Yuletide and dead pigs

Do you know how much eggs 21 guys consume in a month?
55 Doz
Pork?
13 Kg
Chicken?
70 Kg
How do I know this?
Its a part of my job description.

I've always dreamed of being an inveterate traveller.
It's in my blood to travel.
But what stops me?
Well, for one I'm a vegetarian.

But I've always been a vegetarian...
Well, not always.

I was a thin kid once upon a time.
So thin that the doctors pronounced that I was suffering from Malnutrition.
This diagnosis is a slap on the face of any self respecting
mother.Malnutrition alluded either poverty or bad parenting.In this
case , it hinted the latter.
But mom simply could not change my eating habits...I was too picky,
too finicky,too choosy...
I would not eat anything spicy or hot.All my food had to be mixed with
copius amounts of curd.I didn't eat salt or sugar.I would readily eat
fruits and vegetables but not touch fried food...
Relatives told mom that with I would soon become a monk if I kept
eating this spartan bland diet.

Mom took it as a challenge.
She would prove the others wrong.She was not a bad mother.So I would
have to put on weight no matter what.
She was not a bad mother.
She was not.
She's the best mother I've ever had , I tell her jokingly...the only
mother I've ever had , I add later as an afterthought.

As a drastic measure she decided on feeding me non-vegetarian food
which she thought was the quickest way to help me put on weight.

As I said before...I've always been a vegetarian.The only reason is
because the rest of my family is vegetarian too.In different
circumstances , I might not have been a vegetarian.
A lot of people get offensive when I tell them I'm a vegetarian.They
tru to disprove it, and then simply accuse me of lying to their face.
So let me reiterate:When I tell people that I'm vegetarian, I'm not
posturing moral superiority.
I'm not telling people that I'm better than them.
Sure, Brahmins are vegetarians, and once upon a time they boasted
their stringent practices as a mark of superiority , but those days
are long gone.
I'm a global citizen.I claim no caste,creed or religion.I claim no
superiority , moral or otherwise.

I've always dreamed of being an inveterate traveller.
It's in my blood to travel.
I can't stay in put in any one place for too long.The heart grows
restless,for it has not found.
I concur with Basho, when he says
'Every day is a journey,
and the journey itself is home'

It's a lonely heart,
on a lonely journey
so why do my eyes
still search for you ?

Musafir hoon yaaron
na ghar hai , na tikhana
mujhe chalte jaana hain
bas...chalte jaana

But what stops me ?
My block is my vegetarianism.
Imagine asking for a vegetarian balut...or vegetarian caviar or
anything vegetarian in most foriegn countries.
They shook their heads in Korea, laughed at me in argentina,and in
china they thought I wanted to eat meat uncooked and raw.They simply
did not understand the concept of vegetarianism!
But my vegetarianism is a mental block, a phobia to be precise.

For I can't do it.
Can't eat that stuff.

I've gone hungry so many times, because I could find nothing suitable to eat.
I can never taste the local specialities of the places that I visit.


But what is a phobia?

A phobia can be thought of as the paradigm case of psychological limitation.

A person who has a phobia made a decision,unconsciously,under stress,
sometime earlier in their life in the face ofoverwhelming stimuli.
They succeeded in doing something that humans often have a hard time
doing. They succeeded in one-trial learning.
Every time that set of stimuli comes up again later in their life,they
make exactly the same response. It's a remarkable achievement.
You change over the years, and despite external contextual changes,you
are still able to maintain that stimulus-response arc.
The thing that makes phobias sort of interesting is the fact that the
responses are so consistent.

So once again...
I was a thin kid once upon a time,and mom sent me to other people and
asked them to feed me small amounts of chicken and fish and mutton.She
hoped that I would like eating this and gradually eat more and put on
some weight.

It almost worked.

And then one day I followed dad around in his workplace.
He is an engineer.
A chief engineer ever since I can remember, and he had gone into a
meat locker in the refrigeration room for his monthly inspection.

I tagged along only to witness the most horrifying sight a 5 year old can see.

The meat locker was cold and frosty, and in it were hung thousands of
dead and mutilated animal carcasses.The air was cold and it smelled
like death.On various hooks , many dismembered limbs and headless
corpses hung with all the blood drained out and deathly pale.
I wouldn't speak for almost a day.

I'm sure that my five year old imagination had amplified much of what
it had seen on that day, but it left an indelible mark on the psyche.

I refused all dead animals after that day.

I was a vegetarian once again.
I think mom was secretly relieved.

Now , I feel like it is a mental block,an inner constraint that I have
to overcome.

But phobias are not that easily cured.You need to go slow.

I've decided to start small.
I've started with eating unfertilized chicken embryos, or as you
people call them ,Eggs..I can eat eggs without retching or heaving.
In fact I'm eating four everyday.People say four is too much.I like
them fried with the sunny side up.

With this I've realized that most of our limitations are self imposed,
or family or culture imposed.

Now that christmas is upon us, I've been force fed sweet xmas carols
everyday.Yuletide hangs heavily like thick fog curtains.People are
grinning ear to ear and are being nicer these days.

On xmas party we had Roast Suckling.
I offended some people by calling it as 'Dead Pig'.

It's not dead pig , they tried to explain ...it's a roasted suckling
pig...I failed to understand the semantic differences and rephrased my
original statement with the new inclusion 'Roasted Dead Baby Pig',
which infuriated them further.



Suckling pig-Dead Baby Pig...Same difference.

I say To-mah-toh,you say to-may-to...it's the same bloody difference.


I can tolerate ufertilized chicken embryos.
SO maybe with time, I too will learn to eat dead animals.

Till then, I will remain a Hungry Traveller
A Bhooka Musafir.

I have nothing against non-vegetarians or non-vegetarian food itself.
What I'm really bothered by is the cruelty and pain inflicted upon
helpless animals.
Really, Do you need to boil that lobster alive? Do you really need to
dip a live chicken in superheated water to remove its feathers?Do you
really need the blood to flow and drain from a live animal for the
meat to be halal? Are these the only ways to go about doing things?
If so, then I'm glad to be a vegetarian.



p.s. A note to all hindus:
Holy Cows make tasty hamburgers.

I know...Bad Joke.


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