Hip and happening

Some weeks ago, I wrote about vegetarianism in this column. I expressed my aversion to depriving a creature of its life only because its flesh tasted nice, but I also wrote that vegetarianism was against the order of nature because just about every living being besides ruminants lives off eating each other, including its own kind. As expected, I was hauled over the coals by shakaharis with a missionary zeal common to them. They refuse to face facts not palatable to them — around 90 per cent of mankind is non-vegetarian; vegetarianism is largely confined to Hindus and Jains; even the majority of Hindus eat meat, eggs or fish. In the West, though the number of vegetarians has increased, it still remains a fringe phenomenon.

I recall the week I spent with the novelist, R.K. Narayan, at a writers’ seminar in Honolulu. Every evening we went out looking for a vegetarian restaurant. We did not find one. Poor Narayan had to do with buying a carton of yoghurt from a dairy and finding a restaurant that could provide plain boiled rice to make a meal. For seven days that’s what he ate for dinner.

The missionary fervour with which vegetarians, including Maneka Gandhi, propagate their cult makes no sense. Their belief that meat, egg and fish are injurious to health is utterly spurious. Any nutritionist will tell you exactly the opposite.

And as for religion, apart from Jainism and its founder, Mahavir, no other religion of the world or its founder propagates vegetarianism. Buddha, Zoroaster, Abraham, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Nanak, down to the last Sikh guru — all had nothing against meat-eating. In most Sikh homes, to this day, meat is referred to as maha-prasad — the great offering.

Difficult daughters

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is younger than my granddaughter. I have known her parents since she was five. Her father, Madhavan of the IAS, has just retired as a secretary of the Bihar government and is a leading Malayali novelist. Her mother, Sheela Reddy, is from Hyderabad and is now the editor of the books section and a columnist with the Outlook magazine. So Meenakshi (Minna) inherited a talent for writing from both her parents. I was, therefore, not surprised when she came out with her first novel, You Are Here. What surprised me was its content: it is about the brave new world of the youth of our times. They begin to have crushes and date children of the opposite sex before they are ten; many start drinking hard liquor by 16 and lose their virginity in their teens. Their lives revolve around parties held in the homes of one another where they indulge themselves till late hours while their parents slumber in blissful ignorance. Meenakshi describes in vivid detail how she willingly surrendered her virginity. It was painful, bloody, left her bruised, with nail marks and bites, but ecstatic beyond words. She came out of it utterly exhausted but utterly fulfilled.

I am vaguely familiar with the brand of Anglo-Hindi lingo that today’s teenagers use. Boyfriends are dudes or guys, girls are ducks, instead of meeting, they hang out, they chill or cool out to relax. And so on. Meenakshi explains some of their vocabulary: “Bhav” — a word that cannot be translated into English. I’ve tried before but have only come up with ‘importance’, but importance doesn’t even begin to cover all that the word does. It’s a powerful word, bhav, like so many Indian words that have no equivalent in any other language. Like ‘chayn’ with a nasal ending, used to describe girls with whiny voices who have a way of becoming completely helpless in front of guys, or even ‘jhootha’, which basically means something that’s been contaminated with your mouth and so can’t be eaten or touched by anybody else. Bhav is by far the best of all these words. ‘Not giving someone bhav’ could mean not elevating someone beyond what he or she deserves, but it also includes the disclaimer, “maintain a certain dignity in interactions between you and the person in question.”

You Are Here is honest, explicit, well-written and highly readable. If the author were my granddaughter, I would have been highly proud of her achievement. But I doubt if I would have admitted that she was related to me.

Colour code

In the late 1930s, the Unionist government of Punjab had only six ministers headed by Sikander Hyat-Khan. Among other ministers were Malik Khizar Hayat Tiwana, Sundar Singh Majithia and Chhotu Ram. Most of the ministers were tall and handsome with light wheatish complexion. Assembly speaker Chaudhary Shahab-ud-Din was the one exception: he was short, ugly and very dark.

There were two popular jokes about Chaudhary sahib. One was that his father had employed an African servant in the year before he was born. The other was that he had a long swim in the Black Sea while returning in a ship from Europe. Usually Chaudhary sahib was dressed in a brown round cap, brown sherwani and white churidars. One day he came in a black cap, black sherwani and black tight churidars. The dress provided much laughter in the assembly. Said Sikandar Hayat: “Chaudhary sahib aj assembly wich nange hi aa gaye ho” — Chaudhary sahib, today you have come naked in the assembly.

(Contributed by Jai Dev Bajaj, Pathankot)