The Tomato Paradox of Culture

The truth is, everything about culture can be explained by the tomato.

Figure 1: The answer to all things

To prove this let me ask you to jot down 3 common recipes cooked day-to-day in your home. Let me pick out 2 examples, one from the North, and the other from the South. These are both the first google results that popped up on searching for these dishes:

Butter Chicken http://indianfood.about.com/od/chickendishes/r/butterchicken.htm Ingredients: 1 kg boneless chicken skin removed Juice of 1 lime Salt to taste 1 tsp red chilli powder (adjust to suit your taste) 6 cloves 8-10 peppercorns 1" stick of cinnamon 2 bay leaves 8-10 almonds Seeds from 3-4 pods of cardamom 1 cup fresh yoghurt (must not be sour) 3 tbsps vegetable/canola/sunflower cooking oil 2 onions chopped 2 tsps garlic paste 1 tsp ginger paste 2 tsps coriander powder 1 tsp cumin powder 1/4 tsp turmeric powder 400g/ 14 oz of chopped tomatoes, ground into a smooth paste in a food processor 1/2 litre chicken stock 2 tbsps kasuri methi (dried fenugreek leaves) 3 tbsps unmelted, soft butter Salt to taste Coriander leaves to garnish

Sambhar http://www.tarladalal.com/Sambhar-1663r Ingredients: 1 cup toovar (arhar) dal 1 tomato, chopped 1 onion, chopped 2 brinjals (baingan / eggplant), cubed 1 drumsticks (saijan ki phalli / saragavo), cut into 4 pieces 1 potato, cubed 1 tbsp tamarind (imli) pulp salt to taste For the sambhar masala 6 to 8 whole dry kashmiri red chillies 1 tbsp coriander (dhania) seeds 1 tsp toovar (arhar) dal 1 tbsp chana dal (split Bengal gram) 1 tbsp urad dal (split black lentils) 1 tsp turmeric powder (haldi) 1/2 tsp asafoetida (hing) 1 tsp oil For the tempering 1 tsp mustard seeds ( rai / sarson) 6 curry leaves (kadi patta) 1/4 tsp asafoetida (hing) 2 tbsp oil

It is likely your recipes would have ended up with a tomato somewhere as well. Tomatoes seem to form the base of half the North Indian dishes, and is commonly found in sambhar, rasam, chutneys and set-dosas in the South. It’s an integral part of our mother’s recipes – that bastion of tradition and culture.

And yet, as the young chef in my novel points out to his stubborn grandfather (yes, shameless plug) – tomatoes originated in the Americas. Here’s the Wikipedia version of our philosophical fruit’s journey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato#History

So how did our mothers turn American? When did this westernizing influence corrupt our cuisine? How come the RSS didn’t tell us? Most importantly, if ancient (and medieval) Indians didn’t have tomatoes...what did they put in their curries?

Boring stuff, it turns out.

But more interestingly, the tomato incident highlights a fact of culture that its guardians seem to forget – it is a river, not a bedrock. Even the most traditional thing was new once upon a time, probably taken from another people, transmuted, transmitted, twisted and tailored in an unending process.

In fact, much of the confusion comes from the context we view the word in. What is Indian culture? It’s classical dances and music? It’s traditional clothes? It’s cuisine? The body of its literature?

If we say it is all these things, then we confine the word to the part of culture that is the past. In this context, four hundred years ago, tomato wouldn’t be a part of Indian culture.

And yet, we cannot ignore that a major part of culture lies in our inheritances, the habits of our past and our families, passed down. It reaches so deep in our souls that it moulds the very way we think – how we view personal space, how we view different relationships, how our hands move when we talk, how we behave with those who have power over us, and those in our power. I have lived in many countries, and in countries that have people from all over, and the majority of them (including me) find it next to impossible to even form a genuine connection with a person from another culture. Such is the empire in our hearts, and the influence of the past.

In fact, if I don’t get Indian food (with tomatoes) for more than two weeks, I can’t stand it.

And that is the Tomato Paradox of Culture: 

I cannot live without tomato flavoured curry – since I grew up with it as part of my culture and that has molded me. Yet, the presence of that tomato proves that culture changes, and we mold culture.

I think, overall, it’s far easier conceptually to just separate out the word. Let the word culture consist of 2 parts: Active Culture and Passive Culture.

Passive Culture is the habit of our past that is passed down by our family in our childhood. This includes aesthetic habits, dietary habits, body language habits, world view habits, lifestyle habits. It’s our social psychology.

Active Culture is the body of similar decisions a large portion of society takes in response to similar stimuli and rationale. Like the decision of cutting vegetables and doing other parts of housework working ladies take in the long hours spend in the Mumbai Local. Like the decision so many households take to make their children memorize for exams, and go into engineering. Like the collective lust we feel for increasingly vigorous item numbers. It’s the economics of our daily lives.

At all points Active Culture erodes Passive Culture. The insidious tickling of collective lust legitimizes a slow simmer of sexual revolution, upturning existing cultural mores. The presence of air-conditioned, clean retail spaces slowly wear away our cultural relish of haggling with unorganized retailers. The presence of a tasty, cheap new ingredient (like Maggi, and many centuries ago the tomato), changes the proportion of our food where its included, slowly changing our cultural cuisine.

But Active Culture also becomes new Passive Culture bit by bit as generations turn – our mothers gave us Maggi, so we give it to our children. Our frequenting of malls leads to our children becoming more fashion conscious. Our increasing comfort with seeing mainstream stars go sexual changes the way our children grow up thinking about sexuality.

And in the transformation of Active Culture into Passive Culture, in that natural alchemy, lies a pot of gold – a transformation of the consumer and society where the old becomes meaningless, and the new becomes rich.

The New Bazaar Language

“Mere photo ko...”  Dramatic Pause.  “Mere photo ko seene se yaar...chipka le saiyan Fevicol se.”

These hazardous lyrics are from the latest chartbuster Fevicol Se, from Dabangg 2. But you already knew that.

That’s a safe guess because it’s difficult for anyone who has a TV set, or neighbours, or uses autos, to not know of the existence of this song, or any others of its ilk. The growing genre of ‘item number’s has become the point of thrust (no pun intended) for the marketing of any big budget movie nowadays. We are literally carpet bombed. Nobody but the grumpiest seem to mind.

What is interesting though, is a strange pattern twisting through these songs. Note the following lines:

Anarkali disco chali

Character Dheela Hai

Munni Badnaam Hui, Darling Tere Liye

A significant percentage of these item songs use English words as part of their punch-line sentences. The song Jhalla in Ishakzaade uses English for every point in its long list of the character’s jhalla-ness.

The reason I found this surprising is that these songs were clearly meant to appeal to a vast section of society, many who clearly do not speak in English. It’s motives explained the pelvic thrusts. It didn’t explain the increasing use of English words interspersed in Hindi sentences – the legitimacy it seemed to give to this ‘Hinglistani’ as a way of speaking.

Then I started noticing how people were actually speaking – the woman at the local shop who says ‘yeh cream face pe laganaa hai’, the man selling ‘pottery items jisme plant rakhte hai’, the driver who asks if ‘hum scenic spot pe roke? Wahaan photo lena’.

Suddenly, it seemed like there was good reason to add English words to celebrity cleavages. But a part of me still rebelled at the idea of Hinglistani actually gaining ground. It just seemed too far-fetched. I couldn’t see it going anywhere. After all, English is spoken by so few, and spoken well by even fewer. And the Raj is gone, the English are a rare sight in India. Besides, there are currently no books written in Hinglistani, no attempts at any literature in this pidgin. Most good English speakers in India go out their way to ridicule this sort of ghati-ness.

None of these seems at all condusive to a linguistic transition – to the slow simmer forge of a new mixed language.

And yet...that’s exactly how Urdu was formed.

So perhaps, just perhaps, the lyricist of Fevicol Se, is a poet for a new language in its birth pangs.

Golden Songbirds & Kuremal Kulfi

I don’t smoke, it makes me cough. But not smoking has many harmful side-effects, the greatest being the lack of a legitimate excuse to step away from the shackles of the office every hour. The only alternative makes people wonder how small your bladder could possibly be. As such, I have resigned to the life of a pretend-smoker. I pretend to smoke, and together with my pretend-addict buddies I vanish, sometimes for many minutes at a time. People wonder, and offer us pretend-sympathy.

Now a question often turns up in these smoke breaks, an important question – what to do with the energies that lie in the future? What paths to take? The most pragmatic element of this eternal question for the people in my pretend smoking circle is the question of geography. Should they try to go abroad, or should they continue in Gurgaon di galiyan?

Often at this point a pig trots by on its way to lunch in the garbage bin behind our building.

But the more concerning point that is raised is of opportunity. Are there opportunities in India? It is often felt by the participants that there are not. There are so few investment banking jobs here. Half the corporates are lala companies where you have to carry your boss’ briefcase. No one listens to ideas from juniors. So forth.

These are true.

But then there is Kuremal Kulfiwala.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/iinindia/4950355347/

That is Kuremal Kulfiwala. That is the shop. As you might have noticed, the facade of the shop front happens to be thin air. There are some luxuriously appointed plastic chairs, which were absent the day I’d visited. There is a stair in the background, going to the loft.

The picture is from google images, perhaps the second or third row.  In fact Kuremal Kulfiwala is surprisingly easy to find on google. There is a simple reason for that – everybody knows that Kuremal Kulfiwala makes THE BEST KULFI IN THE WORLD.

Seriously, they do.

And everyone knows it. And by everyone we mean half of Delhi, spurred on by the love shown for their kulfi by the few million people who seem to be pressed together in the human sandwich of Delhi 6, who are perhaps the most demanding and discerning kulfi consumers in the country.

They are not the only kulfi consumers in the country though.

So the natural follow-up question is: Why don’t people in the rest of the country know about Kuremal? Why isn’t it a household name like Kwality ice-cream? Why does there only seem to be one thin person with an unenthusiastic mustache in the shop?

And finally, does this mean there’s no opportunity, or there’s lots of it?

Great Ape

There was once an ape who invented, and changed dry straw to fire, and round rock to wheel, and perhaps coconut shell to D-cups. We are all it's fortunate children.