Mind over Matter

"When you eat the 'GREAT' food of the college messes you tend to wonder since when had the food started to become a necessity rather than a delicacy."

Well it had been coming to my mind when people used to ask me about the Rajasthani food which is famous for the 'Shahi' touch it has. I used to reel back to my village and the food habits there. The analysis suddenly brought to the front of my mind, the effect of climate and land conditions over the culture of a place.
I having stayed in many places all over India find the Rajasthani culture richest of all the northern plains (except for Punjab maybe).

My analysis :

The land of Rajasthan has not been given much by the nature. The Thar desert is also starting to spread its fingers all over Rajasthan. Many places are suffering from extreme dry weather and scare of desertification.

In these situations there isnt much vegetation which grows and can be eaten.
So what? Hasnt human been such a fighter for survival that he has survived for so long in this 'Darwin's World'? The Rajasthanis are known for their hard work in minimal resources available.

The food as it is known in the rich plains doesnt exist here. The vegetables are hard to grow, fruits are totally not possible to be grown, then how do they survive?
There is an option of getting the food from outside, but then how much and till what time? The older days when there was not much transportation and there was no irrigation, no water supply, then also people lived there and that too in a very luxurious fashion. All that is the courtesy of the our culture.

The food here is mostly in the form of dried vegetation because there is a very small growing season of the monsoons and that too has no guarantee of arrival. Lets have a look at the "unique" sources of food that i like:

• Grains are in the form of millets like jowar, bajra that can be grown in harsh conditions too. Wheat and maze is also used.
  
• These grains too can only be grown in monsoon season, so there are many indigenous ways of storing them like in the 'coal powder'.
  
• Shrubs and cactii is what nature provides this region with. Two shrubs which give rise to the very famous foods are 'Babool', 'ker' and 'Gunda'. The dish called "PANCHKUTA" has the these three out of the five ingredients.
  

The food habits as I realize consists mainly of grains and pulses and has minimal vegetables in form of dried things.

NO WASTAGE
In Rajasthan all the kids from the birth are taught not to waste any food at all.
And also we waste nothing edible which can be found on the vegetation the nature provides us with. We eat each and every part of the fruits which can be eaten.

Some examples:

• One of my favorite dishes is the "seed of mango". Dont be amazed, its true. During the summer season the main fruit is Mango which comes down to my village from the water abundant valley of Chambal river. The seeds -which are normally termed as useless and are thrown- are dried in the sun and then the shell is broke open to take out the useful seed. The inside seed is cut into small pieces and dried to an extreme so that it can stored for later use. These dried pieces can be soaked in water overnight and then boiled and fried in great Indian spices to make a very tasty dish.
  
  
• As I have seen outside my home, the outer coverings of various fruits are considered uneatable and are thrown away. Just consider how much food and nutrients are being wasted otherwise.
  
  
  
  
  • The mango skin is very tasty and nutrient rich and can be easily eaten along with the mangopulp inside
    
  • The watermelon's thick outer covering can also be cooked into a very spicy vegetable and can be eaten with chapati.
    
  • The coverings of Maskmelon (kharbooja), Sapotta (chiku) are also eaten in my home with ease and normality.
    
  • Well, when I think of it every covering except that of banana can be eaten by human beings.
    
  
  
  
• Most of the dishes of the Rajasthani food do not contain vegetables.
  Like the famous Dal-Bati-Churma consists of wheat flour, pulses and spices. These foods can be stored very easily and also can be grown in these climatic conditions.
  
  Quite obviously Rice is almost absent from our diet as it needs too much water to be grown
  
  
• One of the dishes which i miss the most in college is "Makke ki Ghooghri". In my home it is actually a product of 'wastage' only.
  We grow the that breed of corn that can be roasted and eaten when it is young and tender, thats how major consumption of corn takes place in the country. But there are times when the total amount is not consumed and the corn grows beyond the tenderness and is hard to chew roasted. Then all the corn are roasted just to make them devoid of the major moisture and then they are dried and stored.
  
  These whole corn can be stored for a long time and boiled whenever u like and then fried with the trademark indian spices and eaten with the watering mouths.
  
  
• There is a lot of corn grain which gets partially broken during the shredding of crops. It rather than being wasted is stored and eaten after boiling with 'mangodi' (produced by the french bean flour).
  
  
• The pulses as you see it is 'broken in two half' form. In this process the part of the seed from where the shoot gets out that is between the two cotyledons is what is called the "beej ki aankh" (it looks like an eye) gets wasted.
  But it is a very nutritious part and cant be afforded to be wasted.
  So it is stored and called as 'korma'. It can be soaked overnight and kneaded with the dough to make lovely paranthas. It also contains the broken pieces of pulses and some flour.. so it can be boiled and eaten like a normal indian pulse preparation.
  
  
• And the major part of every food in Rajasthan is the infamous 'GHEE'. Here in the rural parts any food without ghee is incomplete. Nowadays this much amount of ghee is discouraged by the medical world as a cause of heart attacks. But as much as the people of rajasthan are concerned there are hardly any deaths due to heart attacks.
  
  
• Another dish is the 'Daal Dhokli' which contains daal and flour dough together boiled and spices added. Its eaten like that with curd and papad.
  
  
• As we have limited resources of eatables, to satisfy our taste buds we use a lot of spices and also various methods of preparation. So another form of storage i.e. pickling is famous here. The 'goonde ka achaar' is very famous and eaten a lot.
  Its said "Thandi roti aur goonde ka achaar,
                    waah kya baat hai yaar"
  
  

All the rajasthani food tastes best when cooked in a traditional coal chulha and then soaked with GHEE especially baati which is made by putting the dough in the coals for a long time and allowed to cook slowly.

The thing is that the people of Rajasthan have a power to eat and digest the foods like millets, corn and the ultimate source of unsaturated fats called 'ghee' while the people from the other parts of India show their inability to do so..

The hardwork done by the people here in Rajasthan to survive is the main reason for the strenghth we have..

The general genetics also reflects this. Even after eating so much of ghee, there is no problem of obesity here in Rajasthan. Rather the people of Rajasthan are generally lanky i.e. tall and thin.

So here I put an end to my post because I have to go eat the "Rajasthani food"..
I will soon try and put some photographic illustrations too.

I was just sitting in my room and wondering why are things done the way they are..
Why is it that we wear shirts and jeans and not the traditional clothes.
Why is it that we differ so much from the old ways? I mean, there is a difference in the thinking and the conduct of the new generation..

The conservative thinking is so much condemned for the human rights it curbs and its a very convincing argument too. But still i cant cease to think that how can our predecessors being one of the oldest and being once known for their scientific prowess (Aryabhatta, Chanakya etc are examples) be so wrong?? Its just logical that even if the thinking was different from now but they were no sadistic animals. Indians are known for their peacefulness. The Indian women were also known for their grace, beauty and courage. The respect for women reflects in the Rajputs, how the bravery of the Rajput queens is described..

But then what happened? Why did our society come under such darkness? How could we entertain events like 'sati', 'infanticide', 'child marriage' and all the other acts against women? Where did our elders go wrong??

These are the questions that persuaded me to dig out the history and find out the reasons...

EARLY PERIODS:
The golden period for social reforms date back to the harappan society.
The excavations of the indus valley plains give us enough reasons to believe that the development of architecture, metallurgy and even medical science were revolutionarily earliest in the world. The social structures like the great bath also emphasizes the openness of the Indian culture, the equal status of the men and women.
The mauryan period too was very prosperous for the country and the civil society.

MEDIEVAL INDIA:
After that my knowledge dims a little bit but as much as I remember with the rise of the orthodox Indian religion there was the origin of the real problem. The medieval past of India is the darkest. The brahmins taking advantage of their religious freedom and the dictatorship like status increased there lust for power. Then started a period when the making and maintainance of the temples started gaining priority over the welfare of the people in the King's mind.
People became more and more god fearing and superstitious, idol worship got famous, the priests started getting more importance and power over the people, they being intelligent took full advantage of the situation and kept the people firmly under their feet by maintaining the fear of god. And in this process they used the scientific prowess of their predecessors to resonate the natural occurrences with the god's doing. But as the priests were busy in filling their coffins with wealth, the development of science started being shown the backdoor.
Brahmins, to keep their social position high and to crush any competition or opposition from science declared the scientists as humbugs. The scientists started to executed in public to discourage saying anything in opposition of the 'God's Teachings'. And this was not only in India but in Europe also where the church being a very powerful entity in control eliminated the associations of the inventors...

The already deteriorating society was thrown deeper into the pit by the onset of the Mughal era. The religion of Islam was very conservative and the women rights were at their minimal level (Though the situation was much better than the present islamic women but still 'polygamy' etc were there).

Our medieval past was, as Rabindranath Tagore once said,'a place fom which we were glad to be rescued'


BRITISH PERIOD:
After the long Mughal era, the Britishers and the educated Indians tried to abolish some of old practices like sati, polygamy and tried for the upliftment of women.
But after the first war of independence in 1857 even Britishers started keeping away from Indians and their backward culture. The western education gave rise to a new group of elitists who believed in the Renaisaance ideas of democracy, self determination and nationalism. But there was a large divide between them and the vast majority of the subcontinent's common culture, dominated by the iron rules of caste, religion and social custom.
Indian reformers stood at one bank and stared across to the other side, appalled at what they saw. The reformer Bipin Chandra Pal wrote,'We loved the abstraction we called India but... hated the thing it actually was...'

Since then a lot of laws have been made in the free democracy of India for the benefit of women, but is it helping? We daily hear the rape cases increasing, child marriages still going unchecked. The sex ratio is also going down. The reasons still alien to me. Some would say that there might be some genetical mutation in process. But can we run away from the social evils by saying that? Are we trying to defend the wrong we are doing.

Well lets leave the scientific part out and find out the social cause of the decline in no of women. As much as i know of the people around me, there is no hate against the girls. As in nobody will kill an embryo just because its a girl. Though you may sometimes hear people saying that "Its good that you have two sons, it will be great help" with all the sadness in their eyes and contempt for their daughters. However you might try to tell them that daughters are a greater help to their parents but they fail to understand that.
They say that daughters will finally go away someday but they fail to realize that so will their sons in want for more and more materialistic gains. Rather, girls are more attached, they are emotionally oriented and would come running when you need them.

Well lets not get into that chain of thoughts or I will end up creating another story for an Ekta Kapoor soap..

Resume.....
So In order to stop all the crimes against women we again resorted to the same medium from where it all started, i.e. the gods and the religion. The sayings of the common people.

- "Beti to lakshmi ka roop hoti hai" - to curb infanticides
- Sati has been largely eradicated with the awareness of people.. Kudos to the rural India..
- "bure karmo ka fal bura hi hota hai" - to stop the god fearing people from committing crimes.

"Using the ominous tools of evil to rather favour the goodwill of mankind is the best art required currently in this world. Fight smartly in least possible resources."