The non-existent benefits of eating less

Do you have a friend you’ve never met and will likely never meet, a friend who doesn’t know you exist? Well, I do: her name is Gina Kolata, she lives in New York and… but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me backtrack, and tell you first about the perfidy of another friend, Rahul, who I have known since boyhood.

A few days ago, my wife and I met Rahul and his wife for dinner. After we exchanged the usual how-are-you, is-the-back-better and has-it-been-raining-or-what, I got down to business.

“Just because he is a waiter, we shouldn’t keep him waiting,” I said and addressed the good gentleman myself. “For starters, how about a plate of samosas, some paneer tikka masala and papadi chaat?”

“Hello!” said Rahul, “That’s way too much food for the four of us…” – actually I had only ordered for myself – “and on top of that, it’s loaded with calories. Here, let me take over.”

He beckoned the waiter over to his side of the table, instructed him to get a large plate of green salad and while I was still recovering from the shock, dismissed him (“That’ll be all - we’ll give you the mains’ order soon.”) He then turned to me and began a lecture on over-eating, calorie consumption and the evils of fried food.

“I’ve been researching health,” he said. “You should go to this site, www.mayoclinic.org. At your age, Paddy, you should be…”

“I’m the same age as you,” I reminded him. “We went to school together.”

Getting more sophisticated about drinking

In a previous column I explained how gracefully Indians have been climbing the social staircase, exhibiting particular elegance when it comes to drinking alcohol. And as in other walks of life, the woman has begun to walk side-by-side with her man on the alcoholic alley, imbibing the stuff with equal relish. With alcohol inside her, she can no longer be relied upon to drive the happy husband home after a boisterous party. She may sportingly agree to a coin toss to decide who wins the right to drink and be driven (but if she loses the toss, she may simply order a taxi and close the argument).

But while both sexes may sip whisky shoulder-to-shoulder, dispensing drinks is still the man’s domain. Showing kindness and grace, the woman allows her man freedom to choose the liquor-stocking furniture; arrange it in a strategic location; buy all the accompanying dispensing equipment – wine-openers, corkscrews, ice-picks, soda-makers and cocktail mixers; ensure their maintenance; select the right array of glasses to serve beer, whisky, wine and juice; keep them all immaculately polished; stock sufficient quantities of liquor to meet the needs of a wide variety of thirsty guests, including the unplanned ones (“My cousins were in town and were dying to meet you”); ensure availability of ice and soda; and finally, serve each drink precisely as ordered. The woman looks on with benign indulgence as we do all this fun stuff.

A few weeks ago, I observed the suave aplomb of the male host as he offered his guest, a portly banker, a drink.

“Name your poison.” He said it grandly but the statement's splendour was slightly diluted by the fact that he had employed it on his three previous guests.

Getting sophisticated about drinking

If you’ve seen upwardly mobile Indians lately – which is a roundabout way of saying if you’ve kept your eyes open lately – you would have noticed how incredibly sophisticated they have become. They drive fancy cars, wear cool eyeshades that match their Bermuda shorts, bark out Americanisms like “cut to the chase” and even play golf. But the area where their progress from crudeness to elegance has been breath-taking is their attitude and behaviour towards alcohol. If you throw your mind back twenty years, you will recall that drinking used to be considered wicked in India, much in the way that gambling was. The two vices were always linked in my mind, probably because the Hindi movie villain would invariably plan devious plots at the gambling table with a glass in his hand (and Monica standing seductively at his side). My mother would lecture me on the evils of alcohol while my father nodded in sage agreement, undeterred by the drink in his hand.

In those days, Indians started drinking when far away from their parents, relatives and well-wishers, usually in the college hostel. And they developed the habit in a quiet, unobtrusive – one might even say furtive – manner, devoid of any ostentation. They usually indulged in the activity with friends at a bar. And they did not consider stocking the stuff at home where it would be visible in broad daylight.  On the rare occasions that they hosted a ‘wet’ party at home, they would serve their guests from the single bottle purchased on the way home from office, about an hour previously. And the bottle was invariably either Old Monk Rum or Bagpiper Whisky: the only choice that the guests had was the amount of water and ice they wanted with the drink.

Amul: the invaluable Kurien legacy

Dr Verghese Kurien, the man behind Operation Flood, passed away on 9^th September 2012 at the age of 90. In 1949, Kurien began the transformation of the dairy co-operative model in Anand into a nationwide institution. Thanks largely to him, India is the biggest producer of milk today. Many Indian prime ministers have recognized Kurien’s contributions, from Jawaharlal Nehru who inaugurated the first dairy “factory”, to Lal Bahadur Shastri who made Kurien chairman of the National Dairy Development Board for his “extraordinary and dynamic leadership”, to Manmohan Singh who described him as an icon of India’s cooperative movement and the dairy industry. In 1989, when Dr Kurien was awarded the World Food Prize, its founder Dr Norman Borlaug called him “one of the world’s great agricultural leaders of this century.”

We are all proud of the dairy legacy Dr Kurien has left us. But we’re equally proud of the brand behind that legacy: Amul, which comes from the Sanskrit word amulya, meaning invaluable. Amul was at the heart of the milk movement, being sold in pouches, UHT packs and as solid infant milk food. However, to cater to a largely vegetarian nation that literally drinks milk, Amul expanded to offer products such as cheese, paneer, yoghurt, ice cream and shrikhand. But the product that has caught the fancy of the nation is Amul butter.

Perhaps the brand is so popular because of its mascot, the loveable, wide-eyed girl in polka-dots who introduced us to “utterly butterly Amul” in 1967. Since then, she has appeared on hoardings across the nation posing as a cinema actress (Madhuri Dixit for example), politician, cricketer, villager, artist, wrestler or just herself, and making tongue-in-cheek observations on subjects of topical interest. The nation waits with bated breath for the hoarding to change and reveal what the sassy girl chooses as the next target of her wit (revisit this ad campaign at http://www.amul.com/m/amul-hits).