Monday, September 12, 2011

Are you a vegetarian?..... Continued

Some time back I wrote an article on the same topic. When I wrote that article, I was ignorant at a level looks like :-). When someone asked me if I am a vegetarian, I was thinking that this person was commenting on my food habits.

But then, if I say that I am a non-vegetarian they used to ask me if my parents were also non-vegetarians; if I say that I am a vegetarian they used to ask me if my parents were also vegetarians and I do not take non-vegetarian food from childhood. I was getting irritated with these questions. Why should anyone be bothered about my parents’ food habits? In first place, they cannot ask me about my own food habits; but people around me go one step beyond and try to find out what my parents eat!!!

Aha!!! It suddenly struck me!!! They are trying to assess which caste I belong to by understanding the food habits. Wow!!!

Has this thing called caste helped me reach where I am today? NO. My community has had a chief minister… quite a number of judges, police officials, doctors, engineers, and teachers belong to this community… it has more than 60% of retail business of Tamilnadu… So what? Did it help me a bit? Big NO. It is my parents’ hard work, simple life and focus gave me a protected childhood; not the caste they belonged to.

Have I helped my caste in any way? Bigger NO. Have I contributed to the welfare of this community? Have I lived a big successful life that helped this community benefit in anyway? Have I simplified life for any of my men and women? No, not at all…. Then how does it matter?

All I know is, my blood group is B+ve, I have a body that resembles that of humans and the chromosome study done a few years back declares that I have 46 healthy chromosomes like any other human being. So I believe, I am a human in all scientific grounds. (mentally, I may not be as matured as Mother Nature expects human beings to be though :-) )

Throughout the world, people try to find reasons to exclude fellow human being – be it race, nationality, religion, color of the skin, language they speak, amount of wealth, literacy and intellectual level… that is the reason behind so many wars and bloodshed. Lets try to include people!!! Love people for what they are and not for which category they belong to!!!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Another perspective - I ask few people if they were vegetarians out of my curiosity as I was very impressed with their glow in the skin(which I personally believe comes as a result of eating vegatables, pulses). In some cases, I wanted to learn if the oilyness in the skin was a result of non-veg food they had.
To my surprise, few non-vegetarians had great skin. So I asked few more questions - If they eat fish regularly, if they eat LOT of vegetables.
All this is in effort to know the diet people with great skin follow :-) :-)