The Way To My Stomach

I just spent 41 days as a vegetarian. It was the most unpleasant experience of my life.

42 days ago, my mum celebrated her 60th birthday – her sashtipoorthi. So the brother and I decided to break the piggies and invest in some gold. Which was a testament to our filial love – gold was going up faster than Hugh Hefner on Viagra.

But I wanted to disprove the little voice in my head that told me that my mother would want something more from me – the prodigal son, the (literal) black sheep in wolf’s clothing – and so I asked her if she wanted anything a little more… umm… metaphysical.

“Go get yourself some vegetarianism, my son”, she said.

I batted many eyelids. “Mater of mine! Oh venerated umbilical!” I exclaimed, “What injustice is this? You might as well have asked me to stop eating meat!”

She gave me an old-fashioned look. It was the Mother. She proceeded to give me gyan about how one needs to detox from the meaty juices every anon and how one should eat saatvik food because it was good for the soul – forget all that nonsense about chicken soup, that’s the work of the devil – and I could get a leg up the ladder of moksha if I shunned eating carcasses.

I saw the cause was lost and knuckled down to six weeks of herbivoring. It started the next morning, right after I had the omelette in my flight out of Kerala.

The next month and a bit was just a blur, but one of those long-drawn out, shot-on-low-shutter-speed, smeared out thin blurs that happens when one hungers to push one’s pleasure buttons but can’t. Like Hugh Hefner before Viagra.

I was veggie during Ramzan when I was invited to gorge on dabba gosht at Noor Mohammadi – the only place fit for gastronomic enjoyment in Bombay. I would look on, sighing wistfully, when my mates would dig into tandoori chicken at Urban Tadka. I’d make a moue when roast beef sandwich (from Indigo Café – makes you believe in God!) made its way into welcoming stomachs. I went to Goa and stared resentfully as the mates pigged on prawn vindaloo and stuffed crab at Souza Lobo. I went to the Handi restaurant in Jaipur, with its laal maas and nalli nihaari, and ate Paneer Butter Masala, to the consternation of my friend Azhar Habib. I declined offers to Al Kauser’s melt-in-the-mouth kakori kababs and other food – any food – in Delhi. I stuck to the veggies, devouring cauliflowers, dal, potatoes, tomatoes (now I don’t even care how they are pronounced), cucumbers, cabbages, potatoes, dal, mushrooms, more peas than a month of Switzerlands and the entire GDP of Micronesia in paneer.

It was hell. I couldn’t understand why people would want to live like this. God, or the Big Bang or the Great Sneeze or Brahma, wanted us to eat the flesh of dead animals. We have canine teeth – they help us rip apart chunks of meat for easier processing. We used to be hunter-gatherers; those spears early man carried weren’t to knock apples off trees. We learnt to eat sabre-toothed tigers and stuff before we figured out agriculture. Some of the best food in the world – most of it – is stuff that used to walk, fly, swim, crawl and generally perambulate all over the place.

And now we have vegetarianism. I guess it all started when those sadhu dudes in the olden days used to deprive themselves of the good stuff and gave up their tandoori chicken. That was deprivation enough. Now it’s become the cool thing to do. Like quitting smoking. Ptchah!

PS: On a related matter, this Swiss court has ruled that killing plants is immoral. Tell it to’em.

What Is Your Pet Name?

A few weeks ago, I heard that the redoubtable Ms Momota Banerjee had renamed West Bengal – as Poshchim Bongo. I thought it was extremely kind of her; I hadn’t had a topic to pick holes in for a while.

I see what this is, though. It’s the Rise of the Sons of the Soil. Or at least The Man wants us to think so. This is, ostensibly, the return of the prodigal, the step back into the idyllic ways of our past, the return to Ram-Rajya or Arthashastra or Vedic culture or whichever politico-philosophical zeitgeist is prominent at the moment. It’s an attempt to cleanse ourselves of that which corrupted us and the fabric of our culture.

But which one?

It is also an attempt to forget the insults and injuries of the past. The British, being the latest in a series of people who thought of taking candy from the largish baby that India was, are the Big Villains, the Evil Dark Lord, the Sith, the Monster Under the Bed, the Man With the Paddle who spanked us silly for 200 years. Everything they did was bad; everything they left behind is defiled and meant only to defile whatever they left of our once shining heritage – Sone ki Chidiya and all that guff. It’s an attempt to wipe out the trauma, dry the tears, live in denial and remember the good times. Whichever those were.

So it continues, then. Years ago the Brits came down and named everything Cawnpore and Trivandrum and Madras and Bombay and Calcutta and Victoria Terminus and Park Street and Connaught Place and all. Prolly because Clive and the rest of that white trash bunch didn’t brush their teeth (or clean their tongues) properly and didn’t figure how to pronounce anything more difficult than “London”.

And now the neo-antediluvians strut around with various agendas and myriad noses to brown and change everything. The Congress apotheosises the Gandhi dynasty and CP becomes Rajiv Chowk, with Indira Chowk (Outer Circle) encompassing it in a maternal fashion – like Ghar Ek Sansar. Bombay becomes Mumbai because the Thackerays say that Kolis worship Mumbra Devi and that’s what the city used to be called; all that talk about the word “Bombay” coming from the Portuguese Bom Bahia or “Good Harbour” is just European post-colonial propaganda. Fer sure. And so we have Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and Mother Teresa Sarani and Kasturba Gandhi Marg and, I dare say soon, Mumbai Scottish School, Sambhajinagar, Pataliputra, Whatchamacallit Prayag and Dilli/Indraprastha.

And now Poshchim Bongo. Har har de bloody har.

Although the Banerjee claims a more practical reason for this change – it takes the state fro 28th to 21st place in the alphabetical order in the list of Indian states. I think I just swallowed my nuts laughing.

A Tale

This is a tale.

Someone who knew me (I don’t have many friends) called me a few weeks ago and asked me to do something to help her at work. I buffed up the Rather-Musty-Slightly-Moth-Ridden-and-Not-So-Shiny-Any-More Armour and gave my word. I was called to meet the Power That Was on the show, so I landed up bright and squeaky at the office. This turned out to be Naomi Datta. She’s thin, pretty, slightly mongoloid from some angles, earnest, sensibly dressed and ornamented with a bright smile.

She breezed into the tiny conference room, already overflowing from too much of Me, looked at me and pronounced, “So you’re the one who’s as funny as me?”

I was aghast. “I don’t think we know each other well enough for you to say things like that about my face”, I said coldly.

A grin peeped out from corner of her face, unsure whether to make a run for it across her face or wait for clearer coasts.

I decided to show her how it’s done. If my smile had been wider the top of my head would’ve fallen off. “But I do think your face is way funnier than mine, you know”.

This time the grin decided to risk all and took off onto the slightly line at the corner of her mouth. It reached about a third of the way before it saw that the other side was a long way off, braked and wheeled around in the same motion, called itself a bloody quitter, wheeled back and took off back the way it was going, eventually caroming off the other corner up to her eyes and the crow’s feet on the side.

We had a nice enough meeting where she figured I was good enough to help them. She admonished me to buy her book and even threw a sharp-edged url at me for her book at Flipkart.com (go ahead, there’s the link right there, go buy the book, I dare you, I double dare you). It brooked no vacillation and I forthwith toodled over and bought the book.

It looked like a piece of fluffy chick-lit, so I passed it on to a friend who is an obsessive reviewer and roams the bylanes of Yari Road looking for unsuspecting books, movies, plays, TV shows, sports matches and life-in-general to wag a finger at and tell off. He took the book on an office trip to Saudi Arabia, belatedly understood that the cover could have him emasculated, kept it firmly ensconced. He tried reading it on the flight back, came home, slammed the book on the table and questioned my ancestry. He hadn’t got past chapter 2.

So I decided to rush in where fools feared to tread and started reading. The result was this review.

Many moons later, I had a meeting at the same office where Ms Datta runs her personal fiefdom from a tiny cubicle that, I sure hope, is larger on the inside. I had brought the offending book and the bill from Flipkart, and, on spotting her, strode over, slammed the book on her table, slammed the bill on top of it and asked for my money back.

She looked slightly bemused. “You hated it?”

The irresolute smile waved hello, surreptitiously. “I wouldn’t use that same adjective but…” The ellipsis dangled over the atmosphere like the Sword of Damocles.

She decided not to mind. And that’s when I was really impressed. This dame had no airs, no teary blinking or “I just need a moment” or looking at me like I’d been floating in the water for a week. She merely told me the book was in reprint, it was a bestseller, she’s got lots of good reviews and “some bad ones”. We then sat down and had a general chat of cabbages and kings and whether pigs have wings.

It was nice to come across someone who had evolved more than the average bear, who was self-confident enough to laugh at herself, who keeps a stiff upper lip under unexpected stress, who takes on boors and makes them feel a little silly. I haven’t met many people who have that groundedness. Reminded me of one of my favourite English teachers – he used Shakespeare to make people laugh.

So all power to the Datta. She may have written a book I didn’t like, but she’s all right. Decent energies. I just hope she writes books I do like. ‘cos the review stands.

The 6pm Smack In The Face

For one of the many times in my life, I finished a book for the singular purpose of skinning it with a blunt and rusty knife and pulling its fingernails out with a pair of pliers. After I finished, it, though, I didn’t think that it deserved such attention.

But what the hey, I am a man of unlimited opinions which nobody listens to, so I shall tilt at this windmill too.

The 6pm Slot is, very simply, a waste of time. I was done reading it after 3 pages; the rest of it seemed like the literary equivalent of watching paint dry. And that is what you keep doing when reading the book: waiting. Waiting for the characters to add another dimension so they don’t look like cardboard Rajnikant cut-outs or sound like tropes. Waiting for the plot to explode, or at least blossom, into some sort of depth. Waiting for ideas and concepts and the cut-and-thrust of repartee and the brevity of wit.

Naomi Datta brings the big bad world of television to us, and it leaves us as most television does: with an unutterable sense of ennui. The shenanigans of the central character – which seems modelled on a mixture of the authoress, Becky Bloomwood, Bridget Jones and the regular girl-next-door-that-you-wouldn’t-give-time-of-day-even-on-Rakshabandhan – ostensibly take you into the life of a television producer, that much harrowed soul who would much rather be sticking flowers in her hair and emancipating street urchins than sullying her soul with television, but what to do? So the much-belaboured heroine goes forth once more in search of the Holy Grail of rating points (which, of course, everyone in television does without any thought to sensibilities, sensitivities and the general idea of good distaste) unto the breach and takes the brunt of “public school educated dickheads”, itinerant myriad-chinned brown-noses, half-reformed Eliza Doolittles, megalomaniac news channel Grand Panjandrums, the male penchant for sex and the unpredictable television viewing preferences of the Great Unwashed.

Which is the problem I have with this book: everything is too convenient. The characters are what one would expect in the world of television, the scenes are what one knew would happen (‘cos Bunty’s daughter’s friend’s fiancée works in TV and she told me all about what goes on in there – did you know that all reality shows are scripted?), the dynamics are specious, the situations impossibly pat. It’s like a Madhur Bhandarkar movie; it’s a point of view of a person looking in from outside, a clichéd, unimaginative, dinner-table account of the inner workings of a whole different world, full of staples and tropes and platitudes. Oh, and an extremely trite love story.

For somebody to dumb life down like this, it takes a very special talent. Maybe it was thrust upon her.