I was taught at a young age that you should only fill your plate with as much as you can eat. (The phrase “having too much on one’s plate” rings a few bells I’m sure). Always serve yourself a little less rather than a little more; after all, there’s always second helpings, I was told. Made sense. Wasting food is a terrible thing to do.
The scene with putting food into your mouth isn’t very different. It’s quite an obvious one really. I was taught never to stuff too much food into my mouth. What, you may well ask, as I once did, defines “too much food”? If you can’t shut your jaw or chew with your mouth shut, you’ve got too damn much in there. It’s a basic rule of a thumb. Also, even if you do end up stuffing your face, you have to be a man (or if you’re female, then be a lady) about it and attempt to chew. Cover your mouth with your hand if you have to, as you gnash down on the massive slab of pizza or whatever to break it down. Similarly, if you shove smouldering hot food into your mouth, it’s your own damn fault.
Do whatever you have to, but you never spit food back onto your plate. It’s neither done nor acceptable (I believe) in civilised society.
Just a couple of days ago, I was feeling a bit of a dry mouth and throat coming on in the searing heat and popped into a restaurant that I used to frequent (considerably less so in recent times) and ordered a cold glass of watermelon juice to rehydrate myself. I looked around and sitting at a table, a couple of tables away from mine, was this guy whom my brain instantly tagged as a student-type. Spiked hair, beads around his wrist and neck... the usual Mumbai “Pink Floyd and Psy-Trance are rocking, dewwwd” stereotype.
Now, this lad has before him a plate of fried chicken drumsticks. (Interesting aside: I’ve always found chicken drumsticks to be the clumsiest food known to man. They’re awfully messy, awkward, that cartilage gets into your bite and ruins the taste — I used to be a non-vegetarian — and generally, they’re just a pain in the ass.) So, our man attempts to shovel one rather large and wieldy drumstick into his mouth, as his glazed eyes (probably due to a lack of sleep and excess marijuana abuse) follow it into his mouth.
He’s clearly bitten into too large a chunk, bitten off more than he can chew, as it were and it’s evidently quite hot as indicated by his almost spot-on impression of a gorilla in heat. Ptooie! He spits a glob of flesh and bone shards, laced with digestive juices, back onto his plate and throws back a glass of water down his throat gasping and panting. Meanwhile, I swear I saw that flesh and bone glob twitch a little while on his plate, oozing searing hot oil (as indicated by the steam rising from it). A few customers glared at the lad in disgust, while others tutted and some shook their heads. The waiters, for their part, looked on unperturbed and went back to discussing how Waiter A didn’t pay up after betting 50 bucks the previous night, on a team (that lost) in the IPL.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t lower myself and deign to write about something as trivial as the matter I’m about to delve into. It’s a dumb topic to blog about, I’d told myself and I wasn’t going to write about it. Sadly, I happened to witness this incident and so, here we are.
I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the binge-and-purge display put on by Stereotype Boy and the way celebrity news is digested (or not) by the masses. With the advent of Twitter and its hashtags and whatnot, nearly everyone has now been empowered to chip in with their two cents about anything and everything. The fact that 70-odd percent of tweets (I read this somewhere... I can’t remember where) pertain to people who are ‘famous’ is a reflection of this binge and purge mentality. Can’t get enough of the Cheryl-Cashley Cole saga, Eva Longhoria and her active sex life and other similar tripe about who’s fucking whom and so on and so forth.
And then, purging in the form of tweets, protests etc. in a bid to enlighten the world with their views about how things should be. In the past week — perhaps a shade less — everybody and their uncle has emoted about why an Indian tennis “star” (more on that in a second) should marry a Pakistani cricketer serving a year-long ban. She’ll still represent India, say the soon-to-be-married couple, so what’s the big deal?
I’m getting impatient so I’ll deal with that “star” part first. Sania Mirza is not a tennis star. Read that again if you want. Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi, Michael Chang, Goran Ivanisevic, Martina Hingis, Ana Ivanovic, Maria Sharapova, Lindsay Davenport and so on are tennis stars. Andre Agassi (so what if he wore a wig and was on coke?), Steffi Graf, Roger Federer, Martina Navratilova and Serena Williams are tennis superstars. Winning a couple of WTA tournaments that most of the big names didn’t take part in, does not a star make. Neither does a world ranking of 24 for a wee while.
Sure, you could turn around and say, “Who the hell are you to say she’s not a star? Have you ever won Wimbledon?” Fair question. And I reply, she hasn’t won Wimbledon either and neither the fuck have you. Winning a Wimbledon Junior Doubles title is good. But that doesn’t make you a star. Winning an Australian Open Mixed Doubles title is also very good, but everything Bhupathi touches in mixed doubles inevitably turns to gold.
Next you’ll say, well, she’s the best Indian women’s player ever. To which I will retort, well, that shows that we suck and need to start improving, not glorifying middle-of-the-roadness as stardom. We’re getting sidetracked here, but the bottomline is... she’s no star. Just a good player.
Anyway, she’s getting hitched. I’m very happy for her and Shoaib Malik. Whether she continues to play tennis or not, whether she changes nationality or not, whether she goes to live in Dubai forever or not is really none of my effing concern or anyone else’s. So she broke off her engagement to someone else, Shoaib allegedly broke off a wedding. Maybe he’s a user of women. Maybe he isn’t. I fail to see why a) it is anyone’s concern but their own and b) why people should invest their time chipping in with their opinion about the issue.
Why the family of the allegedly ‘used and discarded’ first wife should air their grievances on air. Why the geriatric head honcho of a dying party of hooligans (that’s right, I said it) should see fit to pass judgment And why the general public at large should feel it to be their moral responsibility to advise the duo on what they should do.
But that takes me back to the binge and purge theory. When you stuff yourself with so much info and ‘news’ about these people you claim not to care about, but can’t stop gossiping about, you’re bound to end up puking or spitting up at some point. Or maybe one morsel of info that you stuff down your throat is so damn hot that it burns your mouth and you spit it out (spit out that half-digested morsel with your own salival inputs). And what happens then? You end up looking stupid. Not to mention, spitting half-eaten food back onto your plate is pretty damn grotesque.
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