The Hindu Sunday crossword no 18
8 Setter and lieutenant convert solid into liquid by application of heat (4)
9 Counterfeit for giving exchange initially (5)
10 Sketch doctor with a woman (4)
11 Stick advertisement at this place (6)
12 US cat lay writhing in hospital department (8)
13 Extraordinary ace tests container (8)
15 Mad vet leaves Venetians in a tizzy (6)
17 One travelling around carrying counterfeit visa results in circumvention of law (7)
19 Roars, 'Smithy uses it' (7)
22 Commencement of pain, laceration and fever leads to medieval epidemic (6)
24 Close shave next to girl! (4,4)
26 Peninsular Malaysia is behind reportedly high mountain range (8)
28 Embosses postal fee receipts (6)
30 Cobalt, aluminium and anthracite (4)
31 Hong Kong gangs' torture instruments (5) 32 'Arabian port' is bad English to some extent (4)
Down
1 Force boy at last (4)
2 Emphasises, 'Small locks' (8)
3 A couple of females with middlemen in European court get result (6)
4 Pain in injured rat's windpipe (7)
5 Sweat on steeple (8)
6 Thought beginners in legal service can be role models (6)
7 Throw wildcats (4)
14 Smith's block included in Roman villas (5)
16 New stew cooked in salamanders (5)
18 Wrongly carve a bit of tendon in large hams (8)
20 A sad lamb dances and dances (8)
21 United Nations container near New York is mysterious (7)
23 Girl and woman hug student happily (6)
25 Help like sister when queen is away (6)
27 Historical curtain once protecting Soviet Union from unfair onslaughts (4)
29 Good King Edward's seaside construction (4)
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The Hindu
37 minutes ago
- The Hindu
Madras Day: A touch of Dutch in Chennai
Had the English not proved more tenacious, we would have gone over to the Dutch a long while ago. The VOC (a long name in Dutch that signifies their East India Company), was around in this region much before the East India Company we know so well came along. And they were a significant presence all along the Coromandel Coast. Their interest was chiefly trading, particularly the cotton cloth woven in this region. While the British were still struggling to find a foothold in Madras in 1639, the Dutch were well-established at Pazhaverkadu aka Pulicat, 60 km north of Madras. Also Read:Take a heritage walk at Pulicat to understand how Madras came to be The British picked up the tricks of the trade by observing the Dutch, including the use of translators or dubashes. And the first dubash, Malayappa Chetty, was for a while in the service of both the companies! That was soon frowned upon and Malayappa ostensibly withdrew from British interests but successfully planted his nephews in his place. The Dutch were not happy with the British, but relations between the two were certainly warmer than what it was with the French. There is very little of Dutch heritage left in these parts. In Pulicat, we have practically nothing left of what was once Fort Geldria, but the church in the village, strikingly similar to Luz Church, survives. Rather appropriately, what is in excellent condition is the cemetery with a whole lot of tombstones that have interesting carvings. South of Madras, we have Sadras aka Sathurangapatnam, with a well-preserved citadel. And in the Thirukazhukundram temple, there is an inscription in Dutch on a mandapam, recording the visit of a Dutch gubernatorial party. At the St. Mathias Church in Vepery, there is a Dutch grave — the last place you would have expected it to be in. It is of Martin Stoffenberg, head of the administration at Pulicat. He came to Madras to recover from an illness and died here. Flagstaff by the beach For a while in the 17th Century CE, the Dutch together with Golconda, held San Thome. Their legacy was a flagstaff by the beach, which vanished sometime in the 20th Century. It now has a replacement, known as St. Thomas' staff! The Dutch did well in India but by the early 19th Century decided that Indonesia was better and wound up all their operations here. They left behind a few loan words — palayakat was the word for lungis until the 1950s at least, for instance, and that was the Pulicat connection. In case you need more, look up the Dutch word for toilet – kak huis. There are plenty more. The Dutch had a big presence in Madras in the early 20th Century by way of the Anglo-Dutch company Shell, which came into India by way of merger with the Burmah Oil Company. The resulting Burmah-Shell, had its headquarters at Burmah Shell House located on the Esplanade. It still stands though Burmah Shell, in 1975, became the government-owned Bharat Petroleum, and the building is known as Chennai House. Returning after Independence Post-Independence, the Dutch made a comeback, this time as partners in India's industrialisation. One of the early names may not be a presence in Chennai but is still remembered by way of a bus stop and a junction in Ambattur — Wavin. Short for Water and Vinyl Chloride, it provided the much-needed impetus in irrigation and water supply by manufacturing PVC pipes. Now, Wavin is into water management and has a pan-Indian presence but its name lives on here. An abiding presence in the city, more an abiding odour, is Maschmeijer Aromatics in Chromepet. It commemorates August Maschmeijer, an organic chemist in Amsterdam, who pioneered plenty of aromatic compounds. A representative of the resulting company came to Madras in the 1950s and a collaboration with the Badsha family ensued. The entity continues to flourish. Post-liberalisation, there is a significant presence of Dutch companies in the city. There is in the Netherlands a Dutch Museum of Textiles and in it are several samples of cloth from this region that once brought traders from far away.
Deccan Herald
an hour ago
- Deccan Herald
Give Kannada copies of bills: BJP MLC Ravi Kumar
'Only English copies of the bills have been provided, not everyone here has studied in the English medium,' he added.
Hindustan Times
3 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Rude Food by Vir Sanghvi: Pasta la vista, Italy
What do you think of the Indian pasta tradition? The version of Spaghetti Bolognese served around the world was not invented in Italy (ADOBE STOCK) If your response is one of bewilderment, then join the club. That's what I would have said too — at least until a week ago. 'What rubbish! There is no such thing as an Indian pasta tradition,' I would have confidently asserted. Then, I caught the writer and food historian Kurush Dalal on Kunal Vijaykar's podcast. Kunal looked as befuddled as you and me when Kurush went on about Indian pastas and how our tradition dates back centuries. I was startled enough to call Kurush. Did he really believe all this stuff about ancient Indian pasta dishes? It turned out he did and he regaled me with examples from nearly every part of India. But before we go much further, here's a little historical perspective. All of us think of pasta as being Italian, and we are not entirely wrong. Except that the Italian pastas we know today do not have deep historical roots. There has been some outrage in Italy recently over a book published by the food historian Luca Cesari (The English translation is called A Brief History of Pasta), which argues persuasively that Italians only started eating the pasta dishes that Italy is famous for during the modern period. Luca Cesari's book argues that Italians largely started eating pasta during the modern period. On the other hand, it is clear that while the dishes may be of recent origin, macaroni or some form of dried pasta did exist in medieval Italy. There is a reference to macaroni dating back to Genoa in 1279. This is important if only to dispose of the myth that Marco Polo introduced Italians to Chinese noodles, which they appropriated and called pasta. The early references to macaroni predate Polo's return from China, and in any case, the story about Polo was invented in 20th century America as part of an ad campaign by a US pasta company. There is no doubt that they ate noodles in the Far East long before the Italians ate macaroni. But, even there, it's possible to overstate the antiquity. Ramen only caught on in Japan after the Second World War. Pad Thai was only invented in Thailand in the 1930s and took over a decade to catch on. So, what unites the Far Eastern noodle tradition with Italian pasta? If you look at the map the answer is obvious: The Middle East. Idiappam in the South is proof that India has been making noodles for centuries. Though Italians don't like talking about it, it isn't just pasta, many of today's most famous Italian dishes originated in the Middle East. Pizza is a corruption of the word pita. Calzone has the same Middle Eastern origins as our samosa. Risotto developed because Arabs introduced rice to Italy. Which brings us back to India and to Kurush Dalal's claims for our pasta/noodle tradition. One of his most convincing examples of Indian pasta is idiappam. It is, he argues, a good example of how Indians have been making noodles/pasta for centuries. We even exported the dish to Sri Lanka, where it is usually described as string hoppers. I asked Shri Bala, the chef and food historian from Tamil Nadu, how old the dish was. She said that there is a reference to something that translates as 'shredded appam' in Sangam literature, which could be the ancestor of the modern idiappam. The equipment used to make the idiappam (called sevvai nazhi) probably has Arab origins: There was a black pepper trade between South India and Arabia in the Sangam period. Another example of an Indian pasta offered by Kurush is the noodle biryani made in Bhatkal on the Karnataka coast. Shri Bala said that it is called Shayya Biryani and was created through contacts with Yemen centuries ago. The falooda we eat in North India came from Persia. (ADOBE STOCK) Naren Thimmaiah, the great South Indian chef, took Kurush's claims further. He argued that you find pulaos made with noodles all over Karnataka. He said that the most common name was shaavige pulao because shaavige referred to vermicelli. The Bhatkal version was called a biryani because it was associated with a local Muslim community, but Hindus all over Mangaluru cooked with noodles. So, in South India at least, they have eaten pasta for centuries. And in the North, we have falooda. We think of it as being entirely Indian but it is actually a Persian dish. The Mughals brought the Persian vermicelli used in falooda to India and we called it sevian, adopted it and made it our own. We don't think of the region that now includes modern Iran as being noodle-friendly, but, in fact, they were cooking pasta there long before the Italians had heard of it. For instance, a popular Persian dish in the tenth century was lakhshah which consisted of strips cut from a thin sheet of dough: What the Italians would later call tagliatelle. Radical historians argue that all noodles originated in the Middle East and were introduced to China by Persian traders in the second century BC. Perhaps they are right, but what we do know for certain is that lakhshah came to India from Persia and that Indian merchants (from South India) took these noodles to the Far East, adding our own spices to make them tastier. The dish is still massively popular in Indonesia and other South East Asian countries where it is even called laksa. Pizza is a corruption of the word pita, and bears a similarity to the Turkish pide. So, I don't think there is much doubt that Kurush is right to talk about an Indian pasta-noodle tradition; it actually predates the use of pasta in Italy. Given the close trading relationship between the Middle East and India from ancient times it is easy to see how our own pasta dishes developed with influences from West Asia. But Kurush goes further. If the definition of pasta is something made of wheat (or another grain) and then cooked in a sauce, we have thousands of indigenous dishes that fit that definition. The Gujarati dal dhokli is just one example. What about the Indian tradition of making different kinds of vadi from grains, drying them and then cooking them in a gravy? That's pretty much the classic definition of a pasta dish. The South East Asian laksa may have come from Persia. (ADOBE STOCK) Of course, dishes keep evolving. Ask the Italians. Of their best-known pastas, the version of Spaghetti Bolognese served around the world was not invented in Italy. (They do make a ragu for pasta in Bologna but this is not it.) Spaghetti Carbonara was invented by a restaurant in Rome in 1946 to feed American soldiers. Fettuccine Alfredo was invented in the 20th century by an enterprising restaurateur and is still more easily available in America than in Italy. If you use those parameters, then we also have a more recent pasta-noodle tradition. Hakka noodles, the mainstay of Indian Chinese cuisine, are unknown in China. Momos came to India with Tibetan refugees in the 1960s but we have made them ours: the original version is very different. Instant noodles were invented in Japan in 1958 by Momofuku Ando, but we have annexed them with our masala Maggi. So, not only is there an ancient pasta-noodle tradition in India, but we are in the process of creating a new one. Kurush is right. We may not use the term pasta but we started eating it long before the Italians did. From HT Brunch, August 23, 2025 Follow us on
