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CRANK'S CORNER

        It was a strange drone that came across as a mix of a giant vacuum cleaner and concrete mixer at work simultaneously. But where the hell was this sound coming from? Where in the crowded marriage hall were they using those confounded contraptions, I wondered as I munched on the tasty gobi roast that was served in the seemingly never-ending feast. The urgent birr only seemed to increase up and above the typical noisy exchanges in a marriage function. And it is when I turned to catch the attention of the server with the badam kheer for immediate second helpings did I find out the cause for that intriguing clangor: A man in the row behind was working his teeth relentlessly over some crispy viand. He was going about the job with such vehemence that an elephant in heat would have seemed stylish and soft like a Rembrandt with a brush in his hand. The man did not so much slurp on the rasam as play trumpet on it. He sucked it like a suffocated fish would puck its mouth for desperate breath. He bit into the oily appalams like an incisive lawn-mower connected to a F-1 car engine.

        I am no stylish eater myself — and when I partake of food you can almost feed an entire nursery class with the morsels I let slip between the lip and the leaf. But even I was staggered by the sound eating on show then. The man otherwise looked pretty decent and nattily dressed. But in front of the spread he was a man possessed,transmogrified into a gurgling, ravenous vortex of anything that could be eaten.

        Psychologists say that we reveal a lot about ourselves by the way we walk and talk. But I am sure that the way we eat makes more disclosures about our inner mind than any Freud could ever divine. To be sure, Indian kind of food doesn't allow for dainty peckings and airy-fairy nibbling. That may suit the blotting papers that pass off for Continental food. You can caress, as if you are amorously feeling a young woman's smooth cheek, with a harmless fork the assortment of grass and reeds that constitute the vegetarian delights of the rest of the world. But Indian food is only for the able-bodied. I think Punjabis are well built not by eating those by makhi kha rotis. But by merely attempting to eat them. There is no better exercise for your hands and fingers than the one when you try to snap a piece of it. Many muscles have been honed and trimmed by this one simple exercise. And carry a couple of those legendary parathas in your box, voila you are ready to lift any pounding weight in a gym.

        Now that we are on the subject of eating style (?), I might as well bring up the efforts of some of the foreigners, whom I have seen in some star eateries, in mouthing the masala dosai with a fork and a knife. Yes, you read it right — for god's sake, it is a fork and masala dosai. It is like trying to read Shakespeare in SMSese. A rhinoceros on a roller-skate could have been more felicitous and comfortable.

        Finicky foreigners, who fuss about using hands for eating, wouldn't know this: They are missing on the ultimate enjoyment in the rite of passage of eating a dosai, which is to dunk a chutney-smeared piece in a spicy stream of sambhar and then put in the mouth and then dry-suck the fingers off all the sticky remnants. Heaven has seen no better bliss than this. Though I am not fond of government regulating individual habits, I will not crib if it is legislated by a Constitutional decree (no less) that dosas have to be eaten only with bare hands.

        Of course, equally maladroit are Indians when they try to gobble wiry noodles with mere fingers and palms. How can you do justice to something as heinous as slippery noodles with your digits? Noodles, I think, must be tried with a curling comb and grass-cutting scissor. By the way, how do you handle American monster sandwiches and pizzas? With a drilling machine, of course —— to expand the size of your mouth so that it starts resembling the cavernous holes that the ancient men emerged from.

        Nobody will however have any problems with the way I eat. So how do I do it? Well, there is no prescribed method to eat what I eat — which is a humble pie.