He also sends me frequent non-veg jokes on WhatsApp. Even more confusing is that a very vegetarian friend of mine also keeps sending me non-veg jokes, so is that, like, allowed?
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Frenz, lately I have come to hear that according to some people the whole world can be organised, like Rajdhani train meals, into veg and non-veg. They are pretty clear about this. But I am not.
Food of course can be veg, or non-veg. In India, some jokes are designated non-veg, because, like tandoori chicken, they are about the pleasures of the flesh. Nowadays some people think that Urdu is also non-veg—a journalist recently tried to carry out an attack, mera matlab hai, sting operation, on a Haldirams package because it had something written in Urdu, which the journalist seemed to believe was the official language of non-veg.
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There are other confusions. For instance, for years, I mistook my friend Mukul as veg because his hair and gentle face are like the hero of a movie about Partition, which made me imagine he is parhezi, brahmacharyik and other abstemious things, when in fact he is quite the opposite. He also sends me frequent non-veg jokes on WhatsApp. Even more confusing is that a very vegetarian friend of mine also keeps sending me non-veg jokes, so is that, like, allowed?
Perhaps she is like my friend Subasri who declares herself a fake vegetarian. Which is to say she eats the curry from the mutton curry and the rice from the biryani, and also the capsicum and onions from the chicken tikka but not the flesh. “But before I reformed, I was a fake non-vegetarian,” she informed me when I tried to clarify my doubts. Yaniki, “I used to say I was non-vegetarian but I would eat only the curry from the mutton and rice from the biryani.”
This is different from that large category who are vegetarian at home and non-vegetarian outside. Some people call this hypocrisy, but I think this is loophole vegetarianism. When you are not at home your identity transforms and you can become non-veg. Loophole non-vegetarianism can be found in many contexts. For instance, my Christian colleague is supposed to be vegetarian for Lent (which ends this week, just like Navratri) but the other day, his lunch plate was resplendent with prawns. “I decided to be vegetarian on Monday and Wednesday for Lent,” he said, in the tone of kuchh kuch hota hai, tum nahin samjhoge. And what kind of person do you have to be to turn a loophole into a noose?.
Some people think even whole buildings are veg or non-veg. In 2004, I made a film called Cosmopolis: Two Tales of A City about some of these veg buildings. But during the filming one fish-eating lady in a non-veg building confused me by saying, “They feel if you eat living beings, it will make you violent. But plants are also living beings. Then you can eat only air.” If plants are living beings, are plant eaters non-veg? Discuss for zero marks.
Perhaps Bengalis can attempt that question because they call fish jol tori, or water vegetable, a potential case of loophole non-vegetarianism. Once I offered my friend Raju some prawns, and she asked if they were vegetarian. I don’t know what prawns eat. Do you?
Then there is the category of pure veg. Do pure veg people not partake of other, ahem, fleshly pleasures? And what about feeding off other people? Is that allowed? Kuch pata chale to batana frenz.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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