M’ walked through the canteen door, tray in hand, only to be greeted with hostile stares from The Others, stares that silently suggested that he did not belong there. He quickly located an empty table and walked
towards it in the hope of quickly finishing his chicken biryani and getting back to work. He found himself outmanoeuvred as two of the Others went out of their way to seat themselves at his choice of table in one quick movement and indicated, with a slightly different kind of stare that this particular table was occupied. He looked around for more seating, but before he could get there, there was a tap on his shoulder. One of the Others pointed towards a sign, hastily written in illegible marker ink, that read ‘Strictly for Vegetarians Only’. Now if one were to replace the word ‘vegetarian’ with ‘white’ or ‘upper caste’…
First off, this is a true occurrence. Many workplaces in India, especially in Chennai, have ridiculously offensive rules that treat those who happen to eat a different kind of cell like they were the plague. The huge canteen in the building I work at has a board that reads ‘Strictly for Vegetarians only’, thereby consigning anybody who wishes to eat chicken biryani for lunch to a dingy, dimly lit room that was originally designed to store supplies.
I find it very funny that we still tolerate this kind of intolerance in India. It’s almost as if we put some lipstick on the pig (caste differences) and turned it into the veg-nonveg debate. Actually, if it were a debate, it wouldn’t be a problem. After all, in a democracy, one has the right to one’s opinions, but this sort of blatant inconveniencing of the majority of the population based on their food habits is disgusting, to say the least. Yes. Vegetarians are an extremely high-decibel minority.
What is rather ironic is that vegetarians will go abroad and keep their mouths shut when the restaurant chef uses the same ladle on beefsteak and their ‘meatless’ cheese sandwich. They will also be strangely silent on their apparent need to maintain table ‘purity’ by insisting that non-vegetarians either move to another table OR better still, turn into vegetarians for the moment. Will they ask their American colleagues to order the veggie fajita instead of the shrimp enchilada?
Why are we so oddly intolerant of food habits? In a globalised world, with all our diversity, why is this still a problem in India? Especially when we seemed to grown beyond other kinds of intolerance. Just as we don’t use skin colour, religion or choice of deodorant (Only people using Axe are allowed into the canteen) to discriminate between people, why on earth are we still strangely parochial about what we put in our mouths? Perhaps it goes back again, as it always does, to the way we bring up our children. So message to religious vegetarians — keep your kids veggie, I don’t care, but at least train them to be tolerant of someone
enjoying his keema kabab sitting next to him in the office canteen. By the way, I am a ‘tolerigetarian’ (a tolerant vegetarian).