Delhi Water Bar

April 2, 2005

A water bar on a sidestreet off Janpath in Delhi. Twenty metres down the street is a pump and a well. This water bar is actually a service on offer to draw customers into a shop selling Kashmiri handicrafts and into an alley with other small shops hidden from the street. I love this tented pavillion shared by several shop keepers and its water bar offering a cool place to gather and chat in the shade.

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Eating street food at home

March 19, 2005

Losing the fear of street food in one simple lunch. The lesson is ‘presentation is everything’. The Nomadic Banquet workshop participants dig in to street tucker. All of the dishes for this meal were gleaned from within a 200 meter radius of Nomadic Banquet HQ. It was the first time in a week that I witnessed one of the DAI students eat heartily.
(Please read more… )

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Delhi recycling, in all fairness

March 15, 2005

When is recycling not really recycling? When the recycled or re-purposed item never really had a purpose in the first place. These papers, have been left on the ground (location across the street from Jantar Mantar, Delhi), as far as I can tell, for no other purpose than to be repurposed. The image on the left is a stack of paper left on the street as an offering to the gods of the recycled chaat-bag-makers.

Packaging for chaat is often nothing more than a bag made from old newsprint or repurposed paper, or for the wetter stuff, a leaf plate. The bag pictured on the right was made from some terribly interesting literature about bonds. One can see the imprint of the deep-fried sweet peas contained within being absorbed into the paper making a pretty pattern.

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