Musings of a Guwahatian...

Roaming in the perennially under-construction streets of Panbazar the other day, I wondered about the city I call home. According to the epic Mahabharata, Guwahati was the capital of the kings Narakasura and Bhagadatta. There is an inscription on a rock in the  Nilachal Hills that dates back to the 5th century AD and is incontrovertible proof that Guwahati has been home to a civilized settlement for at least two millennia. My city and the areas surrounding my state seldom figure in the descriptions and imaginations of the bulk of Indian historians, and yet the region has stood the test of time in its journey through the ages.

It was a unique feeling roaming aimlessly through the historical Panbazar. Most of the purchases are now made online, and it has been ages since I went to an actual market to buy something; the malls nearby are convenient. The Sheikh Brothers, the Mahamaya Hotel, the Friend’s Opticals – they all seemed to have stood still in time. The vintage parts of Guwahati are best explored by foot - the alleys and corridors whispering years of lores and stories to the receptive ears. The major areas that fall under this bracket are―the academic hub of Panbazar, the colonial remnant of Uzanbazar, the roads of Kharghuli, the entire area of Digholipukhuri and some parts of Aambari area.

Of late, Guwahati has undergone huge changes. You can say that Guwahati has gone under the knife for a major cosmetic change. But not every facelift or botox injection or silicon implant can be as perfect as Kim Kardashian’s derriere. While the war memorial on the bank of Digholipukhuri comes close to the youthfulness of Hema Malini in her sixties, the oblong statues which are nothing but caricatures of famous Assamese personalities are like the grossly disfigured lips of Donatella Versace post filler injections. Somewhere down the line, the clash between the historic city that Guwahati was and the sustainable city that Guwahati is trying to be seems to have reached a stage of gross imbalance. The sad part is that no one actually seems to be doing much about it, including yours truly who sits and blasts the municipality for the pathetic roads and the Rain God for the flash floods which drown the thinly layered roads after each spell of rainfall.

Issues like water supply or garbage disposal are discussed under the guise of metaphors of metabolism in bureaucratic meets, but nothing fruitful materializes. Every day on the way to my workplace, I wonder about the  shortage of basic services, traffic congestion, pollution and social disparities among others. These problems are only going to amplify in future, given the scale of deforestation and unplanned constructions. With all this talk of converting my laid back city into a ‘smart-city’, it is important to realize that there is a great deal of smartness in being sensitive to the ambient ecosystems.

Nevertheless, today was a happy day for me. Sitting in my car, I was cursing the PWD for the potholes on the road near my home that are soon turning into tributaries which will need to be drained into the Brahmaputra in the very near future. I was also upset about the frequent ‘power-cuts’ for ‘load-shedding’. Just as I reached Ganeshguri, I cast a glance upwards at the angry sun which was threatening to make the rest of the day unbearably hot and humid.  Suddenly I caught a glimpse of the huge billboard with a beaming Hima Das in all her glory proudly holding the triclour. And my mood took a dramatic three-sixty degrees turn! Guwahati still had a beating heart, the generation now which will soon take over from the older lot is responsible, street smart and capable. Maybe I should stop being so pessimistic about everything and concentrate on the ways and means to make each day better than the previous one. Maybe this is the spirit which makes my city the place it is now – ever-changing, everlasting….

Why we forgot to enjoy food?

Recently I read a wonderful article by Santosh Desai titled “The Fear of Food” which was forwarded to me by a close friend. The author has very beautifully described the attitude of our generation towards eating - the almost obsessive consciousness about calorie intake, vis-à-vis the carefree enjoyment of a good meal in the days of yore.

Going a step further than what Mr Desai described, we all these days seem to be suffering for cibophobia. We are increasingly becoming cocooned in our own small worlds, as we feel uncomfortable in social situations such as holiday gatherings, where it would be rude not to accept food.

We start eating healthier for our future.  It’s not eating healthy food that is the disease, but the vice-like grip of the mind on the idea of only eating healthy food - it becomes an obsession. Seemingly innocuous life limitations can be vital clues to discovering crippling food anxiety before it irrevocably impacts health, either physically or mentally. These are some warning signs, - like, if it matters what the menu is before you can accept a dinner invitation, if you can't travel because you will be faced with unfamiliar food, if you can't eat wedding cake at a birthday party, etc.

But I wonder, is this “super - consciousness” about what we eat and how much we eat totally unjustified?

Cut to two decades or so back, and chances are our grandparents had a much stricter routine for food consumption than we do now. Then it was typical for a family to have their meals at the same time every day (breakfast at 8 - 9 am, lunch at 1 - 2 pm and dinner at 9 - 10 pm) so their body was accustomed to knowing when to expect food. This sort of discipline helped to keep waistlines slim and food waste to a minimum. In the modern day, however, a lot of people have lost this disciplined approach to meals and no longer stick to the 3-square-meal-a-day rule. Skipping breakfast, snacking and several cups of coffee a day are notions that our grandparents would have neither considered nor approved. Foods were eaten only in season. The soil was naturally nutrient rich, and fruits and vegetables were picked when ripe (when nutrients fully developed). Naturally-occurring species filled our dining plates and animals ate their natural diet.

It goes without saying that eating habits have changed in the last couple of decades. Many things get added to our foods to enhance the taste, to colour the foodstuffs and to preserve the food for longer. Fast foods, pre-cooked foods and many other foodstuffs contain huge amounts of saturated animal fats. It enhances taste, but excessive consumption of this can lead to atherosclerotic changes. This can lead to heart attacks and strokes.

With the accelerated tension of modern day lifestyle, countless cups of tea/coffee, cigarette and alcohol intake has become a way of life. Both tea and coffee contain caffeine, but so do chocolate, cocoa and cola drinks. Caffeine overload makes it difficult for our bodies to absorb essential nutrients and it can make us suffer from nervous tension, irritability, insomnia and headaches. Excessive tea and coffee drinking was uncommon a hundred years ago - today every workplace has a tea club, atleast my workplace does! Many of the foods that contain sugar and saturated animal fats also contain much salt. We generally eat between 10 and 20 times the salt our bodies need. High salt consumption can contribute to high blood pressure.

Foods like soft drinks, processed foods, canned, prepackaged and convenience foods as well as ready-made sauces are high in phosphorus which impedes the absorption of good nutrients and also interferes with calcium absorption by bone tissue. Also, many of the foods available contain chemical additives which are used as flavour enhancers, colourants and preservatives. Some are harmless, but quite a few are not. And anyway, our bodies are not designed to deal with these additives.

Recently, during a holiday trip to New Zealand, I was impressed with the symmetrical, almost perfect vegetables which were comparatively cheaper than the vegetables found in the local markets in Guwahati. The attendants in the store told me that those were “GM” vegetables, genetically modified to suit our palates. The chillies were seedless, the onions were “manufactured” to give a “tearless” chopping experience, the tomatoes were an ideal red, etc. So, every naturally vegetable and fruit under the sun is now genetically modified to contain genetics and chemicals with unknown effects. Also, there is year round availability of everything. Crop rotation is no longer practiced and chemicals kill the microorganisms which otherwise support nutrient value. Contaminated with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, waxed & irradiated, every food item is now customized and presented in such a manner that we have almost forgotten how the worm inside litchis and mangoes looked! Antibiotics are sprayed on vegetables, and all fresh fruit, cereals and vegetables are sprayed with pesticides at least once. It is almost impossible to avoid this, unless we buy organically grown fruit and vegetables. 

Even meat animals are bombarded with antibiotics, often to the point where they become resistant to them. They are also often used to promote growth and prevent illness in the animals. This overload is passed on to us when we eat their meat.

The point is, while Mr Desai is right about our generation’s failure to enjoy food and mechanically counting calories after each bite, one cannot deny the fact that there is a sea of change between the “food then” and the “food now”. Add to this our sedentary lifestyles and daily routine, and food ceases to be a pleasure. Much physical work has been taken over by machines, and generally we need less energy than they did before.

Ask any man who is atleast two generations older than us, and you will be told that active lifestyles were required then to get food. People ate their dinner and went to sleep when it was dark – unfortunately, fast food joints, electricity and television changed that…

But yes, food should continue to remain an experience to cherish, not something to fear.

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”  - George Bernard Shaw