Divine offering?

Extending food offerings to anyone and everyone has always been an honourable thing. It is also part of desert culture to break bread with a stranger one meets during one's long, weary travels. The frequent famines that famished the often battle-riddled land of Bharat made freshly made simple cooking God-sent.

The art of cooking for the masses arose not only from the indulgence of the Moghul Emperors, who made culinary skills an art form to die for but from the chefs preparing them for their hunger-stricken subjects.

Hunger pangs are real. It is not the irritation one gets after missing his cafè latte or the agony of waiting for his double burger. The homeless people in the city of London, waiting in line patiently for their fizzling hot dhall, chawal, and saag, could give us a first-hand experience of what sleeping with an empty stomach feels like. The real McCoy here is the twitch they feel in their belly as the piping hot masala chai aroma fills the air.

Now, in this age and age, the age-old interpretation of malnutrition is no longer confined to the one who is emancipated, skin and bones, but one where malnourishment goes the other extreme. One is overfed, too big to carry his own baggage, and stricken with various metabolic diseases of overindulgence. From a nation that generally ate two meals a day to one that eats at slight provocation, is the act of annathanam/ bhog still relevant? Is it still a good deed or merely akin to feeding a recalcitrant alcoholic more arrack?

Is food still the essence of life? (“Annam para Brahma swarupam”)

Donors sometimes do it to show their piety and gain bragging rights to aggrandise their stature in society. Others do it to wash away their private misdeeds, knowingly or unwittingly. Some do it with ulterior motives, hoping to get abundant returns in kind.

Then, there will be groups that draw numbers to fulfil personal political ambitions. The bond of eating together goes beyond the act of fulfilling gastronomic desires. This may explain why dating couples plan elaborate dinner plans to impress each other. People become law-abiding when it comes to food. Just see the rows of obedient customers queuing for hours to get their nasi kandar fix. Anyone can initiate a Pavlovian response through food. The way to a man's (or woman's) heart is through the stomach.

It is not all saffron and ghee in the land of Annapoorana. The recipients of these offerings blessed by the divine forces are sometimes not worthy of the heavenly gifts. They do not practise the adages of 'waste not, want not', 'eat to live, not live to eat' and treat 'food as medicine'. They overindulge and have no qualms about assigning the free-gotten meals to the bins, either because they took too much because it is free or because their incisors crave the animalistic tearing of meaty meals.

True, we live in a world of abundance and contradictions. Development and industrialisation saw our race scale the highest skies and deepest mountains, but a section of the population would still be lost in the rat race. Community-based social projects like these, either on spiritual or secular backgrounds, will go a long way to help out the needy.

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