Feline Musings

I was drooling at the sight of the chicken pattie in the caterer’s showcase in my office cafeteria. A plump colleague was remorsefully narrating how his parents, who are food junkies have to go under forced diet because they have been diagnosed with diabetes. He told me that he was giving up on eating goodies, to encourage his parents to do the same, and he was directing his newfound “discourage-from-eating-junk” act towards me. I reluctantly bought a lemon juice and trudged behind him to the nearest seat (I was feeling weak and tired due to lack of chicken-meal-induced energy in my veins!)

My colleague said, you read so much, you remain so aware and yet I wonder how you give into unhealthy temptation. I listened with dropped head; malnutrition was dulling my brain further. He enthusiastically carried on his revelation on the temptation. He says that out of the five senses, or “indriyan,” the tongue causes the most harm to the human body and soul.

Firstly, the tongue supports the power of speech and as the cliché goes words can make or break a situation. Words are like arrows, which when shot cannot be taken back, and the tongue is the prime player in letting words out of our mind. We may be able to think, but without the tongues intervention, most thoughts would remain unspoken and harmless.

I wanted to argue that it’s not the tongue, but the senses of sight and touch that the troublemakers, because once you use your vision and wield a pen, and write precisely what you think, you create a hardcore written proof that cannot be wiped out. The tongue can still sort out a tricky situation with clever wordplay! But I sat there in silence, with no energy whatsoever to contradict the attack against the tongue!

My poor tongue was craving for a bite of that glorious golden brown stuffed chicken pattie. As if my colleague had read my mind, he went into phase two of attack on the tongue. According to him, while the tongue is the mischief-maker by the voicing of thoughts and opinions, it’s also the cause of great trauma to the stomach and the body. Just for the momentary pleasures to satiate the taste buds that we stuff our mouths with the greasy and the spicy and then our digestive system takes the assault, and punishes us with various digestive problems and an increase in adipose tissue.

The tongue is to be blamed for leading us into junk-food temptation. I meekly agreed to my friend’s analysis of the situation and the branding of the tongue as the main culprit that leads to layers and layers of fat on our body. I quietly drained the lemon juice and bid adieu to the chicken pattie wondering how to curb the provocation from my taste buds.

While I had been struggling to get the tongue under my control, I came upon another colleague who apparently had no sense of taste, and yet that didnt help him in controlling his appetite. We were served dahi bhallas with tangy tamarind dark brown sauce, for lunch, with vanilla ice-cream and hot chocolate fudge as dessert. Now these two dark brown add-ons were placed side-by-side with name-plates. This colleague of mine, walked to the cafeteria, served a major portion of dahi bhalla on his plate, and absent-mindedly dumped dollops of chocolate sauce on the dahi bhallas.

I wondered how he would reacte to the weird taste, and kept quiet, just to see his reaction. As I observed him, I saw that he ate all of the dahi bhalla, after mixing the chocolate sauce with the dahi, and he didnt even seem to realize that the taste was amiss. I was now convinced that even without the sense of taste one can continue to gorge on food. The tongue again proved itself innocent. I gave up my war against the tongue, and my struggle to control my sense of taste.

That evening I was back in the cafeteria, and enjoyed mouthfuls of chicken pattie. Pure bliss!

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