Asked about whether he thinks consensus would emerge among the G20 nations that might result in a joint statement, a hopeful Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi told THE WEEK: “The leaders are all at work and trying very hard.”
Tough negotiations may be ongoing to thrash out a consensus in the Bharat Mandapam complex, but yet another discourse is going equally strong—the one across the tables in the dining halls of the International Media Centre. The unifying and polarizing topic is the usual suspect—food.
With only vegetarian fare being served, the journalists are divided into three camps—the lovers of vegetarian food, the haters and the ones who tread the middle way or those who couldn’t care less.
While most western and foreign journalists did not mind the fare spread on the table, mainly due to the novelty factor of trying something different and uniquely Indian, they did have complaints of the dominantly spicy character.
Most of them went as far enough to say that the food was indeed “fabulous” but that the chefs could have gone “easy” on the spices. There were some who found the food no different from their own. Like Parshuram Kaphle, a Nepali journalist working for the ‘Nayapatrika’, he said: “This food is very similar to what we eat. So we are happy.” Kaphle, admittedly, is a vegetarian.
Some were just coping. Biplab Dey Partho, from Bangladesh’s Chatragram digital news platform said: “I can cope. I have reported from many international locations and would usually see an entire range of food from vegetarian and non-vegetarian to continental and Chinese. But more options would have been good.”
His colleague Rajib Das agrees: “Food is okay here, so no problem.” Both come from a primarily fish-eating community in Bangladesh. An Indian journalist was heard muttering between gulps: “This is being forced on to us. It is nothing short of food fascism.”
But regardless of the polarizing nature of the debate on the main course, there was sugary agreement on the sweet dishes—comprising a ‘kheer’ sweetened with jaggery, ‘jalebis’ and a nutty fruit cake.
