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Street Food Home Introduction Louisville, KY Cedar Rapids Chicago Denmark Plano/Dallas/Fort Worth Richmond, VA Singapore Hawker Centres The Rules Teh Tarik / Turkish Ice Cream Chinatown Bugis Market Laksa Farewell Trenton, NJ San Antonio, TX India Introduction Bottled Water Roadside Coconut New York City Nashville, TN Olympia, WA	India Introduction Thanks to my employer, I spent two weeks in India, one in Noida and the other in Bengaluru, with a few side trips. One of the great regrets of my life is that I’ve never been able to go back, spend a longer time, and see more of the country. I did not even get to the Noida gurudwara for langyar, and I regret that deeply. Like Singapore, the time I spent there had a significant impact. I’ll try to summarize a bit but it’s going to be rambly, as you already know if you’ve read any of the previous installments. My first experience of India was a bit rough. The company treated me like a fresher, and put me in a skeevy hotel that was only partly renovated from a big expensive house. There was supposed to be breakfast provided. What I got was a tray brought round by a child, with a box of American cereal and a glass of room temperature milk, and a covered bowl full of dal fry. I ate the dal and did not touch the milk. My Indian coworkers later affirmed that this was the right decision. That left me on my own for midday. The company was having a slow start to what was supposed to be a two week onsite for the client manager, with me sheepdogging him. I was told I would be picked up in the early afternoon. I pulled up a map of where I was, and started hunting for where I might get something a bit more than dal fry. This led to my first experience with Indian traffic. Walking to where the map said there was a vada pav stand required me to cross a major road that had no traffic lights within view. Fortunately, there was a guy out ahead of me, and I was able to see that he just sort of seamlessly integrated into the flow and was across the busy road without incident. Okay, look for the path, my OCD is really good at picking out patterns of that sort, and I did the trick and was on the other side of the road without getting honked at or hit. I didn’t find the vada pav place, but that was because on the way there, I found a little hole in the wall place with a sign advertising Pure Veg Thali. The folks there seemed somewhat bemused at finding this weird white guy walking up to their counter. I ordered by number, paid cash as you do at these places, and took a go-box back to the hotel. What I got was basically a curry bento, what in Indian cuisine is called a thali, a sort of veg-and-three combo plate. It was both better than the dal fry, which had been kind of dry, and more substantial, and I felt much better about the day when Nishant arrived. Nishant Agarwal was at the time a peer, and working as a client relationship manager. He took a look at where I was staying, and had some words about it. They have treated you like a fresher, he said, and I agreed, but it had given me a truly authentic Indian experience for my first day there… yes, I'm leaving some details out. So he said he would do something about the accommodations, and we got in his car and entered Noida traffic. On the way to the office, he started telling me about how they had been looking into options for lunch, and trying to accommodate everyone, and I could see where the problem was. I said, Nishant, I’m vegetarian. The stress visibly left his body, and he said, “Oh thank god” in that tone that only someone with a Desi accent can get. “Yeah,” I confirmed. “I’ve been eating Indian food for twenty years. I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me.” The conversation turned to the traffic, and Nishant said to me the most significsnt thing anyone said to me the entire two weeks. He asked me, what do you think of the traffic? I said, obviously, there are some rules at play here that I am unaware of, as it looks chaotic, but it flows steadily and there are no accidents. "It works by understanding," Nishant said. I sat with that for the rest of the ride, unpacking it. That explained so much of India to me at the time, and has been something that I have thought about ever since. You do not know the impact you will have on someone else's life. As it turned out, it was the client manager they needed to worry about. I ate street food with my coworkers for two weeks and was fine. My boss on the client side, who was the reason for the trip, was born in North Delhi. He stuck to the hotel cuisine and was really careful about what he ate, and by Wednesday he was sick. The senior managers at the vendor company razzed him unmercifully about that. The white guy eats our street food and is here ready to work. You were born here and you have a bad stomach? You have been away too long. I got the feeling they were at some point seeing just what all I would go along with. Like with everything else, I dove into the experience. The only bit I really did not like was the digestive the boss insisted we all had to get from the stand outside the restaurant in Mysore. It tasted like those hard-milled flower soaps your grandmother had.

Street Food Home

India

Introduction

Thanks to my employer, I spent two weeks in India, one in Noida and the other in Bengaluru, with a few side trips. One of the great regrets of my life is that I’ve never been able to go back, spend a longer time, and see more of the country. I did not even get to the Noida gurudwara for langyar, and I regret that deeply. Like Singapore, the time I spent there had a significant impact. I’ll try to summarize a bit but it’s going to be rambly, as you already know if you’ve read any of the previous installments.

My first experience of India was a bit rough. The company treated me like a fresher, and put me in a skeevy hotel that was only partly renovated from a big expensive house. There was supposed to be breakfast provided. What I got was a tray brought round by a child, with a box of American cereal and a glass of room temperature milk, and a covered bowl full of dal fry. I ate the dal and did not touch the milk. My Indian coworkers later affirmed that this was the right decision.

That left me on my own for midday. The company was having a slow start to what was supposed to be a two week onsite for the client manager, with me sheepdogging him. I was told I would be picked up in the early afternoon. I pulled up a map of where I was, and started hunting for where I might get something a bit more than dal fry.

This led to my first experience with Indian traffic. Walking to where the map said there was a vada pav stand required me to cross a major road that had no traffic lights within view. Fortunately, there was a guy out ahead of me, and I was able to see that he just sort of seamlessly integrated into the flow and was across the busy road without incident. Okay, look for the path, my OCD is really good at picking out patterns of that sort, and I did the trick and was on the other side of the road without getting honked at or hit.

I didn’t find the vada pav place, but that was because on the way there, I found a little hole in the wall place with a sign advertising Pure Veg Thali. The folks there seemed somewhat bemused at finding this weird white guy walking up to their counter. I ordered by number, paid cash as you do at these places, and took a go-box back to the hotel. What I got was basically a curry bento, what in Indian cuisine is called a thali, a sort of veg-and-three combo plate. It was both better than the dal fry, which had been kind of dry, and more substantial, and I felt much better about the day when Nishant arrived.

Nishant Agarwal was at the time a peer, and working as a client relationship manager. He took a look at where I was staying, and had some words about it. They have treated you like a fresher, he said, and I agreed, but it had given me a truly authentic Indian experience for my first day there… yes, I'm leaving some details out.

So he said he would do something about the accommodations, and we got in his car and entered Noida traffic. On the way to the office, he started telling me about how they had been looking into options for lunch, and trying to accommodate everyone, and I could see where the problem was. I said, Nishant, I’m vegetarian. The stress visibly left his body, and he said, “Oh thank god” in that tone that only someone with a Desi accent can get. “Yeah,” I confirmed. “I’ve been eating Indian food for twenty years. I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me.”

The conversation turned to the traffic, and Nishant said to me the most significsnt thing anyone said to me the entire two weeks. He asked me, what do you think of the traffic? I said, obviously, there are some rules at play here that I am unaware of, as it looks chaotic, but it flows steadily and there are no accidents.

"It works by understanding," Nishant said.

I sat with that for the rest of the ride, unpacking it. That explained so much of India to me at the time, and has been something that I have thought about ever since. You do not know the impact you will have on someone else's life.

As it turned out, it was the client manager they needed to worry about. I ate street food with my coworkers for two weeks and was fine. My boss on the client side, who was the reason for the trip, was born in North Delhi. He stuck to the hotel cuisine and was really careful about what he ate, and by Wednesday he was sick. The senior managers at the vendor company razzed him unmercifully about that. The white guy eats our street food and is here ready to work. You were born here and you have a bad stomach? You have been away too long.

I got the feeling they were at some point seeing just what all I would go along with. Like with everything else, I dove into the experience. The only bit I really did not like was the digestive the boss insisted we all had to get from the stand outside the restaurant in Mysore. It tasted like those hard-milled flower soaps your grandmother had.