Deep Diving into How Delhi's Culture has Changed in the Last Decade

Every decade leaves a different imprint on a city, and Delhi never hides its changes. You can feel them on the streets before you notice them in conversation. There’s a shift in what people eat, how they move, what they consider normal, and what they pretend not to notice. The last ten years in Delhi have been a mix of convenience, aspiration, and quiet exaggeration that shows up in everyday choices. Foods that once felt occasional have become routine. Scenes that seemed excessive now look ordinary. Preferences that once belonged to a few people have expanded into something the whole city practices without question. You can track these changes by simply paying attention, because Delhi rarely transforms subtly.

Winter Season 2026 in Delhi: Chikki vs Shelling Peanuts & Eating with Gudd [Shakkar]

There’s a small difference between tearing open a packet of chikki and sitting down with a pile of peanuts and a lump of gudd, but the body reacts as if it’s two entirely separate rituals. Chikki is clean, square, and predictable. You break a piece, it snaps the same way every time, and you know exactly how much sweetness is coming. Shelling peanuts with gudd has none of that order. You’re dealing with loose shells, uneven kernels, the raw smell that sticks to your fingers, and a sweetness that melts in its own slow, sticky way. Somewhere in that gap, a person can feel the tug between speed and slowness—between the habit of convenience and the memory of foods that asked for a little more effort. Chikki feels like something you eat while standing.

What Is Mindful Eating, and Why Might It Hold the Secret to Healing via Food?

Think about how people with dipping neurological activity perceive and interact with food - think about how those with Parkinson's relate to everyday food - this should make you reconsider the importance of connecting with the food you eat! People rarely think about how they eat unless something goes wrong. Digestion falters. Appetite becomes erratic. Certain foods feel heavier than they used to, without a clear reason. Only then does attention drift toward the act itself, as though eating were a recently invented behavior rather than something rehearsed thousands of times since infancy. Before disruption, meals pass unnoticed. Hands lift food. Teeth do their work. The body receives fuel with minimal awareness.

The Less Talked About Eight Anxiety Symptoms

Anxiety is usually described as a feeling. Nervousness. Worry. Racing thoughts. What gets less attention is how often anxiety bypasses language entirely. It settles into posture, perception, habits, and micro-behaviors that don’t announce themselves as distress. Many people experiencing these shifts don’t feel anxious in the way they expect to. They feel tense, vigilant, altered, or strangely practical. They notice their body behaving differently and assume it must be a coincidence, age, stress, or temperament. Anxiety, meanwhile, continues working quietly in the background, reorganizing the system without ever introducing itself. These subtler expressions are easy to miss precisely because they look functional. They don’t interrupt life; they reshape how life is carried.

What Is Neuroadaptation—and Why Medicine and Food Stop Feeling the Way They Once Did

The first time something works—really works—it feels like discovery. A medication settles the mind. A painkiller quiets the body. A food delivers comfort so immediate it borders on relief. And then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the effect softens. The same dose calms less. The same flavor excites less. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but nothing is quite the same. People respond to this erosion with confusion and irritation, as though something reliable has broken its promise. But what has occurred is neither failure nor betrayal. It is neuroadaptation: the brain’s quiet insistence on normalizing what once stood out. This process governs far more than tolerance. It shapes how we respond to medicine, how we experience food, and how quickly pleasure and relief are reclassified as baseline. Neuroadaptation is not a flaw in the system. It is the system, revealing how the brain prioritizes stability over satisfaction—and how human disappointment often begins where biology is simply doing its job.

Categorizing Humans on the Basis of How They Chew Their Food

Few human behaviors are as intimate, revealing, and socially charged as the way people chew their food. It happens in public, yet remains largely unconscious; it is repetitive, yet rarely examined; it sustains life, yet often irritates those forced to witness it. People spend hours curating their speech, posture, and opinions, but when food enters the mouth, control quietly shifts from identity to instinct. The jaw takes over.

7 Ways to Escape Fart-shaming when you can feel the bubbles building up inside!

There comes a moment — in a board meeting, a crowded metro, a family dinner, a first date — when your intestines begin whispering a threat. A slow, aquatic gurgle rolls through the abdomen like a small creature dragging its claws across the inside of a metal pipe. Suddenly, every muscle in your torso becomes a security guard. Your face stays calm, but your brain enters tactical lockdown. This is the ancient human drama of fart-shaming, a phenomenon so universal that it barely needs translation. Every society has rituals for love, death, and food, but it also has an unspoken ritual for the moment when the body insists on its right to be an animal. The shame of flatulence is not just a punchline; it’s a cultural barometer of how civilizations regulate the natural world inside us. We pretend we’re above biology until biology knocks, loudly, from the basement. What’s remarkable is not the gas itself — every human produces it, usually 14 to 22 times a day — but the choreography of silence that surrounds it: the stifled posture, the awkward shift, the dramatic cough used to mask acoustic betrayal. Fart-shaming is a psychological battlefield where instinct, etiquette, disgust, and fear of social exile collide. And beneath the surface of our embarrassment lies a centuries-long story about purity, civility, power, superstition, and the stubborn fragility of human dignity.

A Brief History of Gas: How Civilizations Constructed Shame

Humanity did not always pretend that flatulence was a scandal. In ancient Greece, bodily noises were considered signs of vitality; philosophers wrote casually about the body’s expulsions as part of life’s natural functioning. The Roman physician Galen treated digestive gas as an expected product of human physiology rather than a moral flaw. Even the Old Testament mentions flatulence with pragmatic indifference, without attaching stigma. Shame was not the default — it was a cultural invention. The medieval period transformed the body into a moral landscape. Christian monasticism placed heavy emphasis on bodily discipline, self-control, and suppression of earthly urges. Scholars studying medieval bodily regulation note how monasteries structured silence as virtue; noises from the body became intrusions from the lower self, the sinful self. Flatulence transitioned from a natural occurrence to a spiritual weakness. The idea that the body must be subdued, contained, and purified seeped into social norms outside monastic life.

By the Victorian era, fart-shaming had matured into full-blown etiquette. Victorian manuals cautioned against “disruptive bodily functions” as assaults on public decorum. Meanwhile, British colonial power exported these norms globally, shaping bodily etiquette from India to Africa. What had once been a physiological inevitability now carried moral weight. A silent society was a civilized society — or so they insisted.

Yet outside the West, cultural responses varied. Many Indigenous communities treated flatulence with humor rather than shame, seeing laughter as a release valve for the social body. In some Pacific Island cultures, shared bodily humor strengthened interpersonal bonds. Anthropology reminds us: shame is not universal. But globalization ensured that Western bodily norms became the dominant export, and modern flatulence anxiety is, in many ways, a Victorian ghost that survived longer than the empire that birthed it.

The Psychology of Disgust: Why Farts Trigger Social Alarm

Disgust is one of humanity’s oldest emotional warning systems — a survival mechanism designed to keep us away from pathogens long before microscopes could explain why. Psychologist Paul Rozin’s research on core disgust shows that humans are hardwired to avoid anything associated with contamination: rot, feces, spoiled food, bodily fluids, and airborne signals that imply proximity to them.

Flatulence exists in this psychological twilight zone. It does not directly harm, but it represents something potentially harmful. The nose processes it as a micro-alert: “There may be decay nearby.” The mind translates that into social discomfort: “Someone here has crossed an invisible boundary.” The gas itself is harmless; the meaning we attach to it is not.

But disgust alone doesn’t explain fart-shaming. What elevates it to humiliation is metadisgust — the fear of being perceived as disgusting. Humans dread becoming contaminated in someone else’s mental map. The shame is deeply social: being associated with something impure threatens group belonging, a primal need embedded in our evolutionary psychology. Once upon a time, being expelled from the group meant death. Today it means someone side-eyes you on a bus.

What’s striking is that disgust is asymmetrical. We tolerate our own body’s odors far more than those of others. Neurological studies show the brain’s reactions to self-generated smells are muted; identity modulates disgust. But the moment someone else contributes to the air, the amygdala lights up like a ceremonial bonfire. This asymmetry reveals an uncomfortable truth: fart-shaming is not really about gas. It is about the fragile architecture of social identity, where the body becomes a liability we must manage meticulously to remain acceptable.

The Colonial Body: How Western Manners Globalized Bodily Shame

The global spread of fart-shaming is not a natural evolution of etiquette; it is a result of cultural power. During colonization, European norms of bodily control were positioned as superior — cleaner, more rational, more refined — and Indigenous norms were dismissed as primitive. This hierarchy transformed the body into a political symbol. In colonial India, British authorities viewed local bodily practices — burping, spitting, passing gas without theatrics — as signs of uncivilized behavior. Victorian morality seeped into the Indian middle class through schooling, missionary education, and administrative hierarchies. Suddenly, the body that had always been allowed its noises was expected to behave like a machine with muted exhaust.

Similar patterns occurred in West Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Local humor around bodily functions was replaced by imported prudishness. An entire planet gradually internalized the idea that silence equals civilization. Even today, corporate spaces across continents maintain Western behavioral codes: airtight bodily discipline, tacit shame, and the expectation that one must conceal natural functions at all costs. Anthropologists argue that this forced bodily discipline created psychological distance between human beings and their own physiology. The colonized body became something to control rather than inhabit. Fart-shaming is one of its many lasting legacies — a small but persistent reminder of how power rewrites intimacy.

Gender, Power & Who Is Allowed to Make Noise

Fart-shaming is not gender-neutral. Women, across most cultures, face significantly harsher policing of bodily sounds than men. Sociologists note that femininity has historically been associated with cleanliness, delicacy, and restraint — ideals designed for male comfort more than female autonomy. The female body is expected to be an immaculate, scentless, quiet vessel, even though women have the same digestive systems as men and produce the same volume of gas.

Eroticized femininity contradicts biological reality, leaving women in a double bind: to be desirable, they must disavow their own intestines. The pressure is so strong that studies show women are more likely to suppress flatulence in shared spaces, even at the cost of physical pain. Meanwhile, boys grow up normalizing bodily humor, encouraged to treat gas as comedy rather than shame.

Men, however, are not exempt from the politics of noise. Masculinity produces its own paradox: men may joke about farting, but they are shamed when it happens in professional settings where the masculine ideal shifts from boisterous to controlled. The corporate male body must be sealed, efficient, sanitized — no gurgles permitted. Power modifies the rules. A powerful man may get away with a biological slip; a junior employee will not. Bodily noise becomes a class signal: those who must remain silent to keep their jobs cannot afford to be human out loud.

Flatulence, strangely enough, maps social inequality better than many political theories!

The Body Under Surveillance: Why Modern Life Intensifies Gas Anxiety

Modern environments — corporate offices, elevators, co-working spaces, open-plan designs — have turned the body into a performance object. Noise travels farther, privacy is thinner, and the expectation of constant composure is stricter than ever. When our ancestors lived outdoors or in acoustically chaotic settlements, flatulence had far more room to dissipate unnoticed. The modern world, however, traps sound. Air-conditioned conference rooms, metal train compartments, silent hospital waiting rooms — all make the body’s minor rebellions acoustically unforgiving. Today’s social spaces are built for efficiency, not humanity.

Then there’s digital surveillance. Social media thrives on humiliation. A small bodily accident can be filmed, uploaded, shared — a nightmare that inflates shame far beyond its biological relevance. The ancient fear of group exclusion now exists on a global scale. The cost of being the one who “did it” has never been higher.

Urban stress exacerbates digestion. Gastrointestinal researchers note that anxiety slows gut motility, producing more gas and less predictability. The very fear of fart-shaming increases the likelihood of an incident. The body rebels precisely when one needs it to behave. This cycle — anxiety → gas → suppression → more anxiety — is modernity’s gift. Every quiet office becomes a pressure cooker. Every meeting is a Russian roulette of intestinal diplomacy.

Humanity has never been more mechanized on the outside and more turbulent on the inside.

Humor as Sanctuary: The Social Function of Gas Laughter

Despite all the shame, flatulence remains one of the oldest forms of humor. Anthropologists studying tribal rituals, medieval festivals, and contemporary comedy agree on one thing: fart humor is universal, not because it is childish, but because it provides social relief.

Laughter at bodily sounds is not mockery; it is communal acknowledgment of shared biology. It resets the emotional climate. A well-timed laugh abolishes hierarchy, dissolving stiffness between people. The fart joke is a great equalizer — politicians, saints, professors, CEOs, soldiers, monks, and toddlers all emit gas. The humor reminds us that no one escapes the digestive contract of being human.

Some cultures elevate flatulence humor to a ritual. Certain Indigenous groups in North America used gas humor in storytelling as a teaching tool. In parts of Melanesia, exaggerated bodily humor appears in ceremonies to diffuse tension. Even in medieval Europe, fart jokes entered court entertainment — evidence that even royalty secretly granted the body a moment of rebellion.

Humor protects the psyche from shame by converting panic into recognition. When people laugh, the body is absolved. Strangely, humor is the most sophisticated response to flatulence: it is empathy disguised as mischief.

But contemporary society often suppresses bodily humor, replacing it with restraint and silent judgment. This makes fart-shaming more potent — humor was always the pressure valve, and modern adults have been taught to keep it shut.

Rituals of Escape: How Humans Manage the Rising Bubbles

When the intestinal orchestra begins its warm-up, humans employ a wide repertoire of survival techniques. Some are practical; others are pure folklore disguised as strategy. Across interviews, ethnographic notes, and observational studies, a taxonomy emerges.

There’s The Strategic Exit — pretending to take a call, refill a water bottle, or suddenly needing to check something “urgent” at your desk. People learned this maneuver instinctively long before anyone wrote etiquette manuals.

Then comes The Acoustic Masking Technique, where one waits for a loud external noise — a bus rumbling past, someone dropping a book — and releases micro-doses of gas in sync with ambient sounds. This is the jazz improvisation of bodily management: difficult, high-risk, occasionally brilliant.

There is the Postural Shift, a subtle weight redistribution intended to create silence by adjusting pressure on the pelvic floor. Sometimes it works; sometimes it creates a sound reminiscent of a balloon losing hope.

There’s also Cultural Camouflage — in households where cooking smells, festival firecrackers, or crowded gatherings create sensory overload, one blends into the atmosphere. Anthropologists recognize this as environmental opportunism.

But the most human ritual is The Internal Treaty: negotiating with one’s own gut. “Not now, please. I beg you.” It is the closest most adults come to prayer during office hours.

These strategies are often absurd, but they represent the ingenuity of a species desperate to uphold dignity while its intestines conduct their own foreign policy.

The Deeper Anxiety: Why We Fear Being Known Too Intimately

Fart-shaming thrives because it touches a primal nerve: the fear of being fully visible. Humans curate their identities carefully — through clothing, speech, posture, grooming, and social performance. But flatulence is the body’s reminder that identity is porous. The self leaks.

This leakage — literal and metaphorical — threatens the illusion of control. Embarrassment psychologists argue that shame is the emotional response to an unexpected collapse in self-presentation. Farts collapse the boundary between the cultivated self and the biological self. They reveal that beneath the polished persona is a digestive tube like everyone else’s.

For many, this exposure feels like intimacy before consent. It is being known too quickly, too truthfully. Flatulence forces vulnerability, which is why the shame cuts deeper than the act deserves.

But interestingly, intimate relationships often use bodily functions as milestones of trust. Couples who can laugh about gas tend to report higher relational satisfaction. Friendship deepens when people can be biologically honest around one another. Children bond through shared humor about bodily sounds long before they develop mature emotional language.

This suggests that fart-shaming is not inevitable. It is a cultural imposition, not a psychological necessity. The body doesn’t see shame in gas; society teaches us to.

Humans fear flatulence not because of the noise or smell, but because it reveals a truth we spend our lives avoiding: we are more animal than we admit.

Final Reflection Module

Somewhere between biology and etiquette, between instinct and embarrassment, the sound of gas escaping a human body becomes a quiet story about culture, power, intimacy, and vulnerability. Flatulence is not an offense; it is a reminder that the boundaries of selfhood are fragile and endlessly negotiated. Every bubble rising through the gut is an echo of the ancient tension between the disciplined body society demands and the untamed body evolution left us with. If there is an art to escaping fart-shaming, it lies not in tightening every muscle but in loosening the grip on dignity just enough to acknowledge that being human is messy, noisy, and occasionally hilarious — and that maybe the shame was never biologically ours to carry.

References (20 sources)

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• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5579396/
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886916305705
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/26295410
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• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-36114-5
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Not Sure if Amitriptyline Suits Your Symptoms? Scan My Tryptomer Experiences

I have been taking Tryptomer on and off for more than a decade. It was prescribed to me for GAD - Generalized Anxiety Disorder - that still remains and keeps surfacing in ways that are hard to describe. The primary salt here is Amitriptyline. If you Google it, it shows up as a tricyclic antidepressant. This also means that this prescription medicine has been around for a long time. Tricyclic antidepressants are considered a bit old school in terms of their pharmacology age. Chances are high that if you have been visiting a psychologist lately, this drug might not show up at all among all the possible salts that could help you. Yes, it is intended as a long-term use prescription medication.

It is not meant for short-term measures, such as controlling the sudden onset of anxiety. This makes Tryptomer an unlikely contender to be recommended for someone who is still within the initial rounds of consulting, still young to understand how mind medications work, and how it takes a measured combination of some salts to first conquer the immediate symptoms, then provide longer-term relief, and then become a part of your long-term strategy to keep away the symptoms. If you are worried about any of the depression prevention or anxiety control medications becoming a chronic part of your life, stay away from Tryptomer. Like I said, it is typically used as a long-term measure, and people using it for a decade or a couple of decades is quite common. If you Google search the typical applications of Tryptomer, things like nerve-related pain relief show up, but honestly, it does not have pain-relieving effects, and assuming that it will work wonders to reduce bodily pains induced by a constant state of anxiety is just expecting a bit too much. Most of the pharmacy stores don't store this medicine in large quantities.

The old-world charm has perhaps faded away entirely, but it is effective for me, where I have a combination of GAD and anxiety-linked IBS. There is something surprisingly effective about how Tryptomer has helped me in controlling diarrhea-predominant IBS symptoms. That constant sense of worry about untimely bowel movement and sudden changes in body weight was first controlled via Tryptomer. Initially, when my symptoms were acute, I needed as much as 75 mg Tryptomer daily, divided across 3 equal doses of 25 mg each. It takes a bit of time to build up. Give it a week, and if you have been suffering from IBS associated with anxiety or depression, Tryptomer should give you some remarkable results.

Never take it on an empty stomach! This is one rule I have followed for the longest time. Take it after meals, and be patient with it. Tryptomer will get the job done, but if you suffer from acute panic attacks, this is not the best option. For me, getting hooked on to Tryptomer happened after trying and failing at least 4 other prescription drugs, including Valium, Anti-Dep, Tancodpe, and Fluoxetine. Valium is just a short-term sedative at best. I believe it presents the highest chance of abuse. When you are really choking with anxiety, any medication that can give you quick symptomatic relief also presents a higher probability of causing substance abuse. This is where I have done well to be patient, giving each of the prescription drugs for anxiety control some time before trying the next one.

Tryptomer has a stomach-binding effect. Hard to explain in strictly medical terms, but understand it like this - it tends to tighten up and cement the nerves that connect your gut to your mind. This is as basic a definition as you will find online. As a result, the typical symptoms of IBS-D associated with long-term sufferers, such as acidity, bloating, undigested food, and cramping, are controlled with Tryptomer. Yes, the pitfall of sudden weight gain is there, but it is not the drug alone that is at work. Like most psychotic medications, Tryptomer can make you a bit sleepier, and this is when your daily schedule should help you keep away from gaining too much. For many people, Tryptomer is an outdated medication for those with classical, textbook symptoms of depression or anxiety, but for me, it has really worked! 

If you tend to believe medical wisdom borrowed from Google searches, you are likely to find that Tryptomer has been used for migraine prevention and for serious sleep issues. The latter scenario might still work in higher dosages. But, to be used as a means of extreme, splitting headache caused by a flare-up at home or office? Tryptomer would not be my recommendation! 

• AVAILABILITY: not that easy to find in Delhi NCR.
• EASE OF USE: try to take it after meals.
• SIDE EFFECTS: dry mouth and bloating might happen at the outset.
• SEDATION ISSUES: not that serious.
• ANTI-DEPRESSANT EFFECTS: moderate to good over a period.
• ANXIETY CONTROL EFFECTS: good in low dosages and longer periods.
• IBS CONTROL CAPABILITIES: impressive for IBS-D sufferers.
• INSOMNIA SUPPORT: reasonably good without being extreme.
• CONSTIPATION PROBABILITY: a bit higher than other substitutes.
• KICK-IN PERIOD: at least a week, as a minimum.
• RANGE OF INTERACTIONS: not much, rather limited.

What Is Glycation and Why Is It Being Called “The Skin Sugar Disease”?

I came across this title idea when ruminating about a simple fact - lately, due to my generalized anxiety, I am becoming even more dependent on eating and snacking on sweet foods to feel alive and function in the present. Now, the discussion: There’s a new villain in the world of skin health, and it isn’t pollution, sunscreen laziness, or the sun itself — it’s sugar. Not the sugar you sprinkle on dessert, but the invisible sugar that binds itself stubbornly to proteins in your bloodstream, stiffening them, aging them, and quietly sabotaging your skin from beneath the surface. Glycation is the name of this process, and dermatologists are calling it “the skin sugar disease” because it behaves exactly like a metabolic condition — chronic, sneaky, and self-inflicted through lifestyle. You don’t feel it happening, but one day you look in the mirror and realise your skin has turned into a timeline you never approved.

Giving Indian Roti All the Attention it Has Always Deserved

I love Indian food, and the pride associated with saying so radiates without any pretence. At the same time, I dislike it when people seem unappreciative of what makes our food unique and resourceful - nothing explains this better than the Roti in its many indigenous forms, which I have grown to appreciate over the years.

Extremely fresh roti: Right off the tawa | Crispier | Steaming Hot

Fresh but smeared with desi ghee for a soft texture is the top-tier performer in this domain. Still fresh but left slightly more on the flame for some added crispiness and smeared with desi ghee, these fresh as the grass rotis can be kept soft with little crustiness or turned into Indian bread masterpieces by cranking up the crispiness. Ultra-crispy, the holy grail of ghar ki chapati, allowing desi ghee to gain entry through the crisped, broken surface that allows the ghee to penetrate deeper. If you are someone who does not like the ghee on the roti, you are missing out on life’s simplest and tastiest treats. The non-ghee fresh roti has a substantially shorter lifespan. You are much better off consuming it within a couple of minutes off the tawa. If your secondary sabzi, following the dal for the day, is a bit gooey, like paneer kee bhurjee or baigan ka bharta, the excessively crispy roti creates the perfect contrast. This is like eating those Mexican wraps where the fillings are a bit saucy & soft, placed carefully inside a tough bread. If you are having your meal in Delhi’s winters, the fresh roti with a few drops of ghee dripping makes up for any cooking deficits. Even yesterday’s leftovers seem to taste better when that perfect blend of cooked dough and a bit of ghee is churned, turned, clawed into, and mercilessly chewn by your teeth.

Not-that-Fresh | But Not Stale | Hot & Quite Soft | Not Crispy

It so often happens that there is a time lag of a few minutes from the roti being taken off the tawa and finding its rightful place on my plate, nestled comfortably on the sides by some onion, cucumber, and the primary sabzi for the day. This form of roti is rather acceptable and usually the norm given the crazy schedule where my meal timings have taken a serious battering in the last 4 years. This inherently softer version of Delhi’s chapati might be the mainstay in most households, PGs, workplaces, and across the lunch spread of millions who lunch parked somewhere, and those who have to stand and quickly swallow their food.

For any Indian lady who is proud to be the sole meal-time caretaker of a household, the performance of this not-that-fresh chapati is a testament to their cooking skills. You order the wrong type of atta, and these fresh but not-so-hot rotis will develop a dry texture very quickly. Rolled too thin, these reasonably fresh rotis will lose their softness even sooner. You have to know how our forefathers conquered the art of making chapatis and keeping them fresh beyond a few hours!

Not A Typical Roti | Hybrid Version | Borrowed from Desi Parantha

I hope you have all encountered and supported the cause of the Semi-parantha. If not, there is something unhealthy cooking in your kitchen or in the minds of those trusted with cooking for you. The Semi-parantha is Indian cooking’s gift to those who want a bit of extra flavor to their everyday eating, but without consuming the calorie-dense typical parantha. The Semi-parantha has fewer layers to it. It is not a roti or a wholesome parantha. In this identity crisis lies its beauty. It is quicker to make and yet delivers the excellence you just would not expect. You can have it for lunch, breakfast, or dinner. However, Semi-paranthas are not the best bet for workplace lunches. Kept a bit thinner and pressed down using minimal oil or ghee, they tend to develop that hard, coarse crustiness quickly. Have them fresh or within a couple of hours from the time of being packed with you in mind. Semi-paranthas will not fail you!

Muchda-Kuchda Rotis are Mom’s Love & Not Artistry

Tracing the evolution of this form of Indian roti, it was found that our overzealous fore-mothers realized that the humble dhaba-wala or the tandoor artist was stealing their thunder. These guys were doing something unbelievably simple and still so impressive that our ancestral women just couldn’t let go. They carefully examined the cooks across North India and realized that these guys would give the fresh, crispy roti a big crush at the end before serving it. The crush would make a slight sound and unevenly distribute the remains of the roti’s upper crust. To the foodie, this simple torture technique yielded a magical result - the basic roti started looking exotic, as if it had been subjected to handcrafted ingenuity. Enter 2025, and our moms are still doing it. You would imagine forgiving the unsuspecting commercial cooks and letting go of this tactical move, but NO, they still do it, and honestly, it makes the roti taste even better, by at least 17% as per my psychological interpretation and the non-prevalent research team that I have in the underground bunker of a Scottish castle turned laboratory.

Looks like you are roti-wise uneducated & need the enlightenment!

For starters, you have to explore the various forms in which chapati prevails in your life. 

• To categorize each, have a few bites sans anything else to uncover the real taste.
• Fresh roti with yesterday’s dal vs Morning roti at night with fresh dal is a good learning curve to understand the intricacies.
• Try a roti this winter season with nothing but ghee and some sprinkled shakkar…the combination of cereal and sugarcane sweetness is just magical!
• Rotis that are too chewy are a big turn–off. The person making them clearly does not know the art.
• Roti with achaar is the poorest way to eat it, but remember, the genuinely poor souls might go to sleep without a morsel…count your blessings!
• Rotis play a significant role in keeping you away from the bane of the Western world’s health scare…Dread the Bread!

Roti can be a significant quality check for non-vegetarian dishes prepared at home. This is to test the gravy or the soupy part of the dish, especially the meats. Take a big bite, fold it, and dip it repeatedly until you are sure the roti bite has succumbed to your BDSM actions. Now, eat the roti without any meat or flesh. If it tastes damn good on the first bite…your dish is most likely to be loved.

Some Recommended Roti Explorations & Don’t Dos’ for You

• No combination with curd impresses - just stay away
• Try a warm one with some fresh mustard sauce smeared on it
• Wrap half a roti around a big mass of extra spicy pulao - just try it once
• Rotis don’t handle well with any type of salad - definitely worth a miss
• Never end a meal with a sabzi-less bite - kills the entire journey of supper
• Ask your chief of staff to try preparing the dough with some milk

Small morsels of roti in a big bowl of soupy black grams win over 30 minutes spent with friends talking about EMIs and smoking away. For once, compliment the women in your home for the Roti itself and not reserve the kind words for 7-star dishes - without that nonchalant piece of dough, you wouldn’t have grown up if you happened to have a middle-class Indian upbringing!

From artificially themed Rishikesh cafes to urban chic Bangalore bistros, why are expensive sourdough breads surfacing everywhere?

Crunchy Wafers, Clunky Cluttered Coffee Mugs, Tearing Package Tapes - How are Food Noises & Visuals Stimulating Unwarranted Hunger Pangs?

Hunger was once the body’s private signal, an instinctive whisper between the stomach and the mind. Today, it is a performance staged and directed by an orchestra of sounds and visuals designed to provoke appetite before biology even speaks. The snap of a wafer, the crinkle of foil, the hiss of soda, the sight of caramel melting in slow motion — each has been engineered to bypass willpower and activate hunger where none existed. What we call “cravings” are often not cravings at all. They are responses to manufactured stimuli. In a culture where silence is rare, we eat not when we are hungry, but when the world reminds us that we could be.

Make a Dog’s Day “The Rescue Reflex: Why Saving a Dog Feels Like Saving Ourselves”

Somewhere between loneliness and loyalty, between guilt and grace, lies the quiet exchange that happens when a person rescues a dog. It’s marketed as compassion — a simple act of kindness — but emotionally, it’s far more complicated. To save a dog from neglect, abandonment, or euthanasia is to participate in a deeply human ritual: the desire to mend something that mirrors our own brokenness. Every October 22, Make a Dog’s Day returns as both an adoption campaign and a cultural moment of confession — when we collectively try to prove we still know how to care. The campaign’s tone is light, often sponsored by automakers or pet brands, but beneath it lies a psychological truth that is neither cute nor commercial. When we save dogs, we often save fragments of ourselves that have long been waiting for rescue.

Wombat Day “The Animal That Forgot to Rush: Lessons from Australia’s Slowest Philosopher”

Speed has become the measure of modern virtue. We multitask, micro-manage, optimize, and wear exhaustion like a badge of honor. In a world obsessed with acceleration, the wombat stands like a furry contradiction — slow, methodical, subterranean, and utterly indifferent to our collective hurry. Every October 22, Australians celebrate Wombat Day, a festival that began as a quirky homage to this short-legged burrower and has evolved into a national wink at pace itself. The wombat doesn’t tweet, sprint, or strive. It eats, digs, rests, and occasionally looks puzzled — a perfect mammal in an age of overcomplication. To study the wombat is to confront an evolutionary question: what if survival never required haste?

National Boston Cream Pie Day “Calories and Class: Why Boston Cream Pie Was the First Socially Acceptable Luxury”

The Boston Cream Pie is an edible paradox — rich yet respectable, decadent yet decorous. Born in a 19th-century Boston hotel kitchen, it wasn’t technically a pie at all, but a layered sponge cake laced with custard and capped with chocolate. What it truly became, however, was America’s first socially acceptable luxury — a dessert that managed to make indulgence look virtuous. At a time when moral restraint governed everything from women’s laughter to men’s diets, the Boston Cream Pie arrived like a polite rebellion. It was a dessert designed not to shock but to charm, dressed in civility even as it whispered temptation.

Is There Something Called “Nocturnal Tourism”? A Long Read on Noctourism, Vampires, and the Politics of After-Dark Travel

There is a brittle magic to traveling after the sun has gone. Streets that were crowded at noon become private corridors at midnight. Cathedrals glow in a way the day never permits. Markets turn into theatres of scent and heat. Humans, who have spent millennia pulsing with diurnal rhythms, are rewiring their curiosity to the dark hours. Call it noctourism — the growing commercial and cultural practice of deliberately seeking experiences after dusk. In recent years, it has graduated from a niche curiosity into a full-blown segment of the travel industry. It brackets a wide range of practices, from responsible dark-sky stargazing in protected reserves to goosebump-generating Dracula tours in Transylvania, from nocturnal wildlife safaris to rooftop dinners under neon. It is practical, aesthetic, and sometimes performative. It is also, for better and worse, a mirror of what we want from travel: difference, intensity, and a sense that we dared ourselves to go where ordinary tourism does not.

What is meant by “Noctourism”: the Concept Itself

“Noctourism” is shorthand for tourism after dark, but that definition understates the idea. The term covers a wide range of activities and intentions. On one axis lie nature-based practices: stargazing at dark-sky reserves, aurora hunts in high latitudes, bioluminescent kayak trips in tropical bays. On another lie urban rituals: night markets, late hours at museums, illuminated heritage walks, or food tours that only begin when traffic thins. Then there is a third, edges-of-culture zone: ghost walks, vampire-themed tours, nocturnal rituals and festivals that trade in myth, thrill and theatricality. These slices share one attribute: they treat night not as a blackout but as a different terrain, one with its own moods, economies, and ethics. The rise of the term in the press and travel-industry reports demonstrates that what used to be “after-hours” activity is now packaged as itineraries, experiences, and branding. 

Why Noctourism Is Growing: Data, Desire and the Night-Time Economy

The increase in nocturnal experiences is not just a marketing ploy. Booking platforms and travel editors report rising consumer interest. Surveys conducted in recent years indicate that a large share of travelers say they are open to, or actively seeking, after-dark experiences such as stargazing, night markets, and midnight cultural events. Tour operators and luxury hotels have responded by designing packages and programming that begin after sunset. At the city scale, planners and cultural agencies are treating the night as an asset because active nights create jobs, add revenue, and can improve urban safety through continued public presence. Many cities now prepare policies, licensing, and infrastructure to manage this shift. In short, supply and demand are meeting, and public policy is catching up. 

The Aesthetics and Psychology of Night

Why would a sensible tourist choose a midnight food market over the sunlight of a famous plaza? The night contains two forms of novelty. One is sensory: lights, shadows, and temperature shape taste and perception in ways that daylight cannot replicate. The other is social. At night, you encounter fewer peers, fewer guidebook crowds, more intimacy, and risk. There is a low, agency-tinged thrill in being one of the few people at a place outside its peak hours. For many travelers, this amounts to a psychological intensification of the experience. Night also undoes certain habitual defenses. People confess more easily in bars. They take longer in front of lantern-lit monuments. Whether for nature lovers watching the aurora or for someone seeking the thrill of a midnight ghost walk, the night makes things feel more immediate and consequential. Observers of tourism call this part of the possible explanation for noctourism’s popularity: the night is a different grammar of attention, and for many visitors, difference sells. 

Dark Tourism: Where Vampires Live in the Portfolio

“Vampire tourism” is a distinct but overlapping concept. It is a form of themed travel focused on vampire myths, their literary progeny, and the historical figures associated with those legends. Scholars have long studied the way Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the figure of Vlad the Impaler have been folded into Romanian heritage promotion and into wider occult or gothic itineraries. Vampire tourism sits within the broader category of dark tourism, which includes visits to sites of death, disaster, and the macabre. Dark tourism often balances education, memorialization, and thrill-seeking in uncomfortable combinations, and vampire tourism blends folklore, theatre, and commerce. In practice, noctourism and vampire tourism intersect because nocturnal settings amplify the aesthetic of vampirism: moonlight, crypts, empty castles, candlelight — elements that feed the imagination. Yet they are not identical. Noctourism covers legitimate ecological and cultural experiences; vampire tourism is frequently theatrical and rooted in commodified myth. 

Case Studies: Transylvania, New Orleans, and the Urban Night

Three case studies illustrate how noctourism and vampire-style attractions play out in practice. First, Transylvania. Bran Castle and other sites have been reworked into Dracula-branded attractions. This has economic benefits, but also debates about authenticity and national image. Romanian scholars and cultural managers note both the tourism revenue and the ambivalence many locals feel toward the Dracula brand. Second, New Orleans mixes nocturnal culture, cemetery tours, and a gothic folklore economy in ways that are both tourist-friendly and locally rooted in voodoo and Creole histories. Third, many European and Asian cities have reimagined heritage tours for night audiences: illuminated monuments, late museum hours, and night markets create different visitor flows and livelihoods. All three show that the night can be a stage — and the ethics of that staging are complex. Is the experience deepening cultural understanding, or just repackaging myth for clicks and ticket sales? Often, the answer is both. 

Safety, Regulation, and the Practical Limits of After-Dark Travel

The novelty of noctourism collides with practical realities. Night travel requires safe infrastructure: lighting, transportation, policing, or community stewardship. Research into night-tourism safety outlines the risks of poor planning, from pedestrian hazards to disproportionate impacts on women and vulnerable people. Public authorities are responding; some cities are revising licensing, extending public transit hours, and adapting safety protocols to support night economies. Yet these efforts are uneven. Night tourism also raises concerns about wildlife disturbance, light pollution in dark-sky areas, and the sustainability of exposing fragile ecosystems to nocturnal visitors. Good noctourism practice mandates local consultation, safety planning, and limits where necessary. The night is alluring, but it must be managed. 

The Commodification Problem: When Night Becomes a Product

Turning nighttime into an experience bundle has consequences. Markets will monetize everything that feels different. “Midnight” dinners, blackout hotel rooms, and theatrical “crypt stays” can quickly turn from cultural curiosity to themed commodity. That commodification dilutes some of the authenticity that noctourism promises. For instance, a quiet dark-sky reserve becomes a boutique product if operators schedule nightly “star-baths” for camera-hungry visitors. Likewise, vampire tours sometimes prioritize photo ops over historical nuance. This is not necessarily malignant. Economy-boosting niche products create jobs. But tourists and planners must consider whether the production of the experience respects local context or flattens it into a repeatable spectacle. The ethical axis asks: who benefits, and does the night still belong to residents when it is sold to visitors? 

Designing Best Practices for Noctourism 

If noctourism is to be more than a marketing fad, it needs guardrails. Best practices include: grounding nocturnal programmes in local consultation so tourism reflects community priorities; enforcing capacity limits in sensitive ecosystems; creating safe, well-lit urban corridors that do not militarize public space; aligning night programming with public transit schedules; and ensuring economic benefits stay local. For nature-based noctourism, dark-sky policies and strict controls on lighting and human impact are essential. For vampire and dark-heritage tourism, tours should be honest about what is historical and what is theatrical. Interpretation that respects victims, contexts, and histories protects tourism from descending into grotesque commodification. The healthy night is one that balances novelty with responsibility. 

Why Vampire Aesthetics Persist: Myth, Media and Identity

Why do vampire images endure and attract tourists? Vampires are cultural mirrors. They embody anxieties about otherness, contagion, desire, and mortality, and they adapt readily to new anxieties. Tourism commodifies these symbolic energies. Bram Stoker’s Dracula lodged a template for mythic geography; later media, from movies to role-playing communities, extended the vampiric imaginary. That imagination gives rise to experiences that are part cosplay, part historical curiosity. For some communities, embracing vampire tourism is a pragmatic decision, tapping a global cultural current to attract visitors. For others, it is uncomfortable because the myth flattens deeper historical narratives. Understanding vampire tourism requires reading folklore, literature, local politics, and the modern media landscape all at once. The success of vampire tourism says as much about the modern appetite for myth as it does about local entrepreneurship.

Future of the Night: Tech & Travel

The night will attract more attention from travel designers, policy makers, and technologists. Apps will map after-dark experiences, hotels will curate nocturnal packages, and cities will brand themselves for night lovers. Technology can help make noctourism safer and more sustainable: reservation systems for limited night visits, lighting technology that minimizes ecological impact, and real-time safety updates. Yet the future also raises questions. Will noctourism become merely another way to consume the planet? Or can we use this interest to deepen local economies and cultural appreciation? Can we design nights that restore the sense of local community rather than serve transient novelty? The answers depend on the choices visitors, operators, and regulators make now. 

Reflections 

Noctourism is both an honest discovery and a commercial invention. It invites us to re-encounter places at a different tempo, to watch human and natural dramas lit by softer bulbs and colder moons. It also reminds us that tourism will always reflect what we collectively value. If our after-dark itineraries center on wonder, neighborhood benefit, and ethical restraint, the night will repay us with experiences that feel deep and lasting. If we treat the night as merely a new market window, the novelty will be short-lived and the costs long. Vampire tours, dark walks, and starry safaris make different promises. Some are romantic and instructive, others are theatrical and mercantile. The responsible path is clear enough: design nights that respect place, foreground safety, and refuse to turn the solemn dark into a stage for exploitative spectacle. In that way, noctourism can be less a fad and more a new vocabulary for how we travel with care after the sun goes down.

An Afterthought: Would Nocturnal Tourism Thrive in Unsafe Metropolises of India?

The idea of nocturnal tourism glimmers with promise — until you drop it into the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, or Gurugram after midnight. Here, the romantic silhouette of the traveler walking under sodium lights quickly turns into a logistical, cultural, and moral puzzle. In a country where the night is often seen less as a frontier of adventure and more as a zone of threat, noctourism collides with realities that are both infrastructural and psychological.

The Problem Is Not Darkness — It’s Distrust

Indian metros do not lack life after dark; they lack safety that feels democratic. Mumbai’s Marine Drive or Delhi’s Connaught Place never really sleeps, but the privilege of walking there at 2 a.m. belongs overwhelmingly to men. Women and gender minorities are largely absent from the night economy, not by choice but by conditioning. Fear has become a form of social scheduling. Even where police patrols and CCTV networks exist, they serve more as symbols of vigilance than as guarantees of freedom.

The contrast is sharp when you compare with cities like Tokyo, Seoul, or Barcelona — places where noctourism thrives because the night is not coded as male. In Indian cities, the relationship between safety and night is still adversarial. The absence of people becomes the reason for fear, and fear ensures the absence of people. It’s a self-sustaining vacuum that chokes the night economy before it begins.

Infrastructure by Day, Neglect by Night

Noctourism cannot bloom on broken roads and flickering streetlights. Many Indian metropolises were built around the logic of daylight — shops, markets, public transport, and lighting all pivot on the 10-to-6 rhythm. When night falls, the ecosystem collapses: metro services taper off, bus frequency dwindles, and neighborhoods morph into unwalkable shadows.

The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data consistently shows that incidents of harassment and petty crime spike after dark in urban zones with poor illumination and low crowd density. Without reliable infrastructure, the very foundation on which noctourism stands — the idea of safe curiosity — disappears.

Cities like Hyderabad and Bengaluru have begun experimenting with “night markets” and “midnight food streets,” but these remain islands of activity surrounded by seas of darkness. The absence of a coherent night-time urban policy — covering transport, sanitation, and policing — ensures that noctourism remains confined to privileged pockets rather than becoming a public phenomenon.

Cultural Permission and Gendered Visibility

Beyond safety lies a subtler obstacle: social permission. In much of urban India, being outdoors at night still carries moral coding. For women, it implies recklessness; for young men, suspicion; for travelers, risk. The night is viewed not as time but as behavior. This moral mapping throttles the creative possibilities of noctourism because it makes darkness synonymous with deviance.

If noctourism is to take root, Indian cities must normalize presence without prejudice. The night must cease to be seen as the realm of danger and delinquency. Instead, it must be reimagined as an extension of civic life — with family-friendly events, art walks, music festivals, and open libraries operating beyond twilight. When safety is communal rather than enforced, the night begins to breathe differently.

The Policy Vacuum

Globally, cities that have succeeded in nocturnal economies have done so through dedicated frameworks — London’s “Night Czar,” Amsterdam’s Night Mayor program, and Seoul’s extended-hour transport planning. India, by contrast, still lacks any policy architecture for the night. Experiments exist — Mumbai’s “24x7 open” policy for malls and restaurants, Hyderabad’s curated midnight food districts — but these are commercial moves, not holistic urban strategies. A true noctourism blueprint would require collaboration between tourism boards, civic authorities, police, women’s safety organizations, and local entrepreneurs. It would mean designing illumination networks that consider both aesthetics and surveillance, training night guides, certifying safety standards, and marketing night travel not as “dare” tourism but as shared trust.

The Possibility of Change

Despite the barriers, something is shifting. Younger urban Indians are reclaiming the night in incremental ways — cycling groups that meet at 11 p.m., astronomy clubs gathering on city outskirts, heritage enthusiasts organizing midnight walks through forgotten forts. These movements are fragile but symbolic. They suggest a generation less interested in fleeing the dark and more eager to inhabit it safely. Technology may help. Mobile safety apps, GPS tracking, and community alert systems offer tools that weren’t available even a decade ago. But technology cannot fix fear alone; only culture can. For noctourism to thrive in Indian metros, the night must first be rebranded — not as a test of courage, but as a civic right.

A Mirror to Urban Morality

In the end, the question of noctourism in India is less about logistics and more about self-image. A city’s relationship with its night reveals its relationship with vulnerability. To make the night walkable is to admit that safety is not the gift of policing but the outcome of empathy, infrastructure, and design.

So will noctourism thrive in the unsafe metropolises of India?

Not yet — but it can. If the night can be reclaimed from fear, it could become India’s most unexpected classroom in civic maturity. The tourist might arrive for the moonlight, but what they would discover is a nation learning how to coexist in the dark, without suspicion, without judgment — simply as citizens sharing the same streetlight.

References (consolidated)

• Korstanje, M. E. “Dark tourism scholarship: a critical review.” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 2012. 
• Huebner, A. “Who came first – Dracula or the Tourist? New Perspectives on Dracula Tourism at Bran Castle.” European Journal of Tourism Research (2011). ejtr.vumk.eu
• Stoleriu, O. M. “Strengthening Dracula tourism brand through cartographic narratives.” Journal of Heritage Tourism (2022).  Taylor & Francis Online
• Huang, R., et al. “Analysis of the Characteristics and Causes of Night Tourism Safety Issues.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2023). 
• National Geographic, “What is noctourism—and why is it on the rise?” (Apr 2025). 
• Travel + Leisure, “Why ‘Noctourism’ Is the Hottest Travel Trend of 2025” (May 2025). 
• Vogue, “The Rise of ‘Noctourism’—And the Best Places Around” (Dec 2024). 
• Global Traveler / IHG promotional coverage, “Experience Nocturnal Tourism at These IHG Hotels & Resorts” (Feb 2025). 
• Travel + Leisure / Booking survey data referenced in trend coverage (2024–2025) and industry commentary on night travel behavior.  National Geographic | Urban policy and night-time economy
• World Cities Culture Forum, Night-time Economy: 5th Edition (policy review and city case studies, 2024).  World Cities Culture Forum
• Urbact, “Cities After Dark: exploring night-time urban dynamics” (2023). urbact.eu
• USC Center on Public Diplomacy, “Dracula tourism and Romania’s image” (2017 analysis). 
• ResearchGate and various academic posters on Dracula tourism (compilations of studies on heritage, myth, and tourism in Romania). 
• Reviews and reporting on “dark tourist” media, including critical takes on televised dark-tourism programming and its ethics. 
• Family Vacationist & Travel Features Listing: Noctourism-Friendly Hotels and Experiences (2024–2025). 
• Industry trend articles on noctourism from Travel editors and platforms, including Travel + Leisure, National Geographic, and Vogue; Booking survey results noted in commentary. 
• Stone, P., & others. Studies and essays on dark tourism theory and practice (collected critical works referenced above). 
• Anthropological and cultural essays on folklore, commodification, and heritage interpretation (various collected sources referenced in the main text).