Skip to main content

Khichdi Country


I never ask the price of vegetables since I buy them from the same vendor whose prices, I know, are fair.  Yesterday, however, when I picked up two raw mangoes for making chutney, my vendor said to me for the first time in my year-long association with him, “Mangoes are ₹100 a kg.  Should I weigh both?”  He had already kept them on the balance which showed 400 grams.  Not wishing to appear an impoverished citizen in a country that is becoming a global superpower, I was about to put up a cavalier face and say, “Oh, it’s OK,” when Maggie (my wife) forestalled me by butting in very uncharacteristically, “Oh, yes, one’s more than enough.”  I swallowed the hurt to my patriotism and looked at her with the implied question, “How can you be so antinational?”  She was looking at the price list displayed on the shop’s wall.  It is mandatory, in Kerala, to display the prices.

Waiting for Khichdi

“That’s the cost of development,” I told her when we were alone in our car.  “Aren’t you proud to be living in a country which will soon have a lot of temples and statues costing thousands of crores of rupees?  The future generations will remember us as patriotic citizens who sacrificed their mango chutney and vegetable salad for the greater glory of the nation.”

She stared at me as if to make sure whether I had gone nuts.  I was serious, however.  Why don’t people like my wife realise that Hindustan has every right to leave its marks on the palimpsest of Indian history.  Don’t we have the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort and a hundred other things left by the Mughals?  Then we have Victoria Terminal-turned-Chattarpati Shivaji Terminal and Connaught Place-to-be-turned Veer Savarkar Sthal and a hundred other things left by the British.  If the invaders could leave all those marks, shouldn’t we – we ourselves – leave our own marks?  We should happily pay ₹100 per kg or more for vegetables and whatever price each day demands for petrol and so on.  That is patriotism.  That is the duty of every patriotic citizen. 

As soon as we reached home, the TV news channel cheered us with the news about the elevation of khichdi as the ‘brand food’ of the country.  The hike in the price of cooking gas was the next headline.  The water for the tea boiled faster than usual, I think, hearing the latest price of cooking gas.

“But isn’t khichdi the food of the sick?” Maggie asked as she brought two cups of tea and sat down with me to listen to the news.  These days we watch only the news because nothing entertains us more. 

Neither Maggie nor I had heard about khichdi until we started working in a residential school in Delhi which served khichdi to those students who suffered from some ailment which was certified by the resident doctor as worthy of khichdi.  I never tasted it since the doc never got an opportunity to certify me as worthy of khichdi.  The very look of the food which looked messy never appealed to me anyway and hence I was happy to stay far away from it. 

Now our great leaders are certifying us all worthy of khichdi.  A country of khichdi eaters!  Patriotism surged in my veins.  I vowed to put aside my distaste and cultivate an unconditional love for khichdi.

“But I don’t know how to cook khichdi,” said Maggie when I told her that soon the whole of Hindustan will be put on a khichdi diet. 

“Then call up one of your friends in Delhi and learn the recipe,” I urged her fervently.

Will there be both CGST and SGST on khichdi?  I wondered as Maggie was tapping the number of one of her Dilliwali friends to learn the recipe of Hindustan’s brand food. 


Comments

  1. Your post is certainly more interesting than Khichdi, which reminds of my sick childhood days

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Coming-of-Age Poems

Lubna Shibu Book Review Title: Into the Wandering Multiverse Author: Lubna Shibu Publisher: Book Leaf , 2024 Pages: 23 Poetry serves as a profound medium for self-reflection. It offers a canvas where emotions, thoughts, and experiences are distilled into words. Writing poetry is a dive into the depths of one’s consciousness, exploring facets of the poet’s identity and feelings that are often left unspoken. Poets are introverts by nature, I think. Poetry is their way of encountering other people. I was reading Lubna Shibu’s debut anthology of poems while I had a substitution period in a section of grade eleven today at school. One student asked me if she could have a look at the book as I was moving around ensuring discipline while the students were engaged in their regular academic tasks. I gave her the book telling her that the author was a former student in this very classroom just a few years back. I watched the student reading a few poems with some amusement. Then I ask...

How to preach nonviolence

Like most government institutions in India, the Archaeological Survey of India [ASI] has also become a gigantic joke. The national surveyors of India’s famed antiquity go around finding all sorts of Hindu relics in Muslim mosques. Like a Shiv Ling [Lord Shiva’s penis] which may in reality be a rotting piece of a Mughal fountain. One of the recent discoveries of Modi’s national surveyors is that Sambhal in UP is the birthplace of Kalki, the tenth incarnation of God Vishnu. I haven’t understood yet whether Kalki was born in Sambhal at some time in India’s great antique history or Kalki is going to be born in Sambhal at some time in the imminent future. What I know is that Kalki is the final incarnation of Vishnu that is going to put an end to the present wicked Kali Yuga led by people like Modi Inc. Kalki will begin the next era, Satya Yuga, the Era of Truth. So he is yet to be born. But a year back, in Feb to be precise, Modi laid the foundation stone of a temple dedicated to Kalk...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Life of a Courtesan

  Book Review Title: The Last Courtesan: Writing my mother’s memoir Author: Manish Gaekwad Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 185 Writing the biography of one’s mother who was a courtesan is not quite a pleasant task. Manish Gaekwad undertakes that arduous task in this book and does a fairly eminent job with it. ‘Courtesan’ may not be quite the exact translation of ‘tawaif,’ which is what Rekha, Gaekwad’s mother, was. A courtesan is essentially a sex worker whose clients are wealthy men. But a tawaif is primarily an artiste, a singer of ghazals as well as a dancer. Sex is part of that job, no doubt. When a woman sings lines like Apna bana le meri jaan / Haye re main tere qurbaan [Make me yours, my love / I am your sacrifice] to a man, sex becomes a natural climax of the show. Rekha is a tawaif. She tells her own story in this book. The author writes the narrative as if his mother is telling him her life’s story. Towards the end of the narrative, Rekha asse...