Skip to main content

Some Biryani Politics


Biryani is a favourite food of mine. The reason is simple. It’s easy to order. There’s no need to search in the a la carte menu and waste time waiting for the different dishes to arrive. “Chicken biryani,” tell the waiter. Simple. It arrives soon enough. There’s veg biryani if you are a nationalist in contemporary India. My home state, Kerala, offers a rich diversity of biryanis to suit everyone’s palate. You can have mutton biryani, beef biryani, veg biryani, egg biryani, paneer biryani, and tapioca biryani. This last one, tapioca biryani, is a queer recipe. It has no rice in it. Only tapioca and some bones and fat of an animal that was vegetarian until a few years ago. Now a Malayalam poem tells me that the animal has started swallowing certain people called Mohammed Akhlaq.

A friend drew my attention to this Malayalam poem titled ‘Biryani – a non-veg political poem’ by P N Gopikrishnan. It is about the food politics that has been devouring the country since 2014. Slogans started swallowing the country from that year. One Nation, One … became a pet slogan of the country. You can fill in the blank with almost anything – from religion to language to dress to headgear to fertiliser. Yeah, you heard it right. One Nation, One Fertilizer. Never mind, the type of soil you’re working with. If you are a patriot, you will use the fertiliser that your nation wants you to use.

You will eat the food ratified by the Lok Sabha. Wear the ratified dress. Speak the national language. Worship the sanctioned gods.

Biryani will soon be out, in short. That is my worry. Gods and all don’t bother me. Food does.

Will the holy veg animal swallow me alive?

Possible. Especially since Biryani was a Mughal royal food. They called it pilaf which became pulao later. The holy animal made pulao vegetarian and the non-veg version became biryani. You won’t get pulao easily in Kerala which is an incorrigible state. Biryani is as omnipresent as God here.

In spite of the freedoms here to eat what you like, wear what you like, and worship who you like, the youth of the state are leaving for other countries. There is mass emigration. Soon you won’t have youth left here. What I don’t understand is why all these youngsters are leaving a country that is reportedly becoming a superpower. Strange are the ways of the youth.

Or, are they intelligent enough to understand the fraudulence of our holy cow?

P N Gopikrishnan’s poem (mentioned above) has these lines. [Forgive my poor translation.]

Remember

The fruits and vegetables

manufactured in your corporate ovens

will become biryani

chewed

and chewed

by our memories.

We have the teeth for that.

Teeth.

 

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanOctober 28, 2022 at 7:42 PM

    Hari OM
    I do believe the youth can see the cracks in salted crust the Holy Cow is trying to lay... and no place lasts long where youth has deserted. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 28, 2022 at 7:55 PM

      This youth emigration is not the problem of Kerala only. Punjab has ghost villages now with only some old people left there. Something is seriously wrong with India.

      Delete
  2. magiceyeOctober 29, 2022 at 8:28 AM

    Truly said sadly.

    ReplyDelete
  3. dee NambiarNovember 2, 2022 at 1:50 AM

    Oh no! We can't have biryani, kappa biryani and diversity disappear!
    Such a great post. There's so much in here.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 2, 2022 at 3:32 AM

      This 'One nation, One...' craze is going a bit too far.

      Delete

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 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...
19 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

The Essentials of a Successful Career

Book Review Title: Break Your Barriers: Strategic Career Essentials Author: Anu Sunil Publisher:  Amazon K indle [click to buy]   If you are looking for a concise and pragmatic guide to success in your business career, go no further. Anu Sunil’s Break Your Barriers is one of the best in the genre. This slim volume aims to teach the reader “to learn how to lead with integrity, speak clearly, and progress with confidence” (Introduction). The book is meant not just for beginners in their profession but also for seasoned achievers. The best merit of the book is that its lessons are absolutely actionable and focused, with clear procedures that may be implemented right away. The author’s claim in the introduction that “this is more than just a handbook. It’s an attitude shift” is vindicated on every page. Let us look at just one chapter randomly to understand how the book works. Chapter 3 is titled ‘Express Yourself Confidently and Consistently.’ The chapter begins wi...
8 comments
Read more