Skip to main content

Divine Potato

 


Potato enlightened me once. I had, on the previous day, attended a lecture on meditation in which the speaker suggested to his audience to use a candle as an aid to concentration. “Keep your eyes on the candle flame,” he said. “Let the flame flicker. Your gaze shouldn’t flicker. Keep looking at the flame. Keep looking. Focus. Now there is nothing else in front of you but the flame. Just the flame. You don’t exist now. Not even your mind. You vanish. Your mind vanishes. Into nothingness. That state of egolessness is the ideal goal of meditation.”

I was sceptical because I had already spent hours earlier trying to achieve that state of egolessness. The best I achieved was a deep sleep. Even now at the age of 61, I find myself burdened with an ego that could not be incinerated by any furnace, let alone a candle flame. I can only envy those who claim to have extinguished their egos. Back then, after that lecture on meditation, while cooking my dinner in the tiny kitchen of a rented house in Shillong, with a peg or two of whisky tickling my neurones, I said to myself: “Why a candle flame? Even a potato can help one to focus, can’t it?”

Potato was (and still is) one of my favourite food items. It is so versatile. You can add it to almost anything. Potato and carrots. Potato and peas. Potato and French beans. I would add potato to beef too. [By the way, I quit beef the day I left Shillong where it was a staple food, not in order to be in sync with the emerging nationalist fad but because I lived in Delhi where the stuff was not available first of all and when I did get it during my occasional trips to Kerala I realised that the delicate vegetarian diets in Delhi had made my teeth grow too feeble for beef. I’d prefer muttar-paneer with a tweak of potato chunks at any time to beef.]

So there in the wooden cottage in Shillong which resembled a hermitage, I became a mystic with a shapely potato perched on my study table like a holy figurine. I focused my gaze on the potato. I kept staring at it for minutes and minutes yearning for me, my ego, to melt away. The potato filled my mind. It grew in stature into a kind of demigod. Eventually it enlightened me by teaching me that my attempt to escape from my ego was nothing more than wishful thinking.

The potato went back to the kitchen and I went back to the usual routine.

The potato rose in eminence in my mind after that. I became fonder of it. Not a meal passed without the presence of potato in one form or another. Even today, years after those youthful days of experiments and adventures, the potato occupies a venerable place in my cuisine though Maggie is not very pleased with it.

However, my patriotic sentiments are hurt by the information that potato is not Indian by origin. Wikipedia tells me that India was introduced to potato by the Portuguese who called it ‘Batata’. For that matter, a lot of food items that are staple diets today are not Indian by origin. When will they get arrested for illegal residence in the country? Maybe, I should rewrite the history of the potato so that my patriotism remains intact.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 373: Potato and you. Write an essay. As many words as you please. The genre you choose. Potato must be the hero. #Potato

Comments

  1. The Moon's BOYFRIEND May 7, 2021 at 11:20 AM

    The indirect sentences sounds too direct in my head and yes i too have tried the flame thingy a couple of times, but this tells me that you don't need a flame all you need is to concentrate... i see that you couldn't lemme try it with an onion this time lol, not cause i hate potatoes, they trouble my stomach.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 7, 2021 at 11:42 AM

      You can choose onions too. Anything can enlighten one, I guess.

      Delete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathMay 7, 2021 at 1:44 PM

    Enjoyed reading this one, especially the last line yorker!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 7, 2021 at 2:00 PM

      All my attempts at humor end up in satire if not sarcasm.

      Delete
  3. HaddockMay 8, 2021 at 7:42 AM

    Potato was (and is) is my favourite. Like you said it can be added in any curry. Whenever I hear or see potato, I am reminded of the scenes where it was a scarce item in Russia that it had to be guarded with machine guns by the army.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 8, 2021 at 10:40 AM

      Potato is a staple food in many countries. Kerala, my native state, is the only place probably where it is treated with contempt. Keralites believe that potato causes gas problem in the stomach!

      Delete
  4. Durga Prasad DashMay 8, 2021 at 8:36 AM

    Chuckled through your humorous take on potato. I am reminded of a classmate and also a boarder mate of School and College days who used to selectively eat only potato out of the vegetable dishes and wear glasses with big round lenses.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 8, 2021 at 10:42 AM

      So I have a mate there. :)
      My love for potato is rather serious, you know. It's so soft that it melts away between the palates.

      Delete
  5. ViyomaMay 14, 2021 at 2:27 PM

    Portugese called it Batata’- interesting. In Marathi it is called Batata. Infact staying in Mumbai for a long time - I m more familar to Kandha -Batata ( Onion-Potato) than Pyaaz- Aaloo.

    Thanks for the prompt on Indispire. It got me back to writing mode.

    ReplyDelete
  6. SaimaMay 29, 2021 at 10:15 PM

    Amazing to read this piece.

    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
47 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
15 comments
Read more

The music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...
14 comments
Read more

Mahatma Ayyankali’s Relevance Today

About a year before he left for Chicago (1893), Swami Vivekananda visited Kerala and described the state (then Travancore-Cochin-Malabar princely states) as a “lunatic asylum.” The spiritual philosopher was shocked by the brutality of the caste system that was in practice in the region. The peasant caste of Pulayas , for example, had to keep a distance of 90 feet from Brahmins and 64 feet from Nairs. The low caste people were denied most human rights. They could not access education, enter temple premises, or buy essentials from markets. They were not even considered as humans. Ayyankali (1863-1941) was a Pulaya leader who emerged to confront the situation. I just finished reading a biography of his in Malayalam and was highly impressed by the contributions of the great man who came to be known in Kerala as the Mahatma of the Dalits . What prompted me to order a copy of the biography was an article I read in a Malayalam periodical last week. The article described how Ayyankali...
14 comments
Read more

Duryodhana Returns

Duryodhana was bored of his centuries-long exile in Mythland and decided to return to his former kingdom. Arnab Gau-Swami had declared Bihar the new Kurukshetra and so Duryodhana chose Bihar for his adventure. And Bihar did entertain him with its modern enactment of the Mahabharata. Alliances broke, cousins pulled down each other, kings switched sides without shame, and advisers looked like modern-day Shakunis with laptops. Duryodhana’s curiosity was more than piqued. There’s more masala here than in the old Hastinapura. He decided to make a deep study of this politics so that he could conclusively prove that he was not a villain but a misunderstood statesman ahead of his time. The first lesson he learns is that everyone should claim that they are the Pandavas, and portray everyone else as the Kauravas. Every party claims they stand for dharma, the people, and justice. And then plot to topple someone, eliminate someone else, distort history, fabricate expedient truths, manipulate...
14 comments
Read more