Tiger conservation pioneer Valmik Thapar dies at 73
RIP. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/JN0DNewTWS
— Rajdeep Sardesai (@sardesairajdeep) May 31, 2025
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Hindustan Times
2 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Review: From the King's Table to Street Food by Pushpesh Pant
Whenever I've heard Pushpesh Pant speak about food, whether in a three-hour Aaj Tak radio episode or from beneath the shade of a tree in Sunder Nursery, I always picture him with a mouthful of gulab jamun, mid-sentence. It's as if he's chewing on metaphor and syrup at the same time, swaad lagaake. This is not a complaint. It's a particular talent of talking as though the act of remembering is indistinguishable from the act of tasting. Every corner in this book is filtered through desire, rumour, and what the body once wanted at 4 PM in 1972. Fasting and feasting in Delhi's Jama Masjid market (Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times) Pant's great trick is that he does not try to prove a thesis (which he admits early on), he makes the reader feel the absences around which his city has always existed. You can feel the smoke of a missing kabab stall, the sweetness of a jalebi you can no longer find, the way someone once said, 'Yeh asli nihari hai' — and how no one says that anymore. 406pp, ₹699; Speaking Tiger This is not history as chronology. It's history as residue. Pant resists the academic impulse to flatten food into a stable 'object of study.' Instead, he treats it like an unreliable narrator which is part witness, part fabulist. He walks the reader through Mughal durbars, refugee kitchens post-Partition, and 1980s buffets in government guest houses with the same tone: curious, never conclusive. It's a tone I find strangely ethical. He does not lie. He simply doesn't pretend to know more than he does. 'Who's to say what is authentic anymore?' is the book's real question. And when the book refuses to solidify meaning makes Pant's writing feel ungovernable by typical non-fiction standards. A lesser writer might have lined up recipes, wrapped them in context, and added footnotes like garnish. Pant gives you traces. He gives you longing. And then he tells you that history, especially food history, is made of exactly that. This is where the book's revisionist quality emerges, not in the overwriting of old narratives, but in the refusal to grant them authority in the first place. From the King's Table to Street Food doesn't 'correct' history. It walks past it. Pant's loyalties are not with the court, the archive, or the textbook. They're with the forgotten halwai. The refugee daughter-in-law who invented a new biryani out of what she had. The rumour that this particular nihari joint used to serve the emperor's cook. All unverifiable. All valid. What's interesting is how political that stance is. Pant doesn't need to say, 'Food is political.' He shows you a city rearranged by displacement, war, plague, economic migration, caste. And he shows it through a single sentence: 'We must also remember that many of the so-called traditions of Delhi's food are hardly older than 175 years.' That's a statement which dismantles the fantasy of some eternal, static culinary identity. It tells you that Delhi, like its food, has been in motion forever. Even the Mughal nostalgia is handled with a wink. Pant clearly respects the imperial kitchens, but he's far more interested in what came after the empire broke. He's interested in the mutability of taste, in the way food adapts to new economies, new arrivals, new needs. In that sense, he's doing something quite radical: shifting the centre of Delhi's food story away from empire and toward entropy. The real protagonist of this book is change. You can see this in how Pant writes about sweets. Ghantewala's sohan halwa is more than just dessert, it's a ghost. It's a way to think about what happens when legacy stops being edible. Pant's nostalgia is forensic. Memory, in this book, is always being poked, disbelieved, laughed at. 'Memory tends to play strange tricks as you grow old and revisit old haunts, remembering them very differently,' he writes. That's the closest thing to a thesis this book can be. That is to say food is a memory device, and memory is unreliable on purpose. Here's what that does, formally. It frees Pant from the burden of being correct. He doesn't need to prove which dish came first, who made it, or where the cardamom was sourced. He needs only to make you believe that someone once cared enough to make it in the first place. And that someone else remembered it differently. The city's foodscape, then, becomes a series of layered misrememberings. It's history told in gossip, grief, appetite, and spice. There's also something about the way Pant treats 'Delhi' as a signifier. The term 'authentic' loses all structural integrity. There is no stable origin. Only imitation, translation, and habit. He quotes generously, from cooks, vendors, family members, friends. 'Who's to say the street food we eat today isn't more honest than what the royals dined on?' he asks. The question is rhetorical, but the provocation is real. What if the greasy paratha on your plate tonight has more to say about Delhi than the feasts of Shah Jahan ever could? Let's pause there. That sentence 'more honest' is doing heavy lifting. What does honesty mean in the context of food? Purity? Origins? Intention? The paratha you eat today in Moolchand isn't less authentic than the one your grandfather ate, it's just a different version of the same desire. Which is perhaps the book's deepest claim: that taste is a theory of history. And when taste changes, so does everything else. To speak of food, Pant reminds us, is also to speak of gaps — of what is no longer eaten, or no longer made the same way. One of the more haunting threads in From the King's Table to Street Food is his unspoken obsession with disappearance. Foodways are how a people remember themselves, and when they vanish, so does a particular version of history. Pant never mourns these losses directly. But he circles them. He writes around vanished eateries the way one speaks about old friends no longer seen. No judgment. Just absence, noted. We get a map with missing neighbourhoods, a route that doubles back on itself. We also get an ethnography of hunger. What people in Delhi craved at different moments in time. What they missed. What they insisted on reinventing. This insistence is key. Delhi's foodscape, as Pant sees it, is not a static inheritance. It's a constant improvisation. He gives the example of how Mughlai cuisine was repurposed by post-Partition Punjabi refugees. What was once slow, courtly, ceremonial became fast, fiery, and practical. Nihari, korma, and qorma changed hands. Changed oils. Changed meanings. The migrants who arrived from Rawalpindi and Lahore had different needs, different tongues. They didn't preserve Mughal recipes, they mutated them. This is culinary history as lived resistance in the kitchen. We then collectively arrive at a conclusion: food as adaptation. Not nostalgia. Not restoration. Not even survival exactly but a kind of semi-conscious synthesis. His prose mirrors this ethic. It lifts phrases from old Urdu poets. It riffs on colonial gazetteers. It quotes hawkers. It also speculates. This can make for an uneven reading experience. There are moments where the digressions pile up. A description of a long-lost kachori leads to a historical aside, which leads to a personal memory, which leads to a speculation about Persian influences and you feel the chapter is more compost than essay. But even this, I'd argue, is the form doing its work. Pant is essentially letting things rot. Break down. Ferment. That's what food does when left alone, and that's what language does when released from a thesis. Still, the absence of critical friction can feel like a missed opportunity. For all its richness, the book rarely addresses power directly. Caste is mentioned only glancingly. Class appears more often, but often as background. And while Pant is certainly aware of these forces, his inclination is to observe, not intervene. This reluctance feels generational, maybe even aesthetic. It seems his eye is trained on continuity, not rupture. But sometimes, I wished he'd push harder and ask who gets to narrate this city's food stories, and who disappears between bites. There is also an irony in the book – Pant is both an insider and an outsider to his own material. He is a trained academic, but he distrusts academia. He is a Delhiwallah, but one who arrived in the city as a student from the hills. His nostalgia is earned, not inherited. And that makes him unique to write this kind of book. Author Pushpesh Pant (Courtesy the publisher) What stays on the tongue long after the meal is over. What stories repeat themselves in different accents. What dishes resurface years later under new names. This, I think, is the radical heart of the book. It's not about preserving Delhi's culinary past. It's about showing how the past lives on in distortion, in mishearing, in new combinations. So what does that make this book? A field guide to edible memory? Perhaps. By the end, you do not know more about Delhi's food history. But you know how it might have felt to eat your way through it. You know how the city might have smelled on a humid day in the 1960s. You know why someone once said the chaat at Bengali Market was 'what love tastes like when it breaks your heart.' You know that history, too, can be eaten and that its aftertaste is often more vivid than the event itself. And maybe that's enough. Or maybe it's everything. Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.
News18
6 days ago
- News18
International Tiger Day 2025: Did You Know Tigers Smell Like Popcorn And Can Leap 9 Meters?
With the number of Tigers plummeting from 1,00,000 a century ago to only 3,500 by the start of the last decade, thirteen Tiger Range Countries, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Russian Federation, Thailand and Vietnam, joined hands at the Saint Petersburg Tiger Summit and pledged to double the number of Tigers by 2022 under the TX2 initiative. The collaboration helped reinforce efforts towards Tiger preservation, with the creation of the Global Tiger Recovery Program for coordinated funding, law enforcement, habitat protection and overall monitoring of the great cause. International Tiger Day mourns the loss of 97 per cent of Tigers in the last 100 years and promotes awareness and conservation efforts for the remaining. Since Tigers are apex predators, they play an influential role in maintaining an ecological balance of the wildlife, indicating a healthy forest ecosystem which guards against nature's decline. The day also highlights threats and legal reinforcement against Tiger poaching and encourages governments, NGOs and communities to unite against habitat loss, climate change and human-wildlife conflict. International Tiger Day 2025: 20 Facts About Tigers Tigers are the largest wild cats in the world Each Tiger carries a unique stripe pattern. These patterns help them disguise themselves behind the grass. Tigers have stripes on their fur as well as on their skin. Tigers weigh up to 363 kg and are 3.3 meters in length Wildlife experts believe a Tiger's urine smells like buttered popcorn due to a compound called 2-AP. It can act as a warning sign for intruders in their territory. Not just a menace on turf, the Tigers are excellent swimmers and can hunt inside water. A Tiger's canines can reach 4 inches in length The Siberian Tiger is the biggest in the world. Expert at running and pouncing their enemies, Tigers have back legs longer than their front legs. Tigers are hyper-carnivores, only eating meat. A Tiger can eat nearly one-fifth of its body weight in a single meal, which is about 88 pounds or 40 kgs. Their yearly intake of meat is estimated to be about 8,000 pounds. Contrary to their reputation, Tigers rarely attack humans unless provoked. The Tiger is the national animal of India and Bangladesh. India is home to 75 per cent of the world's wild tigers, with the Royal Bengal Tiger being the most famous for its features. Tiger cubs are born blind and rely on scent to find their mothers. Tigers are fantastic at luring animals into their region by imitating prey sounds. Tigers can clean their wounds using their antiseptic saliva. They have the largest brain of all cats and because of their size, can leap over 9 meters while also being able to jump 5 meters vertically. Unlike a lot of group predators, Tigers are solitary hunters who are mostly active at night. An active Tiger can run up to 65km/hour in short bursts.
Time of India
13-07-2025
- Time of India
Weekly Horoscope (July 14 – July 20): Predictions for Tiger Chinese Zodiac
Tiger-born people are natural leaders, but this week reminds you that presence is more powerful than pressure. Don't chase every task with force. Slow down and give your full focus to what is in front of you. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now When you stay present, results improve and peace increases. Let go of future worry and enjoy the moment. What you do with awareness now will carry you further tomorrow. Weekly Career Horoscope for Tiger Chinese Zodiac At work, you may feel pressure to finish everything fast. But this week, quality matters more than speed. Be fully present in meetings, tasks or communication. People will notice your attention, not just your action. A delay may bring better result if you stay calm. Presence brings leadership without shouting. If you remain grounded, you will reach goals with less stress and better confidence. Weekly Love Horoscope for Tiger Chinese Zodiac In love life, don't focus on where the relationship is going—focus on how it feels right now. Keep your phone aside. A small moment shared with full presence will deepen the bond more than big gifts. If single, someone may notice your calm and real energy. Love flows when heart is calm, not when mind is rushing. Weekly Money Horoscope for Tiger Chinese Zodiac You may feel pressure to increase income quickly or match others. Stop comparing. This week, being present in your financial life brings clarity. Write down expenses and check patterns. You may find peace in simple planning. Avoid impulsive spending. The money you handle with full awareness grows better. Step by step, steady income builds. Presence gives long-term stability, while pressure creates short-term noise. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Weekly Education Horoscope for Tiger Chinese Zodiac Tiger students must stop multitasking. When you study, give full attention. Even one hour of focused study is better than five hours of distracted reading. Keep books clean, notes ready and remove all digital noise during learning. Teachers will also notice your change. This week, awareness becomes your tool. Study with heart, not fear. Presence will carry you to academic success with fewer efforts. Weekly Health Horoscope for Tiger Chinese Zodiac Your body might feel tension in neck, eyes or joints due to pressure. Take a pause. Focus on your breathing, your posture, and your meals. Eat slowly, sleep on time, and do not skip water. Presence in body care gives faster healing. Don't try to fix everything fast. One peaceful walk or meditation will help more than many pills. Stay with your body and listen to it.
