I lived in Mumbai, India, from 2004-2006. During that time, I did a lot of traveling throughout the country. I also came to love so many aspects of life in India, from food to festivals. Here are a few snippets of writing from my life there as well as posts on the latest sights, sounds, and style from the subcontinent.
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of writing a FOB (front of the book) “feature” on the legendary Parsi eatery Britannia & Co. for Saveur magazine. At the time, I was living in Bombay, India, and had frequented Britannia enough to know that it deserved to be written about – if not by…
It has been almost nine months since I left India and last posted on the blog. (You’ll also notice I moved cyber addresses – from http://tblogs.bootsnall.com/miss to here.) I was ready to leave India last April, but now I look back on that chaos quite fondly. Indeed, I was also fond of today’s holiday –…
I apologize for the long silence. In fact, not much has been happening around here. Well, not much except bird flu, temple attacks, and presidential visits. At this point, nearly two years later, India and Bombay have almost become everyday for me. And, sad as it may seem, there comes a time when you become…
Senator John Kerry came to India recently to discuss, among other things, his opinions on outsourcing. During the U.S. elections of 2004, Indians (or at least the Indian media) never quite warmed to Kerry, so I suppose this was a chance for him to go on a goodwill tour and to see outsourcing at its,…
Bombay is one of the most progressive cities in India. For most intents and purposes, both the New York and L.A. of India. It is also the capital of of Maharashtra, a state that is proving to be more backward which each report of a book ban. On Monday, the Maharashtra government banned a scholarly…
I don’t think I had ever planned my life beyond 2005, so New Year’s 2006 hit me from the out of the blue. We hadn’t made any plans for New Years, either, figuring that something low-key would come along. Ha! This is Bombay. Something came along, but it certainly wasn’t low key. A friend of…
Another sign that Bombay is booming: it seems like a new club opens each week. Since I arrived over 15 months ago, a number of new clubs, including Zenzi, Seijo and the Soul Dish, and Squeeze have opened in Bandra (north Bombay), the home of the nouveau riche, Bollywood stars, and the majority of Bombay’s…
Bombay has changed to Mumbai. Madras to Chennai. Calcutta to the much less evocative Kolkata. Now, it looks like Bangalore is jumping on the renaming bandwagon. It intends to change its name to Bengaluru, which means “the town of boiled beans” in the local Kannada language. Is this really necessary? When a friend sent me…
I’m finally back to work after three restful weeks back in the States. Besides traveling around and seeing family and friends, I had the chance to while away a few afternoons in some national and state parks, including Wakulla Springs, where I saw alligators grinning in the sun, and Sagamore Hill, the former home of…