Les Writes

  This piece was written in November 2025 and published in the online magazine Bengal Soulfully Yours https://www.soulfulbengal.com/stories/inside-anglo-indian-kitchen .  Here is the extracted content from the site, without the beautiful photos and tables which add a lot of value to the piece. Inside the Anglo-Indian kitchen: Flavours of a hybrid heritage Discover how colonial influences and Indian spices blended to create one of the most distinctive culinary traditions in the subcontinent A Cultural Kichudi As diverse as Anglo-Indian culture is their food — mixed breeding led to mixed tastes. Hence, both the community and its food are lovingly referred to as a kichudi (kedgeree in old British), which is everyone’s favourite dish. Borrowing cuisine from multiple backgrounds and adding the ‘masala’ gives Anglo-Indian food a separate identity. And because of the varied roots, arguments still continue as to which might be the ‘right' recipe for a dish.  Let’s leave the jury...

 Published in My Kolkata   https://www.telegraphindia.com/life/a-humorous-take-on-new-year-resolutions-and-why-they-are-like-low-res-images/cid/2074715 In the aftermath of Christmas, on the edge of the New Year, we take a look at all sorts of resolutions and how they impact our lives. The most played out joke every end of year must be the Q & A where “What’s your resolution this year?” results in “It’s still 1024 by 720 as it was last year.”  Not funny for photographers for whom pixel count is everything. Digital cameras come in with higher and higher resolutions, trying to stay ahead of mobile phones with growing numbers of high end cameras built in. The eternal debate of whether 64 MP is better than 8MP for a front camera rages on.  This is not true of the political sphere where it is alleged that a lower number of thinking MPs could actually be more sensible than the larger horde of elected ones. Sorry for the political comment but MP occasionally sounds more ...