Food
has various emotional as well as psychological connections with every one of
us. Whenever we have a particular dish or visit a certain restaurant, there’s
always some property of the delicacy that we feast on, that helps us remember
something. It may be anything at all, a person, place or even an event. We
always tell that no matter where we have our food, the best dish will always
come from our mothers’ hands, and so it is. Some foods help us
recuperate, helps to find balance during surging times. Foods often bear goods
news, and seldom bad. Alexander the Great wanted to uproot every mango tree
when he was crossing the fertile plains of the Indus and have them planted in
his private orchard in Babylon. It reminded him of victory; sweet, fleshy and
rewarding, he said. Apart from what would have been an ecological disaster, the
mango would perhaps never have reached the ripeness they possessed in India of
course. I wonder how many poor gardeners would have been executed in the
pursuit of sweet mangoes. Instead, the rulers of the nearby kingdoms gifted the
Macedonian warlord with bucket loads of mangoes. It was a token of friendship
as well as a ploy to slow down those wind-like Persian horses in battle if
necessary. The latter was just a funny hypothesis, the former proved effective
in enhancing Indo-Greek relations. In fact, whenever a Greek scholar roamed the
parts of Northern India, it was about mangoes that often enabled him to strike
a blissful conversation with locals.
Picking
up from where those scholars left about two millenniums ago, we still use food
as a very interesting topic of conversation in our daily lives. We often
quibble at home with our grandparents that spinach is actually still green and
ugly not matter how many paneer pieces are put in the crockery to decorate it.
Similarly, I was able to convince my younger cousin that Popeye’s green “thing”
was actually spinach, and that he still couldn’t punch me any harder after he
grudgingly had a bowl of it. I would feint pretty well though. Food
conversations often lead to friendship too. How many awkward moments of
foolishness have we endured, that have perhaps always been eased out with food.
All those unpleasant moments of silence with a new room-mate, shattered with
the sound of tiffin being opened, only to mesmerise your sense of smell with an
every-filling incense of home-cooked food. Or the time you stayed over at your
friend’s place, only to see his or her mother preparing a beautiful breakfast
as you were about to leave. Those fun-filled moments in college canteens,
coloured with the “bread pakodas” or “rajma chawal.”
Food
has numerous properties. It is rich in nutrients, good for your health (well
some of them at least) and can blossom and idle mind into writing sentimental
essay like this one. Well, we need not elaborate its types and candtell you
what a carbohydrate was or the benefits of protein. But its special use as a
binding agent in situations irrespective or dissimilar to the very taste of
food is a property perhaps best exploited by us. Fun dissolves well with spice,
sorrow glues appropriately with sweetness, suspense with heat and hysteria with
tang. Our tongues only perceive what we eat, our minds decide how it tastes,
and our hearts digest the pleasure it provides.
So,
the next time you have home-made cookies stored up at the back of your
cupboard, don’t hesitate in distribution. It will of course mean that you may
lose a few calories, but will certainly ensure that you gain many more friends.
