There are two ways that people in the West feel some familiarity for India - through talking to tech support at an outsourced call center, and through some of the spiciest and the best Indian food around with names like masala dosa, naan, samosa, chicken tikka masala, or pani puri (that last one comes to the Western vocabulary, thanks to Slumdog Millionaire) and aromas that can waft through an entire neighborhood pretty good. If you notice that most of it is vegetarian, you'd be right. Most Indian cuisine is, as dementingly delicious and staggeringly cheap as it is. What is Indian cuisine like though when you actually savor the chicken tikka masala in Mumbai, or the masala dosa in Madras, the cities in India that these famous recipes actually call home? As it turns out, the choices are considerably more spread out, and making a decision, far more complicated.
The thing is, India isn't really one country in any way you recognize the concept of a country. The people and the culture of Indiachange drastically depending on where you look. Up north near the border with Pakistan, people look and act quite Arabic; they look and act quite Chinese in India's far Eastern frontier alongside China and Tibet, and down South, everything changes again. Let's concentrate on the West though, in Mumbai, where the street food is vibrant, easy to go overboard on, and available in quantities and varieties that would frankly overwhelm anyone used to no more variety than what one finds at McDonald's, and the fancy steakhouse downtown. Mumbai, being the immigrant capital of the country, has great cuisine from every major cultural hub in the land.
Mumbai's most famous offering is chaat - a term you could loosely translate to "quick snack food" that doesn't quite cover the range of mouthwatering palette-tickling taste that is possible. The typical street chat vendor comes armed with a range of ingredients that all come together in different combinations for various preparations - popped rice, thin crispy-fried dough bulbs, several sauces and spices, a mint juice soup and potatoes. Every food columnist reporting on the tourist experience in India, will doubtless bring up the world-famous eating joint of Elco Restaurant where chaat of this kind is best savored. You've even seen it on Slumdog Millionaire - in the scene with the pani puri. Pani puri is, in fact, Indian food at its simplest and most delicious. It consists of a puffed-up sphere of wheat dough, filled with a very spicy mint soup. Perhaps the most entertaining part of the whole pani puri experience consists of watching the vendor deftly manage a half-dozen customers with practiced ease.
For about 25 rupees you get your quota of five pieces; each customer standing around the vendor has a personal preference for how he wants it - does he want a certain sauce in it, what kind of stuffing would he prefer, potato or peas - and he keeps track of it all for all in line, all at once. For something that is essentially a mouthful of water, it certainly fills you up really quickly. A little sphere is picked up, the stuffing inserted through a little hole made on top, the whole contraption is dipped into the mint soup to fill it up, and it lands in your leaf bowl. When everyone's wiping their eyes after the spiciness of it all, you do wonder if it could be tears of gastronomic joy. It wouldn't be that far-fetched.
Another mainstay of the Indian food menu, is the South Indian masala dosa that is a favorite all over India. What it is, is a maddeningly aromatic pancake of crispy rice batter, soaking in melted butter, properly toasted on a griddle, and served with a kind of aromatic lentil soup called sambar, and coconut chutney. There is a side dish of potatoes called the masala that is served either on the side, or inside the pancake. Sometimes, visitors defect in culinary allegiance and swear lifelong devotion. If you taste it, you would believe it.