CULTURAL MISFITS ?!

A L’il extension of my previous post at the cost of sounding obsessed with childhood days….i recount with great fondness another phase (yet again)!!!

The innocence and the purity never seemed to fail us then…we never sought to reason out the tragedies and pains that came our way!! Only when we grew up, did things start falling in perspective.

We, matured individuals, that we call ourselves slowly lost out the ability to welcome the uncertainties with open arms, we began to seek so much sense in everytin that life became awfully programmed, so much so that every time there was some shift or some loss, we began to get perturbed and shaken from within.

We began to think that one should dress in a certain way to come across as something!! One should talk in a certain way to be accepted by some few people, we should eat in a certain way coz mum n dad tole us that was the way to eat!!!

I draw an instance from my baby days in school. Mommy was now sending me food and was putting me on to the habit of eating a complete meal that she sent with the “Dabba walla”. I was trying my best to please mother and trying to eat from my tiffin; the complete spread of rotis, dal, salad, veggies. It was a tad too much for a child of my age but I was trying for mommy’s sake!! But what I did keep wondering at lunch time was, why did my food look so different from my Parsi friends who sat down for lunch with me and seemed to be speaking the same language as me… “broken stylish Gujarati” with English words interspersed in the Gujarati sentences or vanilla English sentences!!


What they ate looked like a fancy stick with something like a veggie stuck at the top. My Parsi , Bengali, Punjabi and Sindhi friends devoured this fancy looking eatable that looked rubbery and exciting…sometimes there was some craft work done to it like the silver lining and wrapping. I missed having a veggie that looked like that…that I could tear and eat little at a time and finally leave out a hard bone-like thing behind…it dint seem edible any further for my friends!! My veggies were boring and they landed straight in my tummy with no effort of separating the soft from the hard!!!


So, the forever confused child that I was, I went back home once disappointed. I began describing it to mom and questioned her as to why my meals were devoid of this interesting thing!! She then smiled and tried reasoning it out to me that we were Vegetarians and did not eat Chicken… knowing myself I must have surely dwelled in the confusion as to why wasn’t it possible to have a vegetarian chicken in my tiffin then!! But I have no specific memory of what followed…just that mommy explained that non vegetarian meant something that was once alive…PERIOD!! The idea of the stick with the veggie that looked like a lollipop soon became obnoxious!!


But I could not stop myself from succumbing to the habit of tearing rotis with both my hands…just as my friends did. So once when we were at the dinner table and dad was taking special interest in knowing what I had learnt at school, he accidentally set his eyes on my hands trying to tear Roti!! He looked at me weirdly…I must have felt like I was an adopted kid at that moment!!! …what he prolly found funny and shocking was what was that tiny little left hand of mine doing on the dinner table when it had no business to be there!!! Left hand at the dinner table was redundant apparently!! So he quickly popped a question at me and tried to know why I liked eating food the way I did…with both my hands?? I told him excitedly how I had learnt how to eat food without mum’s help almost failing to realize that it wasn’t even a relevant piece of information…

He told me that we were Gujarati Brahmins who ate with just our right hands and usage of left hand only meant disrespecting food!! (Weird!!). But dad has a way to put things into perspective…he will give you an option to try what you like doing and what he deems fit and then figure out what seems best. He prolly works on the gut that his option will look much more appealing. It surely does!!

…and when he explains that way, you are bound never to forget. So here we had this little girl who had just about begun eating independently who was given a more complex piece of instruction… “Leave aside the left hand at the dinner table”!!! so now as I broke little pieces of Roti, the underconfident shy girl inside me feared the left hand would spring from nowhere and upset father!! To avoid all of that , I found a solution…I would now fold my left hand backwards to almost touch my back and pretend I had no left hand!! Poor little left hand!!

Worse still, I did try acting smart by passing this vital piece of information to my friends who continued eating the way they ate back at their homes!!! I happily ate my food the way dad taught me and grinned within thinking all my friends were disrespecting food and were inviting the wrath of some imaginary God!!

As I grew older, I realized how vulnerable and gullible we were. We happily moulded ourselves the way people wanted us. We felt bliss while we remained ignorant of what they call CULTURAL DIFFERENCES… we loved our friends and folks alike and were unconsciously willing to change for either… we only knew the language of CAMRADERIE …it was above everything….caste, complexion, culture…

Wish we remained as MOULDABLE over the years gone by… without falling prey to becoming JUDGMENTAL!!