lunch, lectures, and syncretism in the ny times

Three good stories:

First, an Americanized take on the tiffinwalla--the rise of lunchtime delivery services of home-cooked South Asian food in the Bay Area and Seattle's Eastside:

Kiran Sharma, 46, cooked for Microsoft employees before the demand became too great. "When I came here from India in 2001 I wanted to find a way to make extra money, and I knew I was a good cook," she said. "My husband knew someone who worked at Microsoft who put up a posting about my food, and right away I had over 20 customers each day."

Damn, if I had a bigger kitchen, I'd hire somebody with a motorcycle and copy them.

Second, this is a pleasing little piece on the rise in public interest in readings, lectures, and other bookish community events. Who wants to go see Rushdie and Zadie Smith next month?

Finally, Somini Sengupta has a story on Hindu-Muslim-Sikh syncretism at a shrine near Varanasi, a nice antodote to the usual mainstream media stories that fall into the easy trap of writing about "ancient hatreds" etc. Reading it, I am full of memories--of an acquaintance in Oxford who died earlier this year, who studied precisely this subject and spoke about it with such alacrity--and also of some places I've been that, like Bahadur Shahid's tomb, managed to be holy in a way that transcended confessional lines. William Dalrymple usually vexes me (he's written nasty, essentialist things about Turks, and had a feud with the mother of a friend) but I'm fond of his book From the Holy Mountain, partly for its accounts of the Christian-Muslim syncretism that stubbornly endures in some parts of Syria. For example, the convent of the Virgin Mary at Saidnaya, north of Damascus:

Sister Tecla sat opposite me as I ate, and I asked her about an unexpected photograph which was framed on the wall beside my table." These are our Syrian Cosmonauts they spent a month together on the Soviet Space station Mir" she said. But why is the picture here? "Of course all three are Muslims, but they visited Saidnaya before they went, to pray for good luck. As soon as they had returned safely they came here again to thank the Virgin and give us this picture and a sheep."

I have a little card from Saidnaya, with a picture of Mary on one side and a prayer in Arabic on the other, that I carry around tucked in my wallet. It sits next to a laminated image of Buddha from a shrine in Mandalay, a scrap of Ottoman Qur'anic calligraphy, and a wadded-up old million-lira banknote: I'm not sure whether this is syncretism, superstition, or rootlessness, but it gives me pleasure nonetheless.