There are few things worse than being stuck in traffic for hours on end, in the most polluted city in the world, Delhi. Any major crossroad during peak rush hour is the best visual representation of a clusterfuck. It's worse when you are trying to keep an appointment or meeting anywhere. In the city. Which in itself is an extremely infuriating process because respect for others time just doesn't fucking exist here. I manage to maintain my schedule in 5 different, often conflicting timezones, yet am amazed how singularly hard it is to deal with time here, work or otherwise.
There is how ever one grudge worse than traffic, that really gets my goat and it's about people's issues around eating said, goat, chicken, cow, fish, even plan ole eggs. Look, I get it, there are many vegetarians in India. I understand the socio-religious, economic and historical reasons of why they are vegetarians, I also understand that many people are just not into food and it's just fuel. I can even overlook the absurdly restrictive Jain, Satvic food where people don't eat anything worth eating. I can get my head around how Hindu Pundit Kashmiris eat meat but not onions and garlic, where as Kashmiri Muslims do use it. I am quite sure you get a Jehadi asshole to eat a slice or four of bacon and he will renounce his evil ways, but I get the mumbo jumbo. There are many reasons for all of this, however asinine and illogical, but I really do get it. Sure, sometimes I make fun of it, because it is kind of silly.-
What I don't get and can't stand is the self righteous moral indignation of so many vegetarians in India, and total fucking myth-ball of bullshit they create around their lifestyle choice. No where else in the world is there such a generalized castigation of a food preference as there is in so many parts of India. Where else does a 'family friendly' restaraunt mean pure vegetarian, as if we meat eaters are a marauding, goat fucking army of impotent bachelors. Visit the small cities in central and western India, where non vegetarian restaraunts are relegated to dingy corners of the city, serving shameful meat eaters indulging in sin, hidden in cars and small groups away from being seen by upstanding veggie-mights . Then there are those that only eat meat outside their house or on holidays because the sight of cooked flesh might incite riot at home, by disturbing the domestic balance between feuding wives and their meddling mother in laws. Our insidious patriarchal system is also well represented in this issue, where men hide and mischievously consume kebabs while the women, must remain pure to pulses. Glance through the matrimonial classifieds, and you will find plenty evidence of the staunch types searching for a fair and lovely vegetarian maiden for their newly minted MBA, because a carcass chewing dusky nymph in jeans might get the perpetually horny but under sexed male relatives a case of the twitchy cock.
Frequent any Indian food related blog or Facebook group page and you will see holy ideologues defending the virtues of the pious by throwing a frothing fit if anyone posts a picture of a holy cow dressed up with pepper or mushroom sauce. Same vitriol goes for anyone posting a picture of a juicy pork chop. Getting their underwear in knots over pictures of food they don't eat because they were told not to, by someone magical they never met. Fucking Unicorns.
Detractors would defend and say, vegetarians do not have much options in restaraunts in the west. Well that's true, but it's not because we think vegetarians are weird as say, the vegans but because they are a statistical oddity. That brings me to the first of many talking points on the subject.
Lets get the facts straight, vegetarians are a minority and oddity the world over. Take Hindus out of the equation, and there would be more gay Mormon missionaries than vegetarians. I don't give a fuck that your bullshit hemp print magazine says otherwise, in the wider world, from Papua New Guinea, to the Caucuses, from the Middle Kingdom to the high Andes, meat is what's for dinner, lunch and many times breakfast too. "It's the meat lobby by that has changed our diet to consume meat" say some.... Right !! the American Association of Pork producers is working their sausage claws into the eating habits of the Arabian Peninsula, while the Chicken Illuminati is mind bending the rest of the world from Sichuan to Santiago into eating chicken wings. They seem to forget that these cuisines have a long history of serving up flesh in all forms.
History brings me to my next point: "we are not meant to eat meat, "our bodies are not meant to process meat" "our 6000 civilisation and our books say so" The fuck it does. Let's forget every historical context of meat in our diet, including ancient Hindu texts, especially pre-brahmanic bs. Let us discount every biological, anthropological and scientific proof including irrefutable evidence that mankind was and is a meat eater. Let's instead ask simple questions. We all know we were hunter gatheres, we have enough evidence as in prehistoric cave drawings showing man hunting. Then there is evidence of spear heads and cutting tools which sure as shit were not for hunting flying cucumbers or sprinting lettuces. According to scripture, old people should set them selves out to pasture and renounce all world things. This whacked Puranic ideology makes itself evident in eating patterns of those that consume meat in their youth only to shun it later as they get closer to the light, because...... no reason, just floppycock. No correlation to age and meat consumption exists in the scientific or the rest of the world, besides moderation. If there was any basis for it then 80+ % of the world would have caught on by now.
How is that only in parts of India did this realization that mankind must not eat meat. They must live the longest healthiest lives, Olympians the lot of them. I wonder why Ponderosa wasted his time searching for the fountain youth, when he should have been seeking rivers of daal instead. Because it doesn't make any fucking sense. There is a very easy way to check what works and what doesnt, it's called mortality rates. Next is the olympics, how many gold medals do we win in endurance and strength meets, and now delete the meat eaters from the few that do win something and check what you are left with. Basically you die younger and are a bit of a pussy, well done.
I am not in any way discounting the breathtaking range of vegetarian food in India, it is monumental in its variety and flavors. There are epic vegetarian meals to be had across the country and they are worth traveling for. My rant is not against vegetarian food, vegetarians themselves, or their life choices, but solely against the brow beating so many veggie-mights do around the rest of us. Just a reminder, the most famous asshole the world has ever known, Adolf Hitler, was a veggie-might.
*Just as I am about to post this blog, I wake up to the news that the state of Maharashtra has banned beef and made possession or sale a 5 year jail sentence with a 10,000 Rupee (160USD) fine offense. These self righteous bastards want to dictate to others who don't share there beliefs or faith. Want to disenfranchise a people, ban what they eat, slippery slope I say.
