Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes
Let’s assume that skill in the kitchen is gender-neutral. If so, why is a man more likely than a woman to be taken seriously as a chef? It is perception that creates the illusion of a distinction between men and women in the kitchen
07 October 2015The sequence of fasting, sacrifice, guilt, feast, guilt and pleasure creates the capacity in our tastebuds to experience food and drink with intensity. Something in the act of fasting kickstarts the taste glands and intensifies the pleasure
02 September 2015Perpetrators prefer using a poisonous delicacy when they want to get away with murder. Food offers a very convenient way of avoiding detection. Despite all his precautions, rumour has it that even the Roman Emperor Augustus could not escape being slowly poisoned to death by his wife
05 August 2015To contemplate the art of being idle, of pottering around, drinking a tall glass of ice cold buttermilk or lemon soda, and nibbling on a cold grapefruit and hot peanut salad, seems an apt subject for the long hot summer
02 July 2015At birth, we all have about 10,000 taste buds scattered on the back, sides and tip of the tongue. But just like with the brain’s grey cells, we still don’t know why some use more of their taste buds than others
27 May 2015If north and south Indians share a similar genetic structure and perhaps a ‘common origin’ in the Harappan civilisation, then what has given birth to the different techniques of cooking?
29 April 2015Just as one adds a pinch of sugar or jaggery to balance the acidity of a tomato or tamarind, the sleuth’s savouring of a dish offsets and highlights the demon-like aspects of the crime
01 April 2015The problem we face today in India and many other parts of the world is that we straddle two conflicting ways of thinking about the relationship between health, food and taste
11 March 2015CELESTIAL HEROISM IS a bestseller, unless it is badly made. In it merges great survivor dramas and the romance of breaching the boundaries of human…
10 April 2019Pratap Bhanu Mehta is one of India’s most influential columnists and public intellectuals
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books on water: Water, Peace, and War and Water: Asia’s New Battleground
MJ Akbar is the author of, among several titles, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. His latest book is Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns
Ram Madhav is a member of the National Executive of RSS and a founding member of the governing council of India Foundation. He is the author of, among other titles, Partitioned Freedom and The Hindutva Paradigm