City Food – The World of Gur, Sadar Bazar, Gurgaon Food by The Delhi Walla - December 23, 2019December 23, 20191 The other sweet. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] There are people who can identify a great number of birds by their names. Some have an encyclopedic insight on butterflies. Others are big on flowers. An environmentalist in Delhi rustled out a book on all the trees found in the city. And then there are experts on gur. Most of us who are fond of jaggery see it uniformly as a lumpy brown mass of unrefined sugar. But the world of gur is a cacophonous democracy. Pankaj Traders, a 70-year-old grocery in Gurgaon’s Sadar Bazar in the Greater Delhi Region, stocks half a dozen kinds of jaggery. This afternoon they are neatly arranged outside the shop’s counter. One variety is encrusted with peanuts.
City Moment – The Pavement Flute Concert, Central Delhi Moments by The Delhi Walla - December 23, 2019December 23, 20191 Music of the street. [Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi] Here’s a ho-hum central Delhi pavement, complete with a snoozing dog and a free public urinal, unexpectedly bursting into live classical music. Certainly not something that happens every day. In fact, car driver Subhash Kumar Das, 36, is regaling passersby with his bansuri (flute). Some pedestrians stop in their tracks to listen. He is perched on a parked rickshaw. “It’s Raag Bhupali,” he says after concluding the brief performance, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone as if it is perfectly normal to come across live instrumental music by the roadside. Hailing originally from Cuttack in Odisha, he works as a chauffeur for a railway officer, “a job which is good enough to give me