December 19, 2007

Stupid Article in Outlook

Chicken A La South - a huge blunder of an article in Outlook.

The point that this article makes is very a "profound discovery" - It says the traditional Idli-Sambar diet of 'South Indians /Tamilnadu' has changed to non-veg. Now more veg people are turning to non-veg.

Some 80 per cent of South Indians are non-vegetarian, as opposed to 44 per cent of North Indians, according to the Indian Food Intake Survey 2007, carried out by Protein Foods and Nutrition Development Association of India and market
research agency Pathfinders: India.

So whats the great deal here? For eons Tamilnadu has been traditionally Non-veg with a very small minority of the population only eating veg. What a discovery now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So would South Indians, who, apart from battling the generic label of 'madrasi' they are all put under, are also assumed by their brethren in the north to be strict herbivores getting by on platefuls of idli-dosa-sambar. In reality,though, vegetarianism is a preserve of the Brahmin, others in the South have always had a thriving meats-rich cuisine.

Who are they trying to sell this point to? It looks like as though you came across an alien species and you needed to write an article about their corrected food habits you presumed as otherwise.

The Nadar down the street may well say 'I told you so' to that. He has for long griped that "ever since Brahmins starting eating eggs, the prices have gone up".

Ha..Ha..Good Joke...I'm saying good becos some extremely good jokes are coming later.

Abitha Sathish Kumar, head of academics at the Indian Institute of Fashion Design in Chennai, thinks the only reason so many biriyani shops have proliferated in her neighbourhood, Triplicane, one of the traditionally Brahmin-dominated areas of Chennai, is because many Chennai Brahmins have turned non-vegetarian.

I'm not blaming Abitha, man..the author, editor incharge should have some great sense of humour to let this get printed. Triplicane is also a muslim dominated area. Any chennai-ite would know triplicane is the place where any non-IT bachelor would get a room - there are soooo many mansions to cater to their needs. No wonder you have biriyani shops..

I think I will end up quoting the entire article ;-))

..It just shows the mindset of people from elsewhere - Tamilnadu has been associated with veg eating people only while the absolute majority (see it is not even a 60% - 40% weightage - If I can be liberal - it would be 90%-10% weightage) has been ignored completely. It shows years of bias. Sometime earlier, even CNN IBN carried a report of how traditional chennai (read veg) is now changing to Non-veg! I guess these people just now woke up to the fact that Tamilnadu is different from what they thought it was. Talk about prejudice!!

No comments: