Go on, call us chicken!

IN Delhi it is that time of year when the chicken tikkas, chicken kebabs and chicken tandooris come home to roast and one’s social and political status is measured quite precisely and simply by the number of kilograms of spiced meat you can manage to put away before the season draws to a close.

For a few months then, Delhi becomes Temptation Island with a truly desi twist — the breasts and legs on tantalising display here belong to that gallinaceous bird, so called because it has descended from the noble jungle fowl or the Gallus gallus. Certainly, the spices that are used are more sizzling than anything a tawdry TV serial can conjure up.

Ingesting such large quantities of the Gallus gallus, as you may well understand, demands from us great qualities of head, heart, not to mention sundry body parts like the duodenal tract and related appendages of the human digestive system.

But it is not as if we don’t pay for our excesses, alas. A recent World Health Organisation report had observed that while Kolkattans tend to succumb to their cigarettes and the Mumbaikars, to pollution, we in the Capital kill ourselves through the far more enjoyable route of consuming several poultry farms of chicken in one lifetime.

In the fullness of time we are then slaughtered like chicken by the Almighty hand, presumably to lead a cholesterol-free kebab-eating existence in a chicken-filled paradise — although I must say the well-fired spits of hell may be better equipped to deal with our gastronomic obsession.

It follows from this that Delhi is not just the heart of Indian politics, it is its very stomach because the politicians who inhabit its corridors tend to wear their politics on their breath.

Serious analysts of current affairs in Delhi are required to display an understanding not just of the delicate manoeuvres of politicians; their ideological moorings and movings, but of their feasting and their fasting as well. They have to be not just political critics but food critics, displaying an ability to discern how mulayam were the kebabs that Sonia Gandhi served at her iftar and whether the dal the prime minister poured out at his do carried the faintest flavour of AIADMK’s sambar masala.

Party politics consequently take on a whole new meaning. One’s party affiliations may have very little to do with whether one belongs to the BJP, the Congress or the Telugu Desam, but where one partied the night before. Was it ran mussalam at P.M. Sayeed’s or halim at Najma Heptullah’s? Or did you just savour the jalebis, sponsored by Murli Manohar Joshi, fried in hundred per cent pure ghee — the word, incidentally, is a colloquial version of the Sanskrit term, grith. Joshi’s jalebis are said to be made according to a recipe contained in the Rig Veda.

In other words, politicians are what they eat, and politics is ultimately all about who eats what and whom. Last week, for instance, if you happened to have eaten a meal of rice and ileesh maach, chances are you that you are in the Opposition camp and desperately seeking a place under the sun. So as you picked your way through the succulent flesh of fish fattened in the sweet water ponds of West Bengal, removing its fine and prickly skeletal remains as adroitly as possible without choking on them, you were also smelling a rare opportunity to cook a future for yourself in the sharp, mustard-tinged air.

If it was the biryani, redolent with the saffron culled from the fields of the Valley and created in the large magical cauldrons of the cooks from Jama Masjid, that you had dined on, it means quite clearly that you are in power and hope to continue in that happy state for a long time to come. It is also understood, of course, that the staging of these annual ceremonies of secularism in the home of the only Muslim minister in your ranks is necessary before the big cook-out in Uttar Pradesh, when chefs trained in other culinary traditions are expected to put the Ayodhya cauldron back on the front burner.

There is nothing new about this great food chain, where one eats and gets eaten in turn. It has, in fact, been the practice since times immemorial. An account given to us by Sir Thomas Roe, the British ambassador to the Court of Jehangir between 1615 and 1619, put it this way: ‘‘The people of India live like fishes do in the sea — the great ones eat up the little. For first the farmer robs the peasant, the gentleman robs the farmer, the greater robs the less and the king robs all’’.

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