Chapati

As promised, here is a post purely about chapatis. This food deserves a post of its own because of how important they are to the Indian diet. They are eaten with anything and everything, from rice to dal to baji to even just with jam and butter. I always thought naan and roti were the flat bread of India, but they are actually MUCH less common. Chapatis are a nutritious compliment to any meal. They are a simple food. The dough contains just whole wheat flour, water, and a tiny bit of salt. They are made fresh every day. Our professors have told us that a common response (especially in rural areas) from husbands when asked if they would like to see their wives formally employed is "Well then who will make the chapatis?" Although this statement may bring up a separate issue of gender roles and inequality, it also shows how important chapati is in Indian culture.

My host family is determined to teach me how to make a good chapati. My grandma, who we call Aiee (which means mother) says that I need to learn how to make them here so that when I go back home I can make a man happy! I'm going to show you what my host family showed me as far as chapati-making goes.

My host family gets their own wheat ground at a mill. Not every family does it, but I think it is cool that that's an option. When my mom showed me this, it was still warm! They go through SO much of this stuff..

After making the dough in the morning and then letting it rise a bit, Aiee or my mom starts making the chapati to eat with lunch and dinner. The extra flour is to help the dough not stick as you're rolling it out. 

 Aiee's getting a small piece ready to roll out

You roll it out a little bit, rub some oil on the flat surface, and then fold it in half two times before rolling it out again. This creates layers in the chapati.

Aiee has a well-practiced technique that makes forming perfect circles look so easy. 

 Well, it's not that easy, trust me! (This is my first attempt. They laughed at me and said I made Australia!)

The delicious end product. I don't get to that often, but eating lunch at home is the best because I eat the chapatis fresh off pan. 

Anddddd I am ending this post with a completely unrelated but super adorable....

...BABY!! (my host brother Arav)

How to Eat Like An Indian

Something crazy about Indian food culture is that they eat with their hands! Utensils are sometimes used and especially in more westernized, up-scale places, but on a whole the culture is ditch the fork and dive right in. You don't eat with both hands though, and for a very good reason. You eat with your right hand only. The left hand is considered dirty because another thing Indians also don't use is toilet paper. The left hand and water becomes the toilet paper, so eating with the left hand is not something you want to do!

You might imagine that eating rice, liquid-y things like dal, and a flat bread like chapati might be difficult to do with just one hand. I sure did! Luckily at our orientation we were well-trained in how to eat like an Indian. I personally love doing it and hardly ever use utensils anymore; and once you learn how through my demo below, I encourage you to try! My host mom says Indians do it to connect with their food. See what you think.

 

Very normal dinner plate: Chapati, yogurt and tomato salad, vegetable baji, and rice. This is how we start..

...You have to mix it together!!

But with things being generally a bit dry, you need to add some dal.

But now things might be too wet, won't they?    Wrong! You use the dal as a sort of glue so that things turn out like...

..This! Now you can pinch the rice mixture into a sizeable amount.

If you want to just eat the rice without chapati, you > have to use a very important thumb technique to do it right. It seems obvious, but it wasn't at first to us and we looked pretty ridiculous trying to figure out how to put rice in our mouths without making a mess. The trick is to put your thumb like I have mine here. Then when you put it up to your mouth, you push the rice in with that thumb and it slides right in. Simple.

<Now if you want to eat your chapati, you also have to use a little technique to tear it. Remember, you only have one hand. It took a little practice and someone showing us, but you basically use a pinch-and-pull method while the chapati is folded in half to get a good piece off.

Then you can use it as a pick-up tool for your rice. Chapati tastes good with everything, and so it is eaten almost always at lunch and dinner.

Proper technique and a delicious meal makes a happy eater :)

My Daily Bread

I'll start by saying I LOVE Indian food. Of course, that doesn't mean I love all Indian food. So far I have had a  fair but not extensive exposure to the great variety of dishes that can be classified as "Indian". As a city halfway between North and South India, and as a city to where many people from all over the country and from other countries frequently migrate, Pune offers a great selection of food. I have tried my hand in a few restaurants around Fergusson and I have really enjoyed trying so many new things (usually ordering involves picking something at random from a menu because although they are printed in English, the names have no meaning to me). However, this happens only every once in a while. The Indian food that I am really talking about is the food that I eat every day. There is a structure to each of my meals that admittedly is pretty repetitive but one I find delicious and comforting. Maybe I will get sick of eating the same foods all the time down the line, but for now I am loving what I am eating.

Breakfast 8am:

During the week, the program center gives us breakfast. There is always yogurt, bananas, another fruit, oatmeal, boiled eggs, and tea. A carb-type portion varies from veg pastry puffs to a rice mixture to this savory thicker cream of wheat type stuff that I call mush throughout the week. There are always leftovers that we can snack on throughout the day.

On weekends, if I am home, my host mom makes me breakfast. We almost always have this dish, which is called pohe (po-hay). It is just pressed rice, spices, green chilis, and peanuts, but it is super delicious. We have it with tea, of course. 

Lunch 1pm:

Lunch is always the most varied meal. We are responsible for our own lunch, and so we go to restaurants during our lunchbreak, which is where I have learned what some different dishes are. The problem is that I don't really like doing that because I don't always have time to go to a restaurant, don't like having to take so much time to sit down, order and then eat, and I don't like not knowing how the food is prepared because I have no idea if it is healthy or not. This is us eating at a place I have gone to a lot because it is right across the street, really cheap and fast, and pretty tasty so therefore the most convenient option. I have come to realize that it is pretty fast-foody, though, and it makes me feel slightly sick, so I really don't like eating there. Luckily, our program staff is awesome and has now organized an ordered meal made by some woman out of her home that is more similar to what my host mom cooks that we can get every day if we want. Maybe it sounds like I have a lot of issues with my lunch-eating, but I'm not the only one so I don't feel bad about it at all.

Dinner 8:30pm:

Dinner is by far my favorite meal. I do everything I can to make sure I am home to eat at my host mom's house. She prepares the most simple but delicious meals. Explaining this meal will give you a really good representation of a typical Indian plate. At her house there is always rice, chapati, baji (which is basically vegetable mush), a vegetable (usually tomato and red onions) and yogurt salad, and dal. Dal is a liquid made from lentils, spices, and other vegetables. It can be eaten plain but is usually served over rice (which helps make the rice possible to eat with your hands, which I will show you in the next post!). Chapati is so important to the Indian diet that I am going to include a post just about chapatis later, but basically it is an Indian flatbread that is used as a tool to eat your food. But like I said, more about those later. The last thing you can see on this plate is something we don't always have but happened to when I took this picture. It is a sweet milky dessert made from grains and milk. Very good, and not too sweet. Indian desserts are INCREDIBLY sweet, way too sweet for me, so you won't really see me talk about them because I don't eat them. 

One more thing about dinner. The portion size here is only what I start out with. My mom always firmly insists that I take more, and I usually do. If I don't accept, she gives me more anyways. Oh and we eat that late because Indians eat that late, if not later. My host family doesn't eat until 10:00pm usually, but to be fair they do have a pretty late, and big, lunch and afternoon snack with their tea. 

Snacks:

If you notice, I have large breaks between my meals, especially between lunch and dinner. While I do often scrounge up some fruit or some leftover mush at the program center, I don't actually snack that often at all. Snacking is not anywhere as near as common here in India. Most of the food is prepared fresh-to-eat. So by the time I get to dinner, I'm usually starving. I compensate by eating bigger portions at every meal, which surprisingly is working out okay. 

Theme 3: Food

The theme is coming late this week, I know, but I have been so busy between field visits, going to class, and doing my homework on top of applying for scholarships and other things. But I should still be able to fit in a few posts before the week is over. This week's topic, one I have been waiting to write about for a while, is food!

The reason I have waited so long is mainly because I wanted to be able to know how to write about it. Indian food is so different than anything I have ever encountered. I never ate at Indian restaurants back home, but even students who have say the food here is still very different. It is hard to tell what a dish is and/or will taste like when I have never even heard of the base ingredients. They use different fruits and vegetables and sooo many spices. While I still am no where near competent with my Indian food knowledge, I know enough to share with you some typical dishes/foods, the style of eating, and a little about the food culture.

Environment

When I didn't get enough sleep, when my days are too long, and balancing everything becomes stressful, the general environment of the city makes everything SO MUCH WORSE. On just okay or good days, it is a bit easier to manage, especially because I have lived in a developing country before. But there are sometimes, some days, where these things really get to me.

Garbage

Despite the city's aim to be clean...

...it doesn't always quite work out that way. Our Contemporary India professor explained to us that while Indians have an almost obsession with keeping their personal spaces clean, public space is viewed as something to be taken care of by someone else. Though I occasionally sees signs saying not to, littering is very common and I see people do it all the time. It doesn't help that there aren't any public garbage cans. While there isn't garbage all over, per say, there is definitely much more than I care to be around. On a rough day, having to see, smell, and walk among the garbage is hard. 

Traffic

Anyone that lives in a city anywhere will have to constantly deal with traffic--the crowdedness, the noise, the lack of peace and quiet at any given hour of the day. Indian traffic is much more intense than anything I have experienced, like I posted about earlier. I took a video to share with you so you would get a better sense of what I mean, but it won't upload. But just imagine what it would be like with not a lot of sidewalks, hardly any traffic lights, not a single stop sign, and tons of cars, motorbikes, and rickshaws that weave in and out of traffic however they want. 

Pollution

Because of all that traffic, there is so much pollution. Breathing it and walking among the air pollution is something I really hate. It makes my boogers black, my eyes burn, and my face and feet feel so dirty that I always have to wash them whenever I come home. Indians hate it too, and they have devised a method of tying scarves around their faces to block the pollution. I haven't done that yet, but I might have to start soon.

Coping Method: Not all parts of the city are this intense. To deal with this new environment, I just have to seek out the places that aren't. Also, listening to my ipod while I walk really helps!

Gender Norms

I have never thought about my gender as a part of my identity until coming to India. There are different social norms that apply to women here, and I feel much more aware of my gender orientation.

For example, here is an outfit I would wear to school here in India.

I don't mind doing it, because I feel that I blend in, the clothes are light and comfortable, and they are pretty. However, it also demonstrates how I have to change my habits in India. Women in India don't show their legs or bear their shoulders. So even though it is really hot now and will get even hotter soon, I couldn't wear the tank top and shorts I would normally wear in this type of weather. I also have to wear long pants to the gym, which I normally would not do. These examples might sound a bit trivial, and it isn't like I can't easily adjust to them, but it is these small restrictions and others that make me feel uncomfortable in general about the idea of having any restrictions at all just because of my gender.

Also, in almost all of my classes we discuss how gender plays a role in Indian society in some way or the other. Usually, it is hard to stomach. In Public Health, we discuss "The Missing Girls in India", which happens because female fetuses are being aborted, women are being neglected during pregnancy if they are thought to be pregnant with a girl, and infant girls are also being neglected as far as their overall health and education--all because male children are culturally preferred. Currently, India is the most dangerous place to be born for a baby girl. These and other stories we hear regarding the discrimnation of women, despite the advancements India has made as a country, are really hard to hear.

Coping Method: With these situations, it is really necessary to apply a cultural lense. I come from a society where women don't face as many restrictions on their daily habits and interactions, but this is a different place. Saying "these poor women" won't help, because I don't even really know how they feel about having to dress very modestly all the time, for example. Saying "poor me" won't help either, because I am here to learn about and appreciate this culture, and that means some adapting is necessary. As for the discrimination issues, it helps to identify with those issues as a woman myself and use those stories as motivation to change something rather than just get angry or saddened by it.

Begging

I am used to seeing beggars on the street in many different places, but the forcefulness of the Indian begging population can bother me still despite my prior experience. They are very physical in the sense that they will touch you, tap you, pull on your shirt, push their way between two people in a crowd, and get in your face.

This woman is a type of beggar that carries around a tin of yellow and red powder. She will get in your face and try to touch your head, which you should never let her do. She tries to give you a blessing, and if she succeeds, she feels that she has the right to demand money. If you give her money, she will demand more.

What is worse are the child beggars. I don't have a picture of any situation, by they are particularly forceful, especially more so with us because we are so obviously foreign. It is hard to ignore them, push past them, or yell at them because they are just kids.

Coping Method: The best thing is just to remember that giving a beggar money won't really help the situation overall, especially with the kids who are often working for some higher up and won't get the money anyway. Sometimes people say it is best to give food, but often here the beggars won't accept it or will throw it back in the giver's face. It takes time to work a level of desensitization, which is unfortunate but really our only option on day-to-day basis.