We do these pop ups under the name Forktales. The latest one was on 5000 years of Indian food history and tracking each influence via a food item. This post is based on the latest event.
The mughals had flower pulaos. Nothing can do more damage to their image than this one sentence with 29 characters with spaces.
I eat flowers too. Pumpkin flowers, deep fried in rice batter. Love it. You can’t see the flower and what you eat is so delicious that you are not even thinking of the crime. Sins should be like that, too indulging to be conscious of it.
But the pulao is a crime that you are forced to watch and participate, like the torture in Clockwork Orange. Eyes taped so you can’t blink and you have to watch crime scenes in loop. In the movie, it is used as a treatment for the obsessively violent.
The pulao has a similar effect. Everyone else loved it, some went for repeats, one guy kept smelling it before eating. But I could not. First, picked the ones and put them in the corner of the round plate. Then, I looked at one of the wilted ones, robbed of its floweriness by the steam and yelled
I AM EATING A FLOWER
and I chewed it with a mouthful of rice. But I could not get myself to eat one of the fresh ones on the top. Who can?
That day, while many turned into pleasure seeking monsters, I stood up as the last guard of humanity.
