Modern Indians have never heard of slow food.

In the great 20th century drive for ever more urgent instant gratification, India developed demands of food and its providers that would stump even the cleverest American fast food giant. We want any dish off a menu of 200 items, and we want it here within five minutes. An Indian waiter will very reluctantly inform you that a special dish will take fifteen minutes to arrive, with good reason: most people will both complain about the time as they place the order, and then precisely five minutes later they’ll yell at the waiter for their food being ‘late’.

We also want it to taste like it was slowly cooked over a coal fire for two hours, and we will not settle for anything less. The second most common outburst from the Indian restaurant patron is that the plate of baingan bharta that has just arrived does not -- horror of horrors! -- taste exactly like the baingan bharta he’s had in every restaurant across the country for the past forty years.