For a long time I had one bag of rice in the house and it was basmati, and I used it for everything. Biryani, plain rice, khichdi, rice for curd, dosa batter when I could not find the right rice.
Some of those worked and some produced results I blamed on my cooking. It was the rice, and once I started keeping three kinds the problems disappeared.
What actually differs between rices
The variable that matters most is starch composition, specifically the ratio between two starches that behave very differently when cooked.
One of them makes grains stay separate and firm. The other makes them soft and sticky. Every variety sits somewhere on that spectrum, and where it sits determines what it is good for.
Long grain aromatic rices sit at the separate-and-firm end. They stay distinct, they do not clump, and they do not release much starch into the liquid.
Short and medium grain rices release much more starch. They cling together and produce a creamy body in whatever they are cooked in.
Neither is better. They are for different things, and using the wrong one is why certain dishes never come out right.
Where basmati is wrong
The dishes I had been getting wrong, all for the same reason.
Khichdi. It wants a rice that breaks down and merges with the dal into a single soft mass. Basmati stays stubbornly separate, and you end up with rice sitting in dal rather than the comforting mush the dish is supposed to be.
Curd rice. Same problem. The dish depends on the rice being soft enough to absorb and bind, and long grain aromatic rice does not do that.
Anything that wants creaminess without cream. A rice pudding made with basmati is thin, and I spent years adding more milk to compensate for a starch problem.
Dosa and idli batter, where the specific rice used matters for fermentation and texture, and where a parboiled variety is what most traditions call for.
Where basmati is exactly right
To be fair to it. Anywhere you want separate grains that carry flavour without merging.
Biryani and pulao, obviously, where the whole point is distinct grains.
Plain rice served alongside a gravy, where you want the rice to remain a neutral platform rather than absorbing everything.
Anywhere the aroma is part of the dish, since aromatic varieties genuinely smell of something and that is a large part of what you are paying for.
Parboiled rice, which I misunderstood
I had assumed parboiled meant partly cooked in the way that convenience products are, and dismissed it.
It is a processing step where the grain is soaked and steamed in its husk before milling. That drives some nutrients from the bran into the grain and changes the starch structure.
The result is a rice that holds its shape well, does not go mushy easily, and has a slightly different flavour that some people dislike and that is standard across large parts of India.
It is what a lot of southern cooking assumes, and using raw rice where parboiled is intended is another version of the same mistake I had been making.
Age matters, which I did not know
Aged rice cooks differently from new rice, and for basmati in particular it is considered better.
Aged grains absorb more water and elongate more during cooking without breaking. New rice tends to be stickier and to need less water.
Which is why the water ratio on the packet is a starting point rather than an instruction, and why the same measurement can produce different results from two bags.
The practical approach is to note what worked with a particular bag and adjust for the next one rather than assuming a universal ratio.
What I keep now
Three, which covers nearly everything.
An aged long grain aromatic rice for biryani, pulao and rice served alongside things.
A parboiled short or medium grain for everyday eating and for anything southern.
And a plain short grain that breaks down easily, for khichdi, curd rice and anything that wants softness.
The cost of keeping three instead of one is trivial. The improvement in the dishes that had never worked was immediate, and it required no change in technique at all.
The washing and soaking question
Since it comes up. Washing removes surface starch and reduces stickiness, which you want for separate grains and do not want for anything creamy.
So washing is not a universal instruction either. I wash basmati thoroughly and barely rinse the rice for khichdi, and both are deliberate.
Soaking shortens cooking and helps grains elongate rather than break. Thirty minutes for long grain rice makes a visible difference and longer does not seem to add much.
Storage, which affects all of this
Rice keeps well and it does not keep unchanged. The oils in the bran of unpolished varieties go rancid within a few months, which is why brown rice has a much shorter useful life than white.
Polished rice keeps for years in a sealed container, and it continues to dry out, which is the ageing that improves basmati and does nothing for anything else.
Buying in quantity makes sense for the varieties you use constantly and not for the ones you use occasionally, which is a reasonable argument for keeping three kinds in smaller bags rather than one kind in a sack.