A couple of years ago, I spent three months in India working at my (publishing) employer’s small Delhi office.  Apart from the amazing people, just about the very best part of this experience was of course the food.  Some of the very best food I had there was the simplest and cheapest.  Most days when I was in the office I had a tiffin of home-cooked food delivered.  It was never too oily, never too heavy and always delicious (and very safe for foreign guts…no Delhi Belly from this great stuff).

Here’s a little photo series of the experience to get you going.  If you don’t like Indian food, you can just go somewhere else right now.

Greetings from the Delhi cafeteria! Please note my purple tiffin, delivered warm at lunchtime each day for 25 rupees (about 50 cents), in the lower right hand corner.

Click to continue »

Here’s an economic stimulus package for ya:  have the government invest a trillion dollar in the research and development of a bomb that doesn’t kill people, doesn’t harm physical structures or the environment, but that completely destroys religion wherever it’s dropped.  Then let’s lob one on India, one on Pakistan and another on Kashmir for good measure (we’ll hit the Middle East and the American Bible Belt later).

Juan Cole has a very thorogh summary of the history that lead to the recent mass murder in Mumbai.  Depressing, but worth reading if you can resist the temptation to renounce your humanity.  Money quote:

The cell that hit Mumbai was probably a rogue splinter group. They completely disregarded the old Lashkar-e Tayiba concentration on hitting only Indian troops in Kashmir, targeting civilians instead. It is very unlikely that anyone in the Pakistani military put them up specifically to this Mumbai operation. This attack was much more likely to be blowback, when a covert operation produces unexpected consequences or agents that were previously reliable go rogue.  The Mumbai attacks were not the first of this scale on an Indian target by the LeT.  If the Pakistani government does not give up this covert terrorist campaign in Kashmir and does not stop coddling the radical vigilantes who go off to fight there, South Asian terrorism will grow as a problem and very possibly provoke the world’s first nuclear war (possible death toll: 20 million).

Good times, good times.

Kashmir is a beautiful place, but this is all about religion.