Chapati, chutney -- and literature!

by Venkatesan Vembu
DnaIndia
Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Food was again on the conversational menu when I met journalist and poet Fatima Bhutto ahead of a talk she gave at the stately Foreign Correspondent's Club at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival

Twenty-five-year-old Fatima, who is Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's grand-daughter (and the niece of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto), is a columnist for the Jang group of newspapers, and is a trenchant critic of the "Diet Pepsi dictatorship" of Perves Musharraf, the dynastic politics of the Pakistan People's Party and of Nawaz Sharif.

I asked Fatima if she had savoured Hong Kong's street food. She confessed to being a vegetarian, but said she had tried some street food the previous night: "It was the spiciest thing I've ever eaten -- and I'm from Karachi!"

Fatima graciously promised me an interview after the talk, but given the rush of things -- and the fact that she was late for another event -- I was at risk of being crowded out.

But yet more graciously, she agreed to talk to me in the cab on the way to her hotel. And so, as we raced through Hong Kong's skyscraper-lined roads in a taxi, we spoke of cabbages and kings...