By Farouk Gulsara
” No, you cannot refuse this!” my wife said. “This is prasad, the divine offering to the gods.”
I reluctantly looked at the glazed motichoor ladoo[1]. The memories of my last blood test results started flooding my mind.
The learned GP looked disapprovingly at my results through his reading glasses, one eye fixed on the result and the other condescendingly on me. Did I hear geckos chapping away in the background, or is the doctor making disgruntled sounds about my glucose levels?
“9.0 fasting sugar is not good! Congratulations, you are a diabetic now!” he declared. I thought I saw a gleam in his eyes as he announced it.
“Let him have his day,” I told myself. “This is his terrain, let him have his last say.”
Quietly, I was guessing how well the doctor’s fasting sugar would be. Looking at his general appearance, it would not be so great. Proudly carrying around his protuberant apron of a paunch, slouched in his chair all day, the closest he must come to exertion would be leaning forward to examine his patients; he does not scream of a paradigm of health. Yet, this is his turf. Hence, I sheepishly blurted, “Yes, doctor.”
There are some things in life one cannot fight, like who your parents are and the garbage of genetic material one is thrown with. With my very strong family history of diabetes, it was a matter of time before I was garlanded with the same laurel. No amount of time spent at the gym or hours of burning the soles of my running shoes was going to steer me away from his genetic heirloom. I knew that. Still, it is unfair to say, nevertheless.
So when she offered me the sucrose-dripping divine offerings, I looked at them as my mug of hemlock, as a concoction offered with an intended outcome, no matter how much one can sugarcoat it with divine intervention. Like an accountant who tallies debit and credit transactions, the body does not take into account whether a food is blessed or otherwise. It is quite transactional in its dealings with the trash that is shoved in versus the energy consumed, aided by detoxifying and catalytic agents.
My mind then wandered upon the practice of emphasising food as one of the highest deeds one can offer to humanity. Every religious function invariably ends with a big feast. Forget prayers; one would get upset if a wedding, a birthday invitation, or even a casual visit to an acquaintance’s home is not accompanied by a meal or at least a snack. What is a birthday party without loads of sugar or unnecessary calories? Feuds have occurred in the past when caterers failed to meet their hosts’ promises. Our community believes that the taste of the wedding meals should be savoured much longer than the newlyweds keep their wedding vows.
The highest brownie points in most religions must surely be for feeding the masses. No one is denied a meal in most places of worship. Why this fixation on meals and their intermingling with divinity? If any calamity were to befall any part of the world, the Sikh brothers would always be the first to be at Ground Zero to whip out some piping hot vegetarian food for the victims. Where do the homeless in the underprivileged part of town go for a square meal? A langar[2] , the Sikh community kitchen, of course.
I once heard an actress boasting about her polyamorous lifestyle and how she managed to win so many hearts. Her answer stuck in my mind. “Honey, the sure way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. You can either stir a nice meal, or you can compliment him on how slim he looks. You can tell him you can hardly see his stomach!” The actress also said that Belgian chocolates win any girl’s heart.
Why this fixation on meals and their intermingling with the human psyche and divinity? Food and divinity are closely intertwined, not only because a hungry soul cannot sing praises of the giver, but also because the gratitude and joy showered upon their givers can be intoxicating. It fosters human connection at a primordial level, regulating social orders. After all, hunger remains one of the primitive needs before social conditioning expanded our insatiable wants.
Famine has been a regular feature in the Indian subcontinent[3]. On the other end of society, opulence and wastage were prevalent. The society decided to imbue the act of ‘giving a dog a bone’ with religious fervour, bestowing it with a divine status. We were undernourished then and overnourished now. Either way, we are malnourished[4] , just that in the former, we were fed a wee bit too little, while in the latter, a tad too much. Both leave us much to be desired, metabolically speaking.
Just as Empress Marie Antoinette could not comprehend why the peasants did not stop their boisterous shouts and just eat the cake[5], my wife cannot understand why I am having second thoughts about indulging in some blessed sweet ladoos.
.
[1] Sweet
[2] A Sikh community kitchen serving free meals to all regardless of religion, caste, gender, economic status, and ethnicity
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_prior_to_1765
[4] . Malnutrition is an imbalance between the nutrients your body needs to function and the nutrients it gets. It can mean undernutrition or overnutrition.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22987-malnutrition
[5] “Let them eat cake” is the traditional translation of the French phrase, “qu’ils mangent de la brioche“, said by ‘a great princess’ according to Rosseau. It has been attributed to Marie Antoinette. Brioche is not cake but an enriched bread made with eggs, flour, butter and sugar. (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake)
Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.
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