Friday, November 28, 2008

One of Us, One of them

A few days ago, I invited a few friends over for lunch. We were all loyal non-vegetarians. Well,almost. Save for one. She was a vegetarian.
And as the six non vegetarians loaded their plates with different parts of a chicken, coated with gravy, she cringed.
and cringed.
and cringed some more.
And then I thought.
What separates us from vegetarians? sure we tend to enjoy a few morsels of meat a little more than those leafy veggies you seem to find everywhere, But apart from that is there anything really different? Nope, we don't have pointy incisors like most carnivores do, nor do we have claws to tear out the meat. For every one of us, there's one of them. Well, sometimes there's more of us, but I don't think we should get into details.
Its not that we are heartless and don't think about the hundreds of thousands of fluffy yellow chicks which are reared to be slaughtered to feed us, we just swallow the guilt, which may or may not contain a bit of the chicken too. :)
Whoever needs to worry about what came first, the chick or the egg, when you can eat both.
And as one of my frequently-worn T-shirts rightfully says, "Why call animals meat, if you cant eat them?"

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

The way I were

A conversation with a friend on the phone about world domination and politics randomly steered to my childhood and before I knew it, there I was standing in my grey and white uniform, with a blue belt around my waist and shiny black shoes that would make any shoe cream company proud, in a very JD-esque daydream (Scrubs does affect me a lot. trust me, it does.)
I haven’t always been the messy hair-sporting, kurta-clad snob that I am now. I am talking about those days when social networking sites didn’t exist (Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?), back when Star Plus was an english entertainment channel (It really was, for all those who think I have gone loony and need a good mental check-up. and no, I am not an escapee from an asylum if incase you been thinking about it.). For you to get a clearer picture, I am talking bout the time when I was two feet shorter and a hell lot cheesier (which is saying something if you know me).
I remember being the cheeky little kid who asked his parents why he wasn’t invited to their marriage. Someone who thought that he started blinking at the age of six (A lot of my stories do involve me being at the age of six). Someone who his nose pinched by a cousin with a clothespin and begged others to remove it, in a Himesh-ish voice, forgetting his own two hands. Who fell inside a manhole and still got a scolding for it. Who thought that the world was black and white earlier, like they showed in old movies.
Someone, who thought that there were only three stars in the sky.
I was the boy with the He-man castle, the robot dog, the classic toy cars and the hundred G.I Joes. And someone who was still greedy for more. Who wanted to be a cook, a writer and a national geographic correspondent just because it was a long word and sounded cool. Who thought essay was spelled SA and dressed up as a Chinese woman for a fancy dress competition just because he had stitches near his eyes. ( I still don’t remember why I didn’t become, ahem, a Chinese man.)
I was the boy whose greatest worry in life was whether school would be open on Monday or not (It still is!)
And then I realized that there’s actually being no change in me at all. I still am here, happily sipping my tropical iceberg, being completely at peace with life, the universe and everything.