Monday Cup Of Links #35 - Jhumri Telaiya, Ancient Baingan Bharta, Drone-Delivered Books
India - 5000 years of adding turmeric to everything.
Coronavirus is back on the rise, and now I’m doubly nervous about stepping out, though businesses are opening back up. Everyone’s collectively decided we’re bored of the virus. Governments should have gone for the kill, pardon the word choice, and locked down hard when people were still scared. Now it just looks like the US has given up. Delhi and Mumbai aren’t doing so hot either, which is pretty worrisome. I’m not happy with how public health officials have dealt with this from the start. It just drives home the point for me that I can only rely on myself to stay safe.
I’m finally back to making a couple of more thousand words of progress on the novel. I thought I’d step it up this month, but something or the other came up and derailed it. There’s got to be ways to be more resilient to knocks. Hopefully I can restart my slow-but-steady progress now to have a draft out in a month.
Anyway, onto our links!
The mystery of Jhumri Telaiya’s relationship with radio request shows. Listening to Vividh Bharti’s request shows through my childhood, among the tons of requests from armymen on remote postings, there would be several from people from a town called Jhumri Telaiya. What was this town? Was it so populous that more people requested songs from there than from other large cities? Given its esoteric name, was it a made up town? Was it a state of mind?
Well, turns out there was one guy who sent 20-25 postcards to the show everyday in the ‘50s. Two other people followed his lead, enamored by the prospect of having their names on the radio. Given this trio kept getting their songs played so much, the rest of the town caught on as well and it became a trend in that tiny town in Jharkhand to send in requests and have their name read out on the radio. The trend lasted a good long time; I think there were requests from Jhumri Telaiya even well into the 2000s.Christiansburg, VA has drone delivery by Google!! They’ve been getting food delivered by drone for the past year already. Now children can get library books delivered by drone! Isn’t that exciting?
This is some older research, but they found evidence of brinjal (eggplant) cooked with ginger and turmeric in earthen pots in the Harappan civilization. I’m no fan of eggplant, but that our tastes were evolved enough to color, flavor and season a cooked vegetable dish 5000 years ago is interesting as heck. I have no doubt they also smoked eggplant over coals or hot stones because that’s even more intuitive as a way to cook it, so that would actually be a curry, the word originating from cooking over hot coals (kari).
I’ve been digging up on Lala Hardayal, the prospective hero of my second book. I found this rather detailed biography of him by an indie author in LA named Bhuval Lall. It turns out there had been a biography of Hardayal written by his granddaughter a few years ago. I looked her up, and turns out, she’s married to a former director of Brooke Bond India, and he, Jaiwant Paul, has authored several books about topics in Indian history. It’s certainly heartening that the family of this great Indian revolutionary is doing well and still carries with them a strong sense of history.
GIF of the week: A cool path by the movements of Venus and the Earth.