Bollywood goes Vegan!

 

Bollywood goes Vegan! So screamed the headline in Page 3 supplement of a popular Newspaper.  This made me sit up and take notice.  Oh! Good, I thought, Bollywood has woken up at last and very soon even Hollywood would wake up to the benefits of Veganism or at least Vegetarianism.  When I read the article through, alas, I was a bit disappointed; as per the article, a few actresses (apologies! Actors, to be on the safer side of the feminist hardliners) had converted to Veganism as their dietary choice.  If only 4 or 5 actors (note: female actors) follow Veganism, does it constitute that the entire Bollywood has gone Vegan?  Well, merely reading the headlines without reading the accompanying article is definitely misleading, I thought.  The author of the article could probably be a Vegan, and hence this huge misdirection; probably, the author would have loved it, if the entire Bollywood per se, had gone Vegan.

Based on my upbringing, at one point in time, I had thought that all the people in the World ate only what I ate i.e., the Vegetarian food.  I had absolutely no notion, that people could eat animal meat anywhere in the World.  Well, you see the World consisted only of my family and a few relatives and friends.  I was literally living in a ‘well’ (like the analogy of frog living in a ‘well’, thinking that this is the entire World!), up until I completed my primary and middle school days; and had no knowledge what constituted the World; even though I studied Geography and History like everyone else in my School.  This indicated that I was only mugging up for passing the exams without actually gaining an understanding of anything that we were supposed to study.  Please note, I don’t have anything against those following a non-vegetarian diet including eating beef or anything else that moves on this Earth (like one of my non-vegetarian friends fondly preferred to say).  I seek apologies, in advance if I sound, prejudiced or racist or something else; in today’s hyper sensitive World one should be very wary of what you say.   As a matter of fact, I was just pointing out that, what a dumb student I was!

One day, when I was in class 6 or 7, a classmate of mine invited me to his home.  I went along with him and saw lots of hens and roosters moving around in their house compound.  I was kind of flustered with the smells emanating from the hens’ shed nearby.  The friend told me that they had kept hens because it gave lots of eggs and around their festival time, they prepared chicken dish in their home by killing off one or more of the hens.   That was the first time I had come across a family killing off hens and eating them.  I was kind of confused and my mind was whirring.   I couldn’t understand how anyone could eat these hens with all the feathers and the kind of smells emanating from them (Pardon my ignorance here!).   My food habits were limited to the extent of rice, sambar, sabzi and its associated preparations.   My major conclusion was that this family was an aberration!  Very soon, I, forgot all about my friend’s house visit. 

However, on enquiry much later with my other classmates, I found out that many of them had also tasted chicken dishes at home and they, in fact, had loved it!  What I didn’t know then was that “we” (as in my family/relatives and a few friends) were an aberration and not the other way around!  May be, barring one or two percent of the World population, the rest of the people (mind you, the World population at approximately 7.3 Billion people) in this World love eating animal meat including fish, steak or anything else that moves on this Earth!   Here is a titbit.  All chocolate bars have at least 7-8 insect legs (on an average) incorporated inside it during their manufacture (We are told that it is impossible to avoid insects, roaches and the like while manufacturing chocolates on a mass scale).  Have we all not eaten chocolate bars at some time?  Cool, right?  Then, why else was I feeling so excited on reading the headline about Bollywood going Vegan.  Well, go figure!