Thinking about food is good food for thought

I think I suffer from a severe case of gastronomic xenophilia - a phrase and affliction of my own imagination. And like all imaginary afflictions, I seem to have all the right symptoms. Consider this:

- An indecent obsession with food
- The more foreign and untried, the better
- A strong urge to research the cuisine of a place I plan to visit even before reading about what the place has to offer

I tell everyone that I have wanderlust; the need to see new places, experience new cultures and meet new people. But who am I kidding? Instead, what I have is gastrolust - the need to taste new cuisines.

And on every trip of mine, I seem to fixate on one specialty of the region. On my recent trip to Brazil, it was Moqueca or more accurately, Moqueca Bahiana. Take a look at the picture.

Looks a lot like Kaeng Phet Daeng Kai - the Thai red curry; has similar ingredients too. But they are worlds apart (pun intended). Moqueca is mostly eaten with Farofa - a toasted flour mixture that is surprisingly filling.

It was Moqueca in Rio and Moqueca in Salvador. This single-item obsession of mine is the same as when I was obsessing about Assam Laksa in Malaysia and Pla Neung Manao in Thailand.

I seem to find no cure for it!


Layers

I wonder if you have heard of a palimpsest! Wikipedia defines it as, “… a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been either scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused, for another document.”

Archeologists who have found palimpsests seemed more interested in the underlying layers.

I first came across the term in Carl Sagan’s CONTACT. Metaphorically, a palimpsest means anything with hidden layers of meaning. And, as you “scrape off” of the top layers, other layers may reveal themselves.

When I posted this picture on my photo stream on Google+, I titled it “Jo Baat Tujh Mein Hain, Teri Tasveer Main Nahin” without thinking about it too much. I was borrowing the title of one of my all-time favorite Rafi songs to say that any picture of Taj Mahal hardly does justice to the charm of the monument itself. And I set it aside.

And then the layers started coming off:

1. That song is from a Hindi movie called Taj Mahal
2. It is set to Raga Jog which is rumored to date back to the music court of Akbar, the grandfather of Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal.
3. It is considered to be one of the most popular Ragas used in the Agra Gharana

I am a Madaraasi and I don’t even understand Hindi very well; and this sounds like pure Urdu poetry. But a good deal of the lyrics seem to apply to Taj the monument as much as they apply to the woman he is singing about.