Mumbai

What would I do without Pronoti Datta? She sits next to me in the newsroom at the Times of India. I am on a journalists’ exchange for the Goethe-Institut in Mumbai, an unparalleled megacity. As for Pronoti, she is responsible for the newspaper’s culinary pages. This means that she has all of the insider tips when it comes to food. She is also so kind as to explain it all to me, which makes it easier for me to avoid tourist traps.

She also explains the canteen food to me. There are separate queues for women and for men. Payment is made with pink-coloured vouchers, the price of which isn’t worth calculating into euros. Try it (1 euro equals about 63 rupees): a meal costs one rupee if you order chapatti, an unleavened flatbread, vegetables, rice, delicious mashed lentils called daal and some sort of unbearably hot stuff on an aluminium plate. But, employees here do not just eat in the canteen, but all the time, in the office, everywhere, sitting at every screen. Sometimes we also order a genuine Mumbai speciality for five o’clock tea: vada pav (pronounced vahda pow), a street snack costing ten rupees. It is said that 200,000 of them are put away every day in Mumbai. Now, I am a fan of them, too, and the boss even bought a round for the semi-finals of the Cricket World Cup when India beat Pakistan.

Vada pav is something like mashed potatoes that are deep-fried and pressed into a damp bun. Tamarind sauce and green chillies also go with it. It’s like a meatless burger. It tastes better than it sounds. My interim result so far: the food here is great. But just once on the way home from work the night air smelled temptingly of schnitzel. I must have been hallucinating, or perhaps it was because of Pronoti. She had just been gushing about schnitzel a few minutes before.