On meals enjoyed during field trips

The flavours a reporter gets to relish can’t be found in restaurants

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With work from home becoming the new normal, one can only look back with nostalgia at all the long field trips one was privileged to take. Amidst the impeccably shot pictures of biryanis and banana bread on Instagram, there is a montage of the hungry hours that you spent on the roads and then the invaluable meals that came your way just when you were dipping into the bag for that one last Parle-G.

It was the month of June, the temperature was hovering close to 50°C. I, along with a photographer, was at Bayana, in Rajasthan’s Bharatpur district, covering the Gujjar protest.

We had been out in the field for nearly four days. Invariably, lunch had to be skipped, because the protest site was far out away from any eatery. I was trying to chase the man of the moment, Colonel Kirori Singh Baisala, for an interview. When I met him, he was just sitting down for lunch under a tree along with his advisers. Mr. Bainsala generously offered us a lunch of thick

roti s made out of coarse grains, bitter gourd sauteed with tangy unripe mangoes, and

kadhi (a curd and gram flour curry). Maybe it was hunger or heat, but that bitter gourd with mangoes tasted heavenly. In spite of many attempts, a similar fare prepared in my kitchen didn’t quite taste like the one I had at Bayana.

During the Lok Sabha elections in Bihar, trailing a Left candidate, I was invited for a lunch organised by the villagers for the candidate. The invitation was so warmly and lovingly given then I couldn’t decline. The entire village was there. The campaign music blared from speakers. The children, sitting on their haunches, in not particularly hygienic surroundings, were eating with gusto. The lunch was served in an empty plot, as we sat on plastic chairs, someone came with steel

thali s on which rice was slapped on, along with dal and potato- parwal fry. Curd was reserved only for a select few, scooped up with bare hands and poured into the thalis.

Dhaba in Sukma

More often than not you got food. But there were rare instances when after breakfast, you did not encounter food till sundown. Two years back, touring south Chattisgarh ahead of the Assembly polls in the State, I along with a colleague drove down from Bastar; after making many stops, it was close to 4.00 p.m. when we reached Sukma.

There was just a smooth road ahead and no sign of any eatery for a long distance. At one of the barricades, where we were stopped and our car thoroughly checked, my colleague asked the CRPF official about a possible place where we could grab food. He directed us to a dhaba that they frequented some km ahead. And there we found some lovely plump boiled rice, dal and a plateful of lightly sauteed beans.

Being able to travel to different parts of the country is one of the rare privileges that journalism provides us. It is often not only about the news stories; these are life lessons that no classroom can teach you.

The crash courses that you get on different trades, the flavours you get to relish which you won’t find in any restaurants, the nuggets of political wisdom and, above all, the warmth that only human-to-human contact can give. And for now all these are all on hold as most of the journalism is via phones and video calls.