At
the time when more and more foreigners have started to preach and practice
vegetarianism, more and more of us are turning flesh-eaters. Once I had a debate with a friend of mine on whether man has been created as a flesh-eater or not.
I fought with him saying we were flesh-eaters and I showed him my canines. He
argued that ours were not canines in the true sense of the word. But as more
and more in the room joined him, I withdrew hesitantly. To be frank, I still
don’t know whether I’m right or he is.
But all the
doctors have unanimously declared that meat is harmful to our body. Our body
does not need it. Our digestive system has been programmed to cater to only a
vegetarian body. And by eating non-veg, we are taking a great risk. But over
the generations, even our digestive system has undergone evolution, resigning
to the fact that they are to work overtime.
Can’t
blame the present generation or, for that matter, the one before that for
turning non-vegetarians. You find more variety in non-veg food. My sister is a
thoroughbred vegetarian, who, even after continuous persuasion from her husband
and his family for years, couldn’t change ways. I see her distress when we all
go out together to eat. We all freak out on the best available non-veg food,
when she is forced to opt for a daal fry or a chilli gobi. Being a very poor
eater, this doesn’t affect her much, though. And I’ve noticed the step motherly
treatment of such restaurants towards vegetarian food. You go to any major
city, it is inundated with international eat-outs – McDonalds, Pizza Hut, KFC,
the list is endless.
But
like a friend of mine once said, “goodness of anything is relative. One
person’s good is another’s bad”. This is very true in the case of food too. When
my husband was in Dubai and me and children back home, every time he calls us
up, the first question, invariably, would be, “What was for lunch and what is
for dinner?” When I tell him the menu for the day, his reply generally comes in
“wow”s or “slurp”s. And what I generally cook are rice and the usual
accompaniments like sambar, rasam, pulisseri, aviyal, etc. And when we return
the question to him, his answer will be, “a burger from Subway”, or “a pizza
from Pizza Hut”, or “a chicken tikka biriyani from Mohammedikka’s shop”. This
answer will soon be followed by a “yuck”. And our son always complains, “Acha
is so lucky, he gets to eat all exotic food. Here I am bored stiff with the
same stuff, day in and day out”. And another of his complaints is that my menu
is so predictable. He says, “When it is sambar today, I know its gonna be
aviyal tomorrow and rasam, the day after. Why can’t you be unpredictable once
in a while?” And my husband says, “It’s so
nice to think of home, where you have a wonderful wife, lovely kids and
sumptuous food. What more would a guy want in life”. This was what I meant when
I said “relative”. And I try to instill in my son the fact that he is indeed
lucky. I tell him, you have such a wide choice now, which gives you a chance to
complain. When I was young, I never had much choice. Going out to eat was on
rare occasions, mostly when we found ourselves outside home during lunch or
dinner hours. And the hotels didn’t have much choice back then.
It
was during one of these arguments that I got a chance to show him how lucky he
was to get the type of food he eats now. My sister, her husband, I and my
children were out shopping once. While returning, my sister and her husband decided
to do a bit of extra shopping on their own. We opted to stay inside the car. It was
raining cats and dogs. It was almost dinner time, and then the talk of what to
eat sprang up between my son and me. One lead to another, and soon we were
arguing. Suddenly I looked out of the window and saw this old man sitting on
the sidewalk and trying to eat something out of a small packet he had with him.
He was sitting under a parasol and it was raining all round him. And the
walkway was crowded. But he was oblivious to all that, busy eating. He would
have had great difficulty getting someone to part with that packet. We could see pieces of roti falling off the
sides of the packet. He didn’t need to think twice to take it from the ground
and put it back. I looked at my son, and I could see he had suddenly become
quiet. I had driven home my point.
But
I was under no delusion that he would never again complain about his food.
