Cooking stories
Food has always been an important part of our lives. Its centrality not only connects to our survival but also is an important catalyst in bringing people together. In the past almost two months, I travelled to the rural areas in the Himalayas across two countries. From valleys to the mountains, I tried to cover maximum I could with limited resources. Occasionally their culture was similar but sometimes it was totally different. Whether it was the Gurungs in the Annapurna Range and Newars in Kathmandu valley of Nepal or the Monpas in Arunachal Pradesh in India, one common string which linked them all was their impeccable hospitality and their food. Every time a story was told, we were either sitting in somebody’s kitchen or sipping a hot cup of tea looking at the mountains. It never happened that a story was being narrated to me without any of the above. The ambience in which stories were narrated was my favourite part. But why the stories were narrated in the kitchen around t...
