Cooking in the danger zone

I generally do not break my good 12 hour lull after a flight but today, I had made an exception for it was a tiring flight and it was becoming really difficult for me to stay up even though Big Brother was on channel 4. I had to be up at an ungodly 3 a.m. to operate a flight to London from scorching 45 degrees Celsius Delhi. I forced myself outta bed after four hours to save whatever was left of a three year old air-crew member’s erratic body clock.

Oh! Do I see something about India in that documentary on channel 2? This is where I stumbled upon ‘cooking in the danger zone’ with Stefan Gates. He was going to feature India and china. Our typical British host went to explore the dalit issue to our very own Bihar. The untouchables were never let into the higher castes’ houses, of course. Nor were they to use the same well of the village for water. They even have to have their food in different utensils. Blah, blah…. Blah, blah! Hah! I know all that. I Am From India. I even have an uncle, my father’s childhood friend, an untouchable, who at tea at our home has on more than one occasion asked for an untouchable’s different cup, laughing his heart out, recounting the stories of their childhood and the supreme proof of untouchable treatment he got in my grandparents’ household in the village. (He has now converted to Islam). And I thought this show was about the food and cooking….

Ten minutes into it, and I could feel myself dealing with uncontrollable tears. A typical dalit family Stefan was visiting worked in the rice fields for they were never allowed to own land. Children in the family never went to school because they had to work in the rice fields for the landlord paid them ‘nothing’ as wages but rice to eat. Rice with the rice soup (the water in which the rice was cooked), since they could not afford to have dal let alone vegetables, was the family’s breakfast, lunch and dinner. The land owners starved them and kept them uneducated to suppress them thus. There was a category in dalit, lower of the lower caste, which was not even allowed to work in the rice fields but only to catch mice in the fields which may be harming the crops. And the land owner would ‘allow’ them to keep the mice they have caught as a payment to the work they have done. That’s all they would have so that’s all they would eat! Roasted mice is their food! (Job search is on at a very high speed in my mind. Could I be so heartless as to just snuggle under a cozy blanket in a London hotel and enjoy the documentaries made by Foreigners?!!! ) Phew!!!

Stefan decides to go to Bombay as many of these dalits, like two thousand crore more people, migrate here in search of a better life. Well, he wouldn’t fly to Bombay, of course, he would like to take the train journey across India, (so snootily British!). While he made faces at the fact that he was going to spend 27 hours in a second class A.C. compartment, which he found to be, hmmm… let me just say, unusual, I am sure cutting across to second class non A.C. and third after that, he felt much better. He meets a dalit boy with polio who cleans train compartments for a living, and whose father has been killed in a dispute over a piece of land which was given to him by government to make a living! After 31 hours instead of 27, 8 pakoras, 3 bhajis and a chili, Stefan reaches Bombay, does some fine dining at a restaurant where an average meal costs more than an average Indian’s monthly salary, before heading to the biggest slum in India,
Dharavi. There is only one toilet for 800 people here. And a shoe-seller who lived and did business in a space slightly bigger than my current bathroom, would give away a free pair of children’s shoes to Stefan for his daughter.

It took Stefan three months to get approval to make a movie on food in china! I was hardly interested in watching a fried scorpion kebab eating host who later actually went fine dining of different penises. I know I am expected/required to put an end to this right here and quite obviously but I just want to leave two loose facts here before I do the same. One, dog’s penis has a bone. Two, there is no electricity in some parts of china, this very day.