Kishore Singh: One man's meat may be another man's indigestion

My wife has a fear of vegetarians, as a result they are among her least favourite people. When we match lists of friends we want to invite home for dinner, they're often at the bottom of her heap. She's practised discrimination to the extent of eliminating those who eat only leaves and shoots from her more "important" parties because she couldn't be bothered to plan a veggie menu, and is always dismayed when someone turns out to be vegetarian because it's Tuesday, or Thursday, or because of 'sharadh', or for being on a new fad diet. But since you can't choose friends for being vegetarian any more than you can on the basis of their caste, sex or colour, she hopes to make amends and buy peace by having an annual party where only vegetarian guests are invited. Thankfully, these aren't teetotaling events, but even she would baulk at the intolerance shown recently only a few miles from our home in Noida where a family was lynched to death for its alleged dining habits.

If we were free to dispense with our neighbours on the basis of their culinary preference, it could lead to a population cleansing more horrific than even Hitler's regime achieved. We have friends who abhor onions (and garlic), others who can't abide eggplant ("disgusting"), vegans who won't touch paneer; some want their dal-bhaat, others who will turn up their nose at a meal comprising of salads, still others who're convinced their Chinese or Thai has some secret non-vegetarian ingredient (probably true) that will blast them into gastronomic purgatory. My wife relishes conversations around food that seem to consist entirely of cuts of meat, much to the disgust of some of our Jain friends, while others think nothing of their fetish of ground breast muscles turning magically into melt-in-the-mouth shami and gilouti kebabs.

One man's meat may indeed cause another man's indigestion, but Indian food habits, never easy to predict, require an everyman's guide to understand why, when everyone else is vegetarian during the Navratras, the Rajputs offer goats as sacrificial lambs (pun unintended), or why a Bengali vegetarian is an oxymoron. Many of our billionaires turn "pure" vegetarian ahead of any major contract, or merger, or IPO, adding meat to the vegetarian point of view of non-vegetarians being one peg below assembly-line cannibals. It's all right to serve quails and snails at a wedding reception, but the meal immediately following one's nuptials must remain free of all flesh. Moving into a new house or office? Don't even think of prawns in your pilauf if you want the planets aligned in your favour. And though our gods may not all be vegetarian, beware the wrath of the mortal vegetarian who inhabits a higher moral realm.

Some Indians have ants for chutney by choice, others sustain themselves on rats because of poverty, some prefer monkeys (banned or not), others like their beef or pork, while a few unfortunate others choose to get by on legumes and vegetables. However, much one might disdain another's food habits - home recipes have led to home-breaking quarrels among families - that discourse has never included death as a main course. But now that we have decided to take dispense justice on the basis of what we do, or don't, eat, it's a matter of time before my wife takes up cudgels with those who think spinach, or arugula, is a higher form of food than at present served in our house. In the name of culinary justice, therefore - beware.