Spices and great meals. In India, like in New Orleans or San Franciso or France, it’s tough to find a bad meal. Indian food is superb. Northern India features dal and naan, the spicy sauces and flat bread that accompany them. In Tamil Nadu it is pepper mutton and chicken thirakal served with baby onions.  Tamil meals are spicy and they grow hotter as you move south. Restaurants serve steamed rice cakes with shrimp.  Chicken is cooked with onions, tomatoes and chilies. All sorts of fresh vegetables appear on lunch and dinner tables, served with baby onions in a tamarind paste. We dined on mashed sweet potato, coriander, ginger and asparagus accompanied by peanut and sesame chutney.

Coconut palms are native species throughout Tamil Nadu’s subtropical landscape. Coconut milk gravy accompanies side dishes, among them fried rice flour dumplings. Cashews are an important cash crop on Bay of Bengal coastal farms south of Chennai. Cashews served with yogurt seasoned with spices are a specialty. For dessert eateries offer mahilampu puttu — ground rice powder with sugar and coconut. Every day was a feast of pleasant surprises. TITN: This is Tamil Nadu.

Banana leaves and no fork.  Speaking of meals.  Plates, knives, forks, and teaspoons are rare in the restaurants of southern Tamil Nadu. In the state’s smaller cities and farming towns meals are served on big green banana leaves and eaten with the right hand. The only utensils are serving spoons that wait staff use to dole out portions of vegetables, meat, curries, and rice in individual small mounds on the leaf. Diners mix the various ingredients together with one hand and then scoop food into their mouths.  The key digit is the thumb. It pushes food from the palm into the mouth.

The first few times I tried eating Tamil-style, most of the food landed on the table or in my lap. I was rescued by a colleague who showed me the usefulness of my thumb. Rituals of hygiene and recycling follow the meal. Diners indicate they are finished and satisfied by folding the banana leaf side closest to them over any uneaten remnants. Folding from the distant side of the leaf indicates dissatisfaction. The leaves don’t go to waste. They are collected and recycled as food for cattle. Restaurants provide wash stations for cleaning up after the meal.

Safety everywhere. I was raised in a suburb close to New York City when crime was at its peak in the late 20th century. I spent seven weeks last year in South Africa, where 24-hour vigilance is a way of life. I spent time in the Philippines, which struggles with such pervasive drug addiction and drug-related violent crime that President Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign of extra-judicial killings, condemned internationally, is widely supported by Filipinos.  

Tamil Nadu, in contrast, has no aura of menace. None. Everywhere we traveled – big cities, rural towns – streets were safe. People welcomed visitors. Shop owners were honest in pricing goods and returning exact change to foreign visitors. The state’s newspapers were not filled with stories of rapes, child murders, and family violence as they are in other regions of India, particularly in the north around Delhi.

Tamil Nadu crimes occur, of course. But India’s national statistics show that crime rates have been falling in this state of 78 million residents. Compared to the unpredictable, frightening outbreak of mass shootings in the United States and Europe, Tamil Nadu’s violent crime rate is strikingly low. The police, for instance, reported 1,748 murders in Tamil Nadu in 2015.  In California, which is half Tamil Nadu’s size, the police in 2015 reported 1,861 murders.

Tamil Nadu’s security is a reflection of the culture of stability and friendliness that is prized all across the Bay of Bengal state, and becoming rarer elsewhere in the world.