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
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