If it wasn’t already evident, the south and east are largely meat eating while the north and west are significantly vegetarian
Rice + Meat is the most common dish pattern, not surprising because it’s either easy to make at scale (biriyani) or with great speed (fried rice) and packs a full meal in a single dish
The easy availability of off-the-shelf fermented batter has clearly made dosas and idlis popular in places they usually weren’t. And for a restaurant, they are low effort in comparison to wheat-based breads.
It’s fascinating to see a relatively modern Chennai-origin dish (Chicken-65) be popular in Hyderabad. Also, hard to go wrong with spicy, fried chicken
Paneer seems to be the vegetarian protein of choice for both South and North India home deliveries while dal rules the West (standard caveats about sample size etc apply as usual)
Delhi and Gurgaon are quite baffling. In other parts of the world, burgers and fries aren’t particularly popular for home delivery because the bun gets soggy & the fries go limp.
PS: I have no clue about the methodology, data sources etc, so take it with a healthy dose of low sodium salt (punditry, not analysis)
PS2: Did they skip Kochi because one of the top selling dishes is likely to be something that gets a few trigger happy people worked up?
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I’ve done my fair share of business negotiations, but nothing could have prepared me to parlay with a thuggish rhesus monkey who stole my spectacles at the Jakhoo temple in Shimla earlier today. I was, rather fortuitously, helped by an imposing alpha male monkey
If you are wondering how on earth I managed to enlist the services of a large monkey to retrieve my spectacles, I will have to tell you the whole story, but since I’m currently trekking to see the Chadwick falls, this will have to wait till my phone gets connectivity
It all started with this guy. More precisely, because I was not able to reach this guy. Vodafone’s service in Shimla is best described as the exact opposite of the Shammi Kapoor song “bar bar dekho” because no bars are to be seen in most parts of the city.
What connects the customary late afternoon/early evening rain in Bengaluru and the Nepenthes fly-trapping pitcher plant? It’s Madagascar. Intrigued? Thread...
Around 120 million years ago, the Indian landmass parted ways with the Antarctic and Australian landmass. And around 88 million years ago, a giant underwater volcanic eruption called the Marion hotspot occurred, and it went on for 2 million years.
What is today the Western Ghats in India was originally a wider mountain range that literally split down the middle like a zipper during this eruption and this is how Madagascar separated from the Indian landmass.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher and accomplished orator who was amputated and beheaded on the orders of Mark Antony for his scathing criticism and opposition against the man.
But before his hands and head were non-consensually separated from his body, he authored a work on ethics titled "De finibus bonorum et malorum" ("On the ends of good and evil”) in 45 BCE.
"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..." is the English translation of an excerpt from that work.
When I was in high school, my English teacher told us this fascinating story of India’s electrification drive in the 1960s. The government sent armies of electrical engineers village by village to bring what would be a disruptive change - light after dark.
And it wasn’t easy because electricity was a newfangled thing and understandably, village elders regularly resisted what the 1960s equivalent of WhatsApp (hearsay and gossip) told them - this was a scary bit of technology that was dangerous.
Apparently, some of them would say - “We heard that electricity is hot and things can catch fire”. As one might imagine, Indian languages did not possess the vocabulary to describe the movement of electrons through conductive materials back in the day.
When you add a pinch of baking soda and a teabag to the pressure cooker when cooking chickpeas, you are using the chemistry of acid-base reactions and also exploiting the ability of sodium bicarbonate to break bonds in pectin.
When you add gram flour (besan) to yoghurt and whisk it to prevent it from splitting in a kadhi, you are experimenting with the physics of emulsions. When you whip air into egg whites for cakes, you are dealing with foams
When you make a perfectly soft-boiled egg, or work cold butter into an omelette, or squeeze lime juice into a marinade for chicken, you are denaturing protein molecules with precision and control.
Uwe Hohn, Neeraj Chopra's coach, and the only man to ever throw a javelin over 100m did not win an Olympic medal because East Germany boycotted the 1984 games in Los Angeles
As throws reached 100m during the mid-80s, the design of the javelins changed to push the centre of gravity 4 cm ahead, which reduced throw distance because it's harder to throw something that is more front-heavy
While it's tempting to assume that this sport is all about shoulder and arm strength, it isn't. The biggest biomechanical factor in throw distance is the ability to plonk the left foot down and transfer energy via the hips and trunk to the throwing arm