The answer depends on where you live, and what type you have brought.
In many countries that import chickpeas they heat treat them to kill seed-borne diseases and insects. The heat treatment process makes them more difficult to cook, and soaking times double or triple.
Beans from exporters with phytosanitary certificates can be imported without heat treatment; these are the ones you want to get.
I don't think you can tell which is which by looking at them. At the moment we have some particularly dark, dry, and dead looking beans that soak up beautifully in 8 hours!
Soak non-heat treated beans for 8 to 12 hours, heat treated beans for 24 to 36 hours. Some overly heat treated beans will never fully revive, and you are best to return these to the shop as "faulty".
Soak and cook without salt, unless you are going to mash them. They fall apart more readily if salted.
If you are not mashing them, the secret to great chickpea taste is after soaking and cooking in water, is to lightly fry them with a little olive oil until dark spot appear, keep them or the pan moving so none burn. Then add the sauce, or add them to whatever dish you are preparing.
In theory chakki is a flour mill, and chakki atta is flour fresh from that mill. Realistically of course nothing you find on your grocery store shelves is fresh from a mill.
Atta flour is made from hard wheat, which has a high gluten content. This means that your flour is probably better for bread than typical all-purpose whole wheat flour from the baking aisle. If it is hard white wheat this might explain the color, as ground white wheat doesn't look that much darker than all-purpose flour.
Like typical grocery store whole wheat flour, atta flour is coarsely ground. This may give your bread a more grainy texture (not a bad thing), and makes atta unideal for cakes, biscuits, and quick breads unless you like them with a coarse texture in the crumb. If you would like to use whole wheat for baking other than bread, whole wheat pastry flour is the usual suggestion (or grind wheat yourself to a very find grind).
Best Answer
Chickpea flour (gram flour, besan) is very useful in Indian cookery.
The most common use in the West is probably for making bhajis and pakora. The most popular of which are Onion Bhajis, very popular in the UK. They are essentially an spiced onion fritter, shaped in either discs or balls. Any vegetables can be used to make pakora (which is essentially the same thing) or bhajis, but spinach (sag pakora), aubergine (us eggplant, brinjal bhaji), potato (aloo pakora) or cauliflower (gobi pakora) are the most common, sometimes in combination.
Gram flour is also used for making poppadoms (also papad, papadum, a crisp fried pancake, served as an accompaniment to meals with chutney.
One of the more commonly seen uses is in chevda (sometimes chivda), or as we call it in the UK usually Bombay Mix (I believe it is called Punjabi Mix in the US). A mixture of dried savoury snacks, coated in spice. One of the primary ingredients is sev, a dried noodle made from gram flour. Mixtures predominantly composed of sev are called sev mamra.
There are also a number of Indian sweets made with besan.
Besan Barfi (barfi is something akin to fudge, made with condensed milk):
Besan Ladoo (little sweet balls):
NB. You can use it as an egg substitute in vegan cookery, but soya flour works better for the same purpose and, in my opinion, has less associated flavour.