eating humble pie

Most of us who say they eat to live are liars. If it had been true, we would not have had so many reteurants dotting the cityscape. We eat ambience, we eat decor and we even eat status and exclusivity. In sum, we eat experience and those who can't afford to take their brood to one of those happening eateries faithfully featured in the page three supplements, nibble away into those appetizing glimpses.

Civilization has dressed the simple physical activity of consuming food into such an inscrutable enigma of arrival. You may not be going to the biyebari of yout pistuto bhai but make it a point to drop in at the wedding reception of your brither-in-law's business partner's brother, simply because it is being held at the ballroom of the Taj. Then there is much networking to do over the drink that you may not consume but carry with you nonetheless as you hop along the length and breadth of the gathering, flying kissess at all and sundry, showing off your new Dolce lether bag or Hermes three peice.

One of the uses of lotus laves, a biology text book for an obscure Bengali medium school about a couple of decades ago claimed, is to function as plates on which to serve food. Banana leaves, of course are much more common as biodegradable plates. Have you ever ever wondered what woulf happen to the hapless cows and other animals who survive on these green leaves. This food chain concept is a very imperialist formulation in that some componets within it, such as chicken for instance, could be routinely overproduced by artificial means, or farmed, as it were, and some others, such as little inscets, are cruelly insecticieded out of the city boundaries. In reality only those who serve the interest of the ruling power are allowed to reproduce themselves, and the rest forcefully escorted to extinction, in the name of a clearner, healthier world.

In this movie that you may like to see, their is this 35 year old man from the drought prone belts of Orissa who looks 60, for he has not had foor days and months, and survived probably on hope alone. Lest the late Nargis Dutt's beautiful soul decideds to charge me with selling India's poverty--she had even charged satyajit Ray--let me clarify that Orissa, for the record, is a part of India and I am making mo money selling this crap. You may of course go ahead and advise these hapless souls to eat protein supplements instad, just as Marie Antoniette had suggested to the Frenchmen who had come to her husband clamouring for bread. While the man above was a genuine victim of malnutrition, there are others who keep eating all sorts of delicacies and equally religiously force them out of their systems, and still look like thin ball pencils. Food, too, is a bit like the proverbial laddoo of Delhi-you lose weight when you don't have it and you die even when you have too much of it. It is no coincidence that the rate of anorexia and bulimia related comlications are increasing apace in India, precisely when the nation is euphoric about its GDP growth rate and near self suffciency level performance. If you try to tease out realtions between these disparate observations, it must be attributed to your perverse imaginations and nothing else. I am far too used to eat humble pie.