Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2021

Hansel and Gretel and a Walk in Calcutta

St James Church, Calcutta   (PC Team Walk Calcutta Walk)) With our hemisphere hurrying towards the dark Solstice, family traditions around food are uppermost in everyone’s minds and the season brings with it Humperdinck’s opera ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The setting in the meagerly provisioned kitchen of the children’s family home, in the haunted woods with its dream feast and in the risky kitchen of the witch, blends seamlessly with our everyday lives of hunger, desire and hope. In Calcutta, where I live, two of my friends, Deep and Ayon, have thought up a new tradition of food around the Solstice. On the first Sunday of December this year, we were on a trail that was strongly reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel’s forest walk. Throughout the year, Ayon and Deep take their friends out to explore cultural and historical traditions in the city. Because they walk everywhere, their group is named ‘Walk Calcutta Walk’. This was our first time exploring old bakeries. And because it was close to C