MANGALA’S WORDS: GANDHIJI, SPICE, CRICKET

Mangala waited with a smile as the last of her students gathered all her belongings and headed for the door. “See you soon!” breezed young Anushka. “ Not if I saw you first,” said Mangala to herself as she nodded and waved in a plastic friendly manner before closing the door and flopping on to the plush sofa. Free for the day. She wondered if it had been a wise move at all, starting a cookery class…. She had always wanted to do something different, something that would give her a sense of purpose. But had it been wise to start cookery classes? She wondered.
She hadn’t been a very confident cook to begin with and heeding the advice of her mother that a the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach she had cultivated herself into a culinary orchid – a very specially talented, painstaking cook. She had the expertise of churning out meals of all kinds- of all regions.
Now that her kids were grown up she had too much of time in her hands. Not that they had been enthusiastic at her idea of starting cookery classes. “Marala?” her son had asked when she placed her idea in front of her family, but seeing her expression hurriedly supported her…as he had always done.
She had enjoyed initially the challenge of initiating her class of culinary morons into the aromatic, delicious world of cooking! Yes, quite a challenge, she mused, to have taught some young yuppie new bride that ‘spice’ had nothing to do with pop singers or that ‘chives’ were herbs and ‘hives’ an allergic condition. But students like Anushka who were terrified to use their fingers polished nail et al to perform menial tasks like extracting tamarind pulp the traditional way(“No dear, you don’t need to use an extractor for a gooseberry sized lump of tamarind…!”) made her feel helpless like while watching her country’s cricket team perform miserably… Why do we lack the killer instinct that the Pakistanis or the Aussies have? Have our sportsmen been indoctrinated by Gandhiji’s call for Ahimsa that they passively let themselves be trounced in the cricket, hockey or any other sport arena?
Funny how we pass the buck to the selectors and coach for our sporting disasters! We as a nation believe in not admitting our drawbacks and our weaknesses…
Well, not she. She would train her class to perform in their arena and bowl people over with exquisitely cultivated culinary skills.