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Mint
17-05-2025
- Mint
Amid conflict, the lessons we can learn from the humanism of forests
Friday, 3pm, Uttarakhand: The oak forest stretches in front of us, the path between the trees rising and falling like the back of a camel. Friday, 5am, Delhi: The city had been lashed by a furious storm. Rainwater has fallen like bullets, pooling on the streets. Trees have crashed to the earth, never to live again. Cars have stalled, like they are holding their breath. Also read: Can we leave the Olive ridley turtle nesting beaches alone? In the mountains too, unexpected May showers have rushed down the slope. As we enter the forest in the last of the afternoon, the sun is beginning to break out through the trees, its golden shafts sharp and stinging. It has rained for a few hours and the birds are hungry. They emerge from the leaves, moving across the trees with the energy of ants on their hill, irrepressible and at home. A Himalayan woodpecker, coloured in a pack-of-cards scheme of red-white-black, begins tapping at an oak. A Grey-winged blackbird pair excavates mounds near the base of trees for the treasure of caterpillars, their heads bobbing to keep track of us. A Grey-headed canary-flycatcher bursts into exquisite song, showing us note after note why it's referred to as a canary. The last rhododendrons of the year cling to the trees, wet and pink and tender, with a 'I don't want to leave, mummy" sentiment. Or maybe I am being sentimental. The border is tense. The future seems desperate, as uncertain as the coming of climate-change storms. My heart flutters in my chest—is it the climb, or fear for the future? I walk, I gasp; the mountains carry on as they always do, implacable. They have a sternness I have come to love, promising an experience that always puts the onlooker in her place. When travelling to areas near our international borders, one is struck by the beauty and timelessness of our transboundary areas. The Himalaya and trans-Himalaya bioregion possess a splendour that's full of contradictions—Martian-style starkness and lush, forest richness. You might walk in oak and rhododendron forest that is redolent with mosses, mulch and ferns. You might gasp at high-altitude meadows, taking in the rocks that look as grand as they are jagged. Towards the east, you have the thick, lacy forests of Arunachal, Assam and other states. The air here smells and tastes of water, a contrast to the western desert-border with its dry sand and needle-laden plants. There are animals that live here, as rare as their ecosystems are special, and they own their hard lives with grit. On the India-Pakistan border lives the Great Indian bustard, one of the heaviest flying birds on earth. On the Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bhutan borders, mighty rhinos and elephants live—and sometimes cross over. The Eastern Himalayas comprise a global biodiversity hot spot with scores of endemic plants and birds. The border rivers on the east and west both cut steep banks to flow into the mountains and the plains. 8pm, Friday, Uttarakhand: We wait for more information, on whether there will be more hostilities, whether there will be war. We calculate how far we are from the border, thinking of the billions of human and animal lives near it. 7am, Saturday, Uttarakhand: The mountains stretch ahead of us, suddenly more precious when life, and peace, seem fragile. I laugh nervously in my head. The Himalaya have withstood nearly everything. We begin looking at the birds, their calls knitting a temporary safety blanket around us. A Verditer flycatcher, powder-blue with a black ninja mask on his face, sallies for bugs from a dry tree. Above it, the sky matches the bird's plumage almost effortlessly. Yesterday's angry and sudden storm seems like it was last year's. Pine trees stick their needles out to snag the cotton-wool of the clouds. The sound of cuckoos rises in the air, a rising crescendo—the Common cuckoo (the call is 'cuckoo, cuckoo") and the common hawk cuckoo (it repeatedly shrieks 'brainfever, brainfever"). There is the buzz and drill of the Rufous sibia, a rufous-and-black bird which is briefly inspecting the last of the pink rhododendrons. The bird pauses and breaks into a melody which sounds like pennies falling down the stairs—warbling, tinkling, making you richer. There are wild flowers everywhere—Himalayan daisies, the hint of strawberries, the rhododendrons on the trees. The plains sigh in the heat, but the mountains always make you believe you are in a different time zone, a different season. It is the closest to being in 'another place" that I can think of. I wonder if searching for beauty during times of crisis is maudlin. Is it banal to search for colour when times are militarised? Something hard crunches under my feet and I am reminded nature is anything but maudlin. Beauty is just one lens to understand the wilds. Awe is another. In his lovely book, The Immense Journey (1957), anthropologist Loren Eiseley writes about the power of the seed, and the petal. Reflecting on the abundance and miracle of plants, he writes: 'The golden towers of man, his swarming millions, his turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries, would glimmer dimly there in the ancestor of wheat, a few seeds held in a muddy hand. Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be indistinguishable… the weight of a petal has changed the world and made it ours." 9.30am, Saturday, Uttarakhand: The birds are retiring to the leaves of the oaks and pines. A hot day gnaws at the sides of the vista in front of me. In Delhi, my friend's garden tree has crashed. The Resident Welfare Association moans about a tree that has fallen on a new car. The storm is gone, but it has taken its toll in heartwood. In the hills, it is too early for cicadas, but flycatchers' calls ricochet in the air. There is a flash of deep blue— detergent blue—and this is the Ultramarine flycatcher. Near the base of the tree I am looking at, there is a little gecko, out to sun himself. The forest seems to drip with meaning and generosity, feeding literally everything that lives here—people, bugs, birds, flowers, snakes. Somehow, my anxiety has abated. I feel intensely this place is a corner of peace. I realise then that the opposite of conflict is thinking of the future. Thinking about what we can plant today to reap tomorrow—both trees and good common sense. The future must have trees; part of our future is saving our wilds. The future is in taking the high road—through caution, through calculation, and through the woods we must protect. Most of us don't know about war. But we do know the importance of building corners of meaning, our own personal havens. I look again at the spot the gecko emerged from. It was a hole in a tree that died long ago, now resembling a skeleton of an arboreal giant, useful even in its death. There is something intensely life-giving about every corner of natural ecosystems. Everything is worthwhile. Everything feels like it is speaking a universal language of connection: between the bug and the bird, the fern and the spring, the mountain and the person. Looking at the forest, I feel the humanism of the forest. I realise then that being a humanist is a radical act. I look at the trees and hope we always stay radical. Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and author of Wild and Wilful: Tales of 15 Iconic Indian Species. Views expressed are personal. Also read: When it comes to healing, copy the trees
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Great Indian, London: ‘A thoroughly delightful food pub'
The Great Indian, 139 Marlborough Road, London N19 4NU. Small plates £7.50-£11.50, large dishes £9.50-£23.50, desserts £6.50, wines from £23, Cobra £6.30 At the top of the menu at the Great Indian, a new and thoroughly delightful food pub in London's Archway, there's a set of slogans of a sort guaranteed to make my teeth itchy. It says things like 'comfy', 'social' and 'vibe dining'. I looked up the last one. Apparently, it means the place is, y'know, nice. We can all get behind nice. It was, however, another phrase that really stood out. It said 'Indian influenced'. The Great Indian is owned by Aman Dhir who already has a takeaway of the same name in Hackney where they serve chicken tikka, seekh kebabs, aloo gobi and the rest. The executive chef here is Surjan Singh, an experienced restaurant consultant from India known there as Chef Jolly and familiar as a judge on MasterChef India. He has been spending time in Archway, alongside his Indian cooks and the Indian front of house team. The charming head waiter who served us had not long arrived in the UK from India. It speaks volumes about increasing sensitivities around dish origins and cultural appropriation that an entirely Indian team apparently think it wise to open up a little distance between the satisfying and well-executed Indian food they are serving and the mere suggestion that it might actually all be Indian food. Perhaps it's because, among the small plates section of the evening menu, there are gunpowder Buffalo wings, which the pious might allege, with a performative eye-roll, must come from the upstate New York bit of India. Likewise, there's a lamb 'taco roti', which might come from the Mexican part. These are dainty folds of flaky, buttery roti, each filled with a hefty spoonful of a hot, dry lamb curry, in which the sauce has almost been cooked out to a crust around the meat. These are topped with crispy deep-fried curry leaves and arrive at the table in one of those zigzagged metal trays used to keep hand-sized tacos in one piece. If these were served as canapés at a party, one to which I would very much like an invitation thank you, anyone with good taste would be loitering by the door from the kitchen to get their hands on them as they arrived. Given all the ingredients, this is clearly an Indian dish. To describe it otherwise would be to set weird, po-faced, and arbitrary boundaries around what fits within a culinary tradition and what does not. We all play with our food. Be thankful that we do. The word 'influenced' is happily redundant. Definitions can still be helpful. The Great Indian is inside what was the Prince Alfred, an old boozer on a north London residential street. It is a restaurant serving Indian food housed in a pub. I believe we call those gastropubs. It is not, however, a Desi pub, like the Yew Tree in Wolverhampton, which I reviewed at the end of last year. A Desi pub is one which happens to have an Indian kitchen, generally serving the local Asian community among others; a place where you genuinely could just go for a quick pint or seven. There is a bar here, a pretty one with a jade-green tiled frontage, boasting a collection of gins, alongside Cobra, Guinness and Neck Oil Session IPA on draft. But the two high-tops for drinking at feel solely like places at which to wait for tables in the abutting dining room, rather than somewhere to pass the night. This isn't a criticism. It's a description. The ceiling is hung with artificial foliage and there are multilayered rattan lampshades. They care about small things. Start with the spiced poppadoms, which have been smoked and come with a chutney in the colours of the Indian flag. At the bottom there's a date and tomato relish, in the middle, some spiced yoghurt and, on top, of that a dense mess of finely chopped sweet-sour mint. Hilarious amounts of work have gone into this idea, given that digging in with a teaspoon doesn't quite reveal the full beauty of the flag. But it's a great accompaniment and a nice story. Alongside the roti tacos we have their tamarind-rich chaat. It surrounds two flaky vegetable samosas, served warm, which peek out shyly from the crust of fried noodles and pomegranate seeds. At lunchtime there are thalis at £14.90 built around the likes of butter chicken or tandoori paneer. Or there are bigger dishes priced in the mid-teens, which are proof once more of the power and joy, the depth and profundity, of brown food. The Punjabi lamb curry has a thick gravy the colour of freshly turned London clay, heavy with roasted spice and the sort of acidity that opens everything up. The dal makhani is described as having been simmered for 48 hours and there is a buttery-rich quality to it that suggests they really aren't kidding. Come for the lamb tacos; stay for the lentils. Assume no one is watching and spoon it neat from the bowl. It's cold and raining out there. Yellow weather warnings are in place. This dal will keep any storm at bay We forgo a side of rice in favour of the chicken biryani, served in its own cast-iron pot. Take off the lid and breathe in the hot waves of cardamom and the sweetness of caramelised onions in among each spice-dusted long grain. Lubricate it with a little of the snowy garlic yoghurt with which it arrives. Or scoop it away with a crisp-crusted naan filled with pickled chillies and stringy cheese, which feels like the sort of thing you might order after a long session down the pub, when boozy appetite is fully in charge, rather than before. That one item shows a particular determination to feed. The sense is very much of a kitchen which, given the price point, is putting its back into the cooking rather more than might be expected. Desserts are sweet, creamy things. Sliced orbs of syrupy gulab jamun, for example, come on a splodge of rabdi, made by simmering sugar-rich milk with cardamom and saffron until it thickens. It's topped with almonds and pistachios, and serves as a great defence against the miserable, thrashing weather outside. The Great Indian might be a slightly grandstanding name for this newcomer, but it sits comfortably alongside places like the Tamil Prince, only a few miles away, which have helped redefine what the gastropub might be. Doubtless, some locals will feel they've lost an old boozer. They should think, instead, of having gained a great Indian restaurant. This week's high-profile closure is perhaps less surprising than some. Café Laperouse is an outpost of a Parisian restaurant group which opened here less than two years ago inside the OWO (Old War Office) hotel on London's Whitehall. Now it is shutting its doors. Despite the high prices – main courses topped out at £58 – it was dogged by a one-out-of-five hygiene rating at opening and less than favourable reviews, including from this column. In better news, chef Livia Alarcon, who cooked up a storm at Queens Bistro in Liverpool, has been announced as the head chef of the Dog and Collar, a new food pub on the city's Hope Street. Alarcon, who is currently representing the northwest on BBC2's Great British Menu, says she intends to 'celebrate British produce in a pub setting, pulling influence and inspiration from the north, my culture and upbringing,' The new pub opens at the end of the month ( And news of another chef who made his name in Liverpool. Anton Piotrowski, who won MasterChef; the Professionals before opening the much-admired Roski in the city, is returning to his home town of Lynmouth in Devon. He is taking over the kitchens of the Rising Sun Inn, a 14th-century thatched tavern on the town's harbourside, which he says has long been one of his favourites ( Email Jay at or follow him on Instagram @jayrayner1
