Buddha's Delight

From time immemorial I was a pure veggie. Then on a historic day, that my mother did not care to record, I became a non-veg eater. This happened in the late eighties. But in the mid nineties, I reverted to vegetarianism upon seeing gruesome pictures of butchered cows and goats. As a child, my heart bled for those animals and I joined PETA. Maneka Gandhi even wrote me a letter.
After six long years of vegetarianism, one fine evening I turned into a chicken eater.
That was in Bangalore. My friend and I were the only mallu male students in the batch and we happened to be the darlings of the senior mallu chechis. They found their long lost kumbh-mela brothers in both of us. One evening, a ChechiX, (name withheld) decided to throw a special party to celebrate her engagement.(The sad part of the story is that Chechi’s engagement very soon broke up. She eloped with a computer operator without finishing her house-sourgeoncy…) This wonderful Chechi had a prominent role in dismantling the viswamitra in me who had resisted temptations of chick(en). From then on, for months on end, I conducted a Digvijaya, pouncing upon all varieties of chicken.
Finally on an unrecorded date, I again became a vegetarian after seeing cages full of poultry pushed and shoved into a truck. I was reformed. If I had seen anything more I might have stopped eating completely and taken sanyas. I was reminded of Sidhartha Gautama who lived in the 6th Century BC. History repeats itself, very true.
Unlike the Buddha, my reformation was short lived. The period of sinning too was short lived as I found an article by Maneka Gandhi so moving that I quit non-veg food completely. For three months, precisely. Then I started eating chicken and quit reading Maneka Gandhi completely.
You must nevertheless understand that I never venture out on my own to start sinning. But once the first sin (aadi paapam) is committed, I’m very good at sustaining it. By now, I had learnt that to continue as a sinner, one should avoid looking at unpleasant sights and stop reading uneasy articles. One can train the senses and the memory not to disturb our conscience. It is an art. I entered the new Millennium as a confident sinner against the winged species.
In my gastronomic career, my greatest enemies were my own friends who poke fun at me during my non-veg period by quoting my own ‘great advices’ rendered during the veggie era. And when you are running a veggie period its very authenticity is put in question. The past few years saw me function as a troubled pendulum. The frequency was/is however undetermined. ChechiX and Maneka Gandhi are infact two symbols of culinary beliefs fighting within my subconscious mind.
“So, what is your current status?” When I dine with my friends I’m confronted with this wicked question and I can sense the iniquitous humour in the question. They term my frequent shifts in culinary habits as ‘chicken hearted’. That’s okay with me. Speaking of current status, I was a pure sincere vegetarian until I dug my teeth into chicken at my cousin’s marriage last week. (anyone tasted Thalassery Biriyani? Nothing like it.) There after I continued my sinning spree for the next two days…was just beginning to enjoy.
And then bird flu hit India :-(