Phoren Tadka ( Exotic Spices)



Indians like foreign stuff. As long as you properly Indianise them. They want the phirangi stuff drenched in Indian sensibilities. Dish should be foreign, but garnished with local spices. Ok, ok, enough of bad puns, ill elaborate further. They basically want to play it safe but at the same time pretend to project an aura of sophistication.

They think they like Chinese and Italian. But that is only because they have eaten the street side vendor spicy Chinese, or the thick cheese pizza on hard crust bread at the local fast food outlet. Authentic food, with its weird often smelly ingredients and sometimes bland taste would leave them disgusted. And this i say only about the conventional items. I am not even going to speak of acquired taste items like Frog or snakes that might present themselves on the menu. Which reminds me of a funny incident at a Hong Kong breakfast buffet. I took some meatballs on my plate and as I headed back to the table I thought it wise to check the contents in case it was pork. I asked an idle waiter if the contents were chicken or pork. He said something that sounded like pork. Further prodding made him enunciate it equally unintelligibly albeit a little louder. Imagine my horror when I realised the word he was spouting was FROG.

This is not relegated to just food items. They take whatever aspects of foreign culture they like and then Indianise it. The result is not always pretty. Torn jeans that have gaudy glitter patterns on the backside, worn with atrociously loud t shirts. You have to pretend to like exotic stuff. And so you are always searching for exotica. Because at some point the exotic stuff becomes common place. And once everybody else likes it, you have to discard it and move on in search of other exotic stuff. Because, lets face it, there are pretenses to be kept up with.

All this while, the other cultures are discovering the good about our culture. Yoga, vegetarianism and Herbal tea to name a few. Ironically, some of these things became popular only after the West found it cool and hip.


They like modernism, freedom of expressions and casual, open minded approach. They imitate it. But only to a certain extent. Social and class distinctions, communalism have not been discarded. The youth there take up odd end jobs to earn their pocket money. Most of the work here is considered

below standards, sanctity of work has no respect here. So we continue to take and mould, adapt whatever catches our fancy to our convenience. The gadgets, playstations, ipods are all there. Of course wifi zones are scarce. The casual workclothes, and young urban attitude is there, but alternative careers find no takers. We don't move beyond, doctors, engineers, lawyers and MBA.






enough of bad puns, ill elaborate further. They basically want to play it safe but at the same time pretend to project an aura of sophistication.