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CRANK'S CORNER

        Students, at least the generation to which I belonged, unfailingly put pencils into their mouth and chewed on the wooden, leaden tastelessness of it all while the teacher droned on and on in the classroom. I don't know whether students were making a nuanced point that even something decidedly unappetising as a pencil butt being preferable to what the teacher was trying to drum into their minds. But by the end of the school day, most pencils at the bottom looked as if they had been mashed by a relentless bulldozer. These days, students, for some strange reason, have stopped munching on pencils. But if anyone really wants to find out the flavour of a pencil, I strongly recommend he or she to partake of oatmeal that is now so popular among those who think looking thinner than a thread makes entry into heaven easier. An oatmeal in the morning can be ingested only if the alternative to that is eating blotting paper dunked in slush or if a gun is pointed at your forehead. I don't know who figured oats could be good as morning eat for humans. But suffice to say, he or she had a score to settle with humanity.

        Anyway, why would any human being want to eat what is essentially gourmet food for horses? But look around there are thousands of otherwise perfectly normal and intelligent men and women slurping gluttonously the porridge cooked out of oats. Not only are they guzzling this abhorrence but some of them have even begun to feel that it is delicious. All this makes me to come to the conclusion that one of the unpublicised side effects of consuming the so-called health foods is that they corrode the brain cells to such an extent that one's intelligence is reduced to that of a toad and one begins to appreciate even films like Sivaji.

        The rule of thumb as far as foods that are classified as healthy for eating go seems that they should be so offensive that you actually go to the extent of giving up eating at all. Otherwise there is no logical explanation to justify the existence of items like tofu on our dining tables. This health food idea is the typical fad of vapid westerners who alas have never tasted or heard about the spices and seasonings that are quite unique to our region. A Brit or a Finn can tuck heartily into an oatmeal as their regular menu consists of things that even an unthinking sheep would run away from. But for us, Indians, endowed with so many flavours to savour eating bland-as-cottonwool items is much worse than a sin. Personally speaking, I have long come to the conclusion that I don't want to embrace healthiness if the whole process involved insulting my taste-buds.

        Think it this way, if the role or idea of food was just to keep us healthy and thin-looking then would god have given us a mouth and put a tongue into it? Wouldn't he have provided simpler slots or convenient orifices on our body to dump the food into the system?

        What makes this stupidity of health foods even more unpalatable is the fact it has elbowed out some of the most mouth-flooding dishes out of our everyday kitchens. Take the example of this royally puffed up poori masal. I am sure most households have stopped making it, and those who want to bask in its oiled smoothness have to go to hotels. What did this humble viand do to deserve such a fate? Sure, oil is all about fat which the modern world dreads more than it does Osama bin Laden. But our forefathers lived happily for years together even while contently smacking their fingers after polishing off several plates of luscious pooris and their consort, the masal. After tasting them here would anybody bother about looking thin or thick? At any rate, death by fat-induced heart attack seems an eminently more honourable idea than starving yourself on the slow but sure path to mortality.

        When you come down to it, who said looking reedy like a freshly spun out yarn is hip and healthy? Accepted, tummied protuberances are no Taj Mahal-like domes on human body. But before you wade into that next bowl of porridge make up your mind whether you really want to lead life looking like a show pony but eating like a donkey.

        For me, the bowl of panneer tikka beckons.