say the same for Tamil or Urdu. It’s all very complicated and is a result of a somewhat nomadic upbringing, not to mention the fact that my parents spoke two different languages at home and English was our common factor. Add to that my decade of boarding school in Pondicherry in Southern India (a former French colony), where I learnt English and French, and the constantly transferable job my father had with the World Health Organization, and it becomes clear that I do not have a propensity for languages but that the environment I grew up in forced me to adapt to the many languages spoken around me.

It can get problematic. Last week while I was interviewing a source for a story, I struggled with a word. While it translated to a beautiful flower in Bengali, it meant buffalo in another language. My multilingual brain was fried.

These are the moments that my editors do not see. The glamour behind being able to decipher a feeling in a foreign language and being hung up on the exact meaning of a word is a fine line. I tried to deduce the logic behind the word. Did the source really pay thousands of Bangladeshi rupees for a beautiful flower or a buffalo? What were the chances? In journalism, you don’t take such chances, so I called the resident linguist: my mother.

She was rushing to the airport, so she couldn’t be much help. I called the second best in the business, who had taught me the difference in phonetics between Urdu and Hindi words: my father.

Turns out a buffalo is still a buffalo and a flower is just that. And it all depends on the pronunciation, which was obviously lost in translation over static phone lines between me and the source.

In spite of all those languages, it was back to the drawing board for me.

Romantic ideas of home

Despite the fact that life is good – great even – twice this year I have returned from India and found myself dragging my feet.

I was being an ingrate, I told myself. The job was interesting. Friends were fabulous. I had enough of a steady income to afford me holidays (and those trips to India). And my parents were in good health.

I wondered if I was homesick. It was an unfamiliar feeling. My earliest memories are of leaving for boarding school, cheerful and strutting towards an aeroplane – violin case in one hand and the dreaded “unaccompanied minor” sign hanging from my neck – while waving goodbye to the parents. They were not, if memory serves, upset to see me leave. I was seven. The only child of two very busy doctors.

Could it be that, weary of world travel and having to fend for myself all of these years, I was missing my family?

I called my mother. I am told I am built like her, with little time for careless emotion. I missed my parents no more than when I left home as a child. Did I miss the house? Not particularly. Friends at home? There were none. Those bonds were created in school and foreign countries and, thanks to the internet, we were still in touch. My mother told me to stop moping and count my blessings.

Last week, I met a friend whom I’ve known since we were in grade three. He lives in Hong Kong now, but we found ourselves in Bangalore – he on business, I to attend a wedding – at the same time. We caught up even though there was little of that to do, thanks to modern technology. I told him of my growing dilemma.

“So you want to move back to India?” he asked. That was it! I was no longer satisfied with being a visitor in my own country, or with the nostalgia of spending childhood in a place that has since grown into an economic power. I wanted my fair share, but was it fair to ask it from a place where I had not lived for more than 13 years?

“You have romantic delusions,” my friend said and explained a sentiment that most expatriates feel when they have been away from home for too long. The idea of their imagined homeland grows larger in their head with every passing day. And the resolve to return one day generates its own mix of guilt and apprehension.

I finally admitted to myself that I had been away for too long, and was likely to be for longer. And that what I was feeling was homesickness for an imagined homeland.

Safety pins in my sari

You would think that coming from a country of half a billion Indian women, I would know how to wear a sari. After all, when they wake up in the morning, most of them can tie seven yards of cloth around themselves as if they were performing one of those mundane morning rituals – such as making their morning coffee. Or frying a dosa.

I cannot fry a dosa, or even make the batter from scratch. I can rarely remember the ratio of water to coffee that goes into the cone-filter coffee maker, which mostly sits idle. And I have never woken up, tied a sari around myself and moved through my daily chores with ease.

Except for special events (which mostly involves a visit to the temple for Diwali), I rarely don one. And even when I do, instead of walking around gracefully and following the folds of the pleats in the front of the sari, I totter around as though someone had stapled my feet to pieces of cardboard. I keep it together with safety pins because I don’t want to join the hordes of urban tales about saris unravelling in public, on stage, or worse, at the temple.

That stuff is complicated. Some even call it art. Systematically wrapping all that cloth around yourself and still being able to walk freely while using your arms for anything but holding up yards of material may look easy, but it is not.

I believe it runs in the family. Or at least in my generation of cousins. For a while, when my cousin worked in the travel industry and had to wear a sari to work once a week, she would pull out one of six that her mother had pleated and pinned. We called it the “home-made version”. You tuck in the right bits for the lower half and create a sort of pleated skirt, while piling the remaining fabric over your shoulder.

Then came the modern day tutorial. Designed for me, the one living so far away from the reach of parents and relatives that my cousins initially would take photos of the aunts tying it around themselves and send me photos. Then we chanced upon the internet version, which teaches you how to go about wrapping it yourself without looking like a mummified corpse. We called this the “ready-made version”.

I’ve even worked out a plan for when I am stranded in a hotel room with no access to the internet: call guest services and – in India at least – a lady from the hotel will pin you up. In a foreign country? Call a friend’s mother. They always answer the call to tie a sari.

Marriage the traditional way

I’ve always wanted to visit Bangalore. The garden city of India. The IT capital of the country and full of bright, young, motivated people who take pride in their city and their work.

So when Seema Shetty, the brains behind BiteRite, a company that caters food to the health conscious and has a special plan for those who are diabetic, invited me to her wedding in Bangalore, I couldn’t refuse.

A modern Indian woman by every standard, Seema studied at Boston University before returning to Abu Dhabi to start her own company. Yet she chose to marry a man her family approved of.

They had met early this year and, coming from a similar background of family values and respect for their community, decided to tie the knot.

So arriving in Bangalore to share her happiness and what is considered one of the most auspicious occasions in a woman’s life was an absolute delight.

It would also be my first insight into a traditional South Indian wedding. We started with, as in all Indian weddings, a lot of singing and dancing leading up to the day of the wedding.

Her father, Dr BR Shetty, the founder of the NMC group of hospitals and pharmacies, the gracious host, welcomed us all as if we were family.

He chose the back garden of his house in the city to host some of the ceremonies, including an evening of Sangeet, where the cousins and friends of Seema put up a variety of song and dance shows that told everyone of how the couple met.

The next morning, the women took over Dr Shetty’s garden again and had henna applied to their hands for the mehndi ceremony.

On the eve of the wedding, we witnessed the Muhurtham, a ceremony held at sunset.

Dressed in a traditional blue and gold silk sari, Seema glowed as she was walked to the stage, flanked by her maternal uncle’s wife and her father’s sister. She was presented with toe rings – a symbol of a married woman in Southern India – by the ladies of the family. Seema then sought the blessings of everyone present.

There was hardly a dry eye left as she was led through the crowds slowly, stopping to ask everyone present to bless her new life.

The next day dawned early as we rushed to the Bangalore Palace grounds for the wedding, when Seema, dressed in a breathtaking salmon pink and gold embroidered sari with jasmine flowers in her hair, was married to Nirman. Her parents officially offered her hand in marriage to the man who made her glow.

As she stood there, receiving a line of visitors who came forward to bless the new couple, one couldn’t help but wonder at how much the modern Indian woman has achieved, while never straying from her culture, or community.

A singular kind of blessing

Another Diwali, another year abroad. Another round of celebrations away from home. It may be the festival of lights but nothing is as bright if it is not celebrated with family.

There’s no point getting sentimental, though. I cannot remember the last time I was home, running around bursting firecrackers under my cousin’s bed or stealing sweets.

I have vague memories of such times in India, of stringing together so many “chilli bombs” – tiny dynamites that came in packs of 12 – that they extended all the way across my friend’s house, past the swimming pool and tennis court and right down to the main gate. We concealed the train behind the bushes, and in the evening – just when the adults were getting comfortable – set off the entire string. The firecrackers went off for at least 15 minutes. The adults shouted, we giggled.

In contrast, the celebrations away from home have been sober. And it almost seems that each year I compromise on a lamp and light a candle instead. This year, I didn’t have time to shop for anything – the traditional terracotta lamps, a string of lights, new clothes, an appliance or even a small indulgence such as a piece of jewellery.

I am not sure if it’s proximity. When I lived in Toronto, the idea that I was so far away from home made me observe the little rituals. In Abu Dhabi, it seems, when there are so many people around me celebrating, I feel like it is OK to let go of the apprehension that if I don’t practice my culture, I will lose it. As a result, Diwali crept up on me this year.

Among other things, Diwali celebrates the return of the ancient king of -Ayodhya, Ram (along with his wife, Sita, and brother, Lakshman), to his kingdom, ending 14 years of exile after a war in which he killed the demon king, Ravan.

Their return represents the -triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, joy over despair, right over wrong. It is believed that the -entire kingdom celebrated by lighting lamps in order to guide their path through the darkness.

People took to the streets and burst fire crackers. However, legend has it that one old lady, who lived by herself in a decrepit hut on the outskirts of the village, could not afford such extravagance. So she filled a single terracotta lamp with oil and lit it. On his way to the palace, amid all the fanfare, it is said that Ram noticed the hut.

This year, I was that old lady and I hope that lighting my singular brass lamp will invite just as many blessings as lighting a hundred.

Delectable dishes in Delhi

Of all the tours that are offered in India, the best that I can imagine is one through which visitors are allowed to travel through the gastronomic wonders of the Mughal empire.

To make things simple, I am referring to the mighty kebab. This wonderful dish comes in many forms, varying in richness, texture and complexity of spices. While it is the source of much debate as to whether the best examples are found in Delhi or Hyderabad, or across the border in Peshawar or Lahore, the kebab remains, mostly, the undisputed king of Mughlai cuisine.

Sticklers for history may argue that the imperial kitchens of the Mughals contributed much more than pieces of delicious meat to the repertoire of Indian cuisine. With creamy curries made from cashew paste, spectacular biryanis, and desserts enriched with dried fruits and nuts, this is an indisputable fact. However, I am a huge fan of the kebab and an unapologetic non-vegetarian, thanks to its existence.

A few weeks before I left Abu Dhabi for a recent holiday to India, a craving for shammi kebabs struck. So I called at least half a dozen of the top Indian restaurants in Abu Dhabi not nestled in the pricey surrounds of a five-star hotel to ask if they offered the dish. None did.

To my dismay, I ended up making myself a batch from scratch before boarding a flight that took me to the heartland of kebabs – Old Delhi.

The shammi, also known as the galouti – although easy to replicate at home, using the right mix of minced meat, crushed spices and lentils – offers a legend of its own. It is said that one of the rulers, or nawabs, of Lucknow, who was very fond of kebabs, in his old age was unable to chew succulent hunks of skewered and grilled meats, and ordered his khansamas, or chefs, to come up with a special recipe that would make the meat melt in his mouth. In short, he asked they produce “the toothless nawab’s kebab”.

So, as legend goes, more than 100 different spices were added to minced lamb meat in order to produce the shammi. A variation of this is still found on the streets of Lucknow, Hyderabad and of course, in dusty shops nestled along the narrow lanes of Old Delhi.

After a half-day trip to the Taj Mahal, we thought that it was only fitting to continue our tour of Indian history by following our nostrils right down to Old Delhi. Since such culinary tours are only offered by friends who call the city home, we followed them blindly as they sauntered through streets specially illuminated for the Eid celebrations.

We managed to finally get our hands on the last plate of shammi kebabs that was on offer at a tiny restaurant. That’s a taste and a feeling that can only be experienced in the forgotten alleyways of Delhi.

Finally, I see the attraction

We intended to see the Taj Mahal by sunrise, so we set off by road from Delhi at 3am, for what would be a three-and-a-half-hour journey. Of course we joked about Indian Stretchable Time (IST), about traffic jams, potholed roads, driving around cows, goats and any other kind of livestock that happened to amble across our path. We hoped to get there at least by noon.

As a 12-year-old, I had suffered a similar fate at the hands of my parents, who were eager to introduce their petulant child to the history of the country. So for a week (or much longer it seemed) I suffered through bumpy rides across the Indian countryside while hardly glancing at the splendours that were on offer.

I vaguely remember being impressed by the sight of the Taj from a window at the Agra Fort. Apparently I was standing in the room, where, legend has it, Shah Jehan, the Mughal emperor who built the Taj as a mausoleum and monument for his wife Mumtaz, was imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb.

But, more than that, I remember the mind-numbingly boring eight-hour road trip from Delhi, via Fatepur Sikri and the Agra Fort to – finally – the Taj.

Almost two decades later, I had returned to a different India. There was even a highway between Delhi and Agra that promised to zip tourists in and out of Agra in half a day.

I expected to half snooze through my road trip with my friends. Instead, we found ourselves chatting about the landscape, while cutting through centuries-old farmland on both sides and passing one crumbling fort after another.

Even Agra had been transformed. Once upon a time not so very long ago, getting in and out of its congested roads was a nightmare. Now, there were proper road signs that, every few metres, pointed even the most hopeless tourist towards one of the wonders of the world.

And it seemed that years of talking about conservation had finally paid off too. The delicate marble with which the monument had been built was for years under siege from the pollution being spewed by nearby factories and the sewage being pumped into the river Jumna, that runs beside it.

Things had been cleaned up. Even the touts that used to charge outrageous prices to sightseers have been replaced with government-approved, ID-wearing guides who courteously asked once or twice if we required their services.

However fortuitous this journey was, it was especially significant when we realised that we were standing at the Taj on Eid, where thousands of the faithful poured in, to offer their morning prayers.

It was then that I finally realised what the hullabaloo surrounding the Taj Mahal is all about.

A journey worth taking

The rush to get home in time to break your fast is something has become familiar during the past month. The traffic got particularly heavy during some times of the day, and come sundown, the roads were deserted.

If you turned your gaze towards airport lounges, you would have seen that there is no relief for airline personnel, either. The race to get home to celebrate Eid with your nearest and dearest has meant airport lounges are bursting at their seams with people eager to be reunited with their loved ones – and keeping strange hours in order to get there on time.

And so, on a recent flight, I saw two gentlemen sharing one piece of carry-on luggage. There was not much in it because all the gifts – clothes, a DVD player, toys, perfume and running shoes – were packed away in two boxes that had been checked in. In the bag, apart from the usual necessities of travel, they carried two gold chains, one for each of their wives.

Once they landed at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, they would take a shuttle to the domestic airport, where they would wait, snatching occasional sleep, on the lounge chairs for three and a half hours before boarding the next flight to Ahmedabad. Then they would board a train and travel to the northern town of Unjha. More than half the village would turn up, they said. But after two days of travel, they refused to admit they would be too tired or irritated to celebrate their return, a well-earned leave they take every two years.

“You must have a sense of humour about these things,” one of them said. “Otherwise, how are you going to entertain a house full of relatives with your travel stories if everything on the journey turned out just fine? That is boring. Telling them what we ate in the plane is fun. Or if the train is delayed, what happened. How did we cope? They want to hear every detail so we will tell them.”

A group of men from a village near Unjha – like scores of others from all across India – work in the UAE. Not all their friends are returning home this year to celebrate Eid, but they are all sending money home. These two men are not carrying money, for fear of being pickpocketed along the way. When they reach their village, they will line up at a local money transfer shop to receive the money they sent ahead of time and distribute it to those less fortunate than themselves. It is zakat – an essential part of celebrating the holy month.

A whole new highway code

The name of the highway you find yourself on is irrelevant when you are hurtling down in it panic. Research may have found that the UAE has more than its fair share of bad drivers and crazy speeding, but really, has anyone reading this column ever had to slam on their brakes for a cow ambling across the Sheikh Zayed Road? Or goats? Or buffalo?

You know what I am getting at. Driving in India, in any city, town or village is an act of bravery. Which is why it is not surprising that most international rental companies that have set up shop in India rent you their cars with drivers. It is not because they don’t trust you, but because they know you don’t know how to come to a sudden stop from 100kph on a highway when a cow decides to cross four lanes of traffic.

So there I was, being driven by a maniac down the Delhi highway which connects Delhi to a number of cities. It is an impressive stretch built solely to boost tourism in India. Of course, the economic gains have been impressive – fresh apples from an orchard in the hills of Himachal Pradesh can now reach the Azadpur wholesale vegetable and fruit market on the outskirts of Delhi in eight hours. If the truck had my driver, you could shave another two hours from that time.

Throughout the drive, I scolded him. First it was the seatbelt. He wouldn’t wear one. I made him. Then the phone calls he was taking while navigating through a maze of trucks, autorickshaws, young men on motorcycles and other aggressive drivers in sedans (and cattle). He stopped after I threatened to call his mother.

It was not entirely his fault. I hate to admit it, but what he was doing sounded familiar from my friends who commute daily on the Sheikh Zayed Road. If others around you are behaving badly, driving above the speed limit or flashing their lights at you, you have little choice in respecting the speed limit yourself because the chances are that you are going to get rear-ended or worse by a speed freak who will forcibly take their right of way.

In his case, too, he had little choice. If he didn’t aggressively nudge himself between trucks, someone else would. If he didn’t overtake on the wrong side of the other vehicle, someone else was going to, and probably hit him instead. Besides, there were no lane demarcations so traffic converged.

But panic is panic and whoever said driving in the UAE was bad surely hasn’t taken a ride on India’s new asphalt yet.

The voices of a nation

On my first-ever trip to Pakistan, I found myself at Illusions in Islamabad. It is one of those cool, glass-walled music stores with all the latest HBO shows advertised at the front. “Where are the classical artists?” I asked. I had strict instructions from my mother to locate old, classical works.

She had trained as a classical singer in her youth only to take up medicine as a more practical career option.

Growing up in a freshly partitioned India, tutored by some of the best vocalists in the country, my mother had watched in dismay as some of her favourite singers migrated to Pakistan. It was a loss she never overcame. It seemed as if Mehdi Hassan, Iqbal Bano and Noor Jehan took with them her ambition to join their ranks.

Of course, some Pakistani musicians have successfully crossed over in recent years, including Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and bands such as Junoon. But the best voices from the past failed to reach my generation.

I was unable to relate to this alien list of artists whose music I had been asked to collect, but at the same time, I was curious to know what “the other side” was listening to these days. My friend suggested I start with the basics.

Currently, everybody is listening to the Coke Studio Sessions, an artists’ collective that was brought together by Umber and Rohail Hyatt, who also founded one of the country’s first bands, Vital Signs. The pair has been credited for this unifying series in a time when the country is plagued by political strife and terrorism. It has captured a nation’s imagination and bridged a yawning generation gap.

These live music sessions broadcast on television are Pakistan’s pride and joy. It’s a series of concerts played by some of the best contemporary artists, alongside classical singers who recreate popular songs of yore, while lyrics penned by Sufi saints get a fresh set of drums and strings.

From the female duo Zeb & Haniya to the pop singers Atif Aslam and Noori, from Riaz Ali Khan and Javed Bashir to Ali Hamza and Saieen Zahoor – all bring their bit of magic.

The internet has been instrumental in spreading the word among those homesick for some local tunes. Hyatt has 2,000 fans on Facebook and some of the songs posted on YouTube have more than 30,000 hits.

The amount of hits signals a positive shift and indicates that the next generation of Pakistanis are looking to renew their sense of culture.

In cooking, a shared spirit

For non-Muslim expats, there are few opportunities that come our way that allow us a glimpse into the world of fasting and feasting during Ramadan. Of course, hotels offer grand iftars and a lucky few are invited to their friends’ homes to break the fast and enjoy a lavish meal. But to understood how various groups celebrated their first iftar this year, The National sent reporters across the country to talk to and report about people congregating on the first evening of Ramadan.

I headed to the labour camps in Musaffah. It is a 20-minute drive from the city of Abu Dhabi, over a bridge and a motorway that divides drivers who are rushing towards Dubai versus those, mostly in minivans, buses and taxis, ambling their way into a suburb of workers’ quarters.

The mood was festive. For the next month, they would be returning at least two hours early to their camps due to decreased work hours. That in itself lent an air of excitement to those busying themselves with the tasks at hand.

There was cooking to be done – chopping, peeling, frying and dicing – and washing and bathing after one prepared the feast and before evening prayers. Although the camps attract workers from various countries in South Asia and the Middle East, the majority of workers are Muslim. And away from home, they have improvised the ways in which they divide their duties.

Lacking women from their households who would typically take care of the food preparations, the men have come together in groups of anywhere between four and up to a dozen to share duties and divide cooking time. During Ramadan, friends take turns to prepare their favourite dishes for the rest of the group while also sharing precious kitchen time by cooking in shifts. So instead of 200 men cooking individual meals and being confronted with impossible shift timings in the kitchen, now each group sends a representative every day to sweat it out. Similarly, costs are divided by buying a large bag of rice at wholesale price rather than individual portions for every few days.

With workers cooking their favourite foods, one sees a bounty laid out like no other. Just as someone from Kerala grates coconut to mix with a rice paste to make pottu, another man from Pakistan is using his mortar and pestle to blend together coriander leaves, garlic and chillies to make a chutney, while a man from Bangladesh makes a curry out of mustard paste: the true diversity of the city and the spirit of Ramadan is best laid out here.