Sweet Nothings: How to Survive as a Sugar-Conscious Gujarati

Every Gujarati wedding menu has two kinds of dal; there’s “normal” dal and then there’s meethi dal. The first bland and boring version is for the six people at the wedding who are fitness conscious and are obviously not Gujarati, and the latter is for the rest of us who will die of diabetes. Then there’s sweet kadhi, sev tameta nu shaak, and basundi – all this even before you reach the dessert counter – for the sugar rush we need to dance to “Sanedo” later. They say some stereotypes exist because they are true, and this is certainly true for us Gujaratis. We love sweet food, truly madly deeply.  

You could say Gujjus are as obsessed with sweet food as paps and admins of dank meme pages are with Taimur Ali Khan. In a Gujarati household, the sugar jar is placed right next to the salt jar, and used as liberally as Virat Kohli uses expletives on the field.

We can live without water but not sugar and jaggery, especially in places where the rest of the world thinks they have no business being. We like our pizza with more ketchup than toppings – in fact, the sweet tang of ketchup makes everything from dal chawal to hakka noodles to falafel better.   

For breakfast, we either have bread with layers of jam or roti, or a side of gud. Lunch is always followed by sweet chaas or sweet lassi. At dinner, we have mithai with food and then have ice cream an hour later for dessert. Post that, we have a meetha paan as the closing act and follow it with some sugary saunf. Our meals and drinks come in size XL but our taste is always an S (sweet).

But now, in an age where people have quinoa cake or avocado chocolate pudding for dessert, it’s not easy for us sugar-loving Gujjus to survive without judgment. At work, when I pour two entire packets of sugar into my coffee, my colleagues give me the death stare generally reserved for those who defend demonetisation. But can you really blame me? In our house, black coffee is treated like a medicine to cure stomach issues and the non-Gujarati cook who forgets to add sweet to undhiyu is promptly fired.

I don’t know how my family will cope with this new-fangled – ok, old-fangled – idea of how sugar is the biggest, hidden villain in the culinary world. Because my fam doesn’t think that we use too much sugar; it passionately believes that the rest of the world uses too little.  

While it may appear that we snort sugar instead of cocaine, the reason for excessive use of sugar and jaggery in food is the kharo paani (salty groundwater) in Gujarat that made the food taste awful. Our ancestors used the sweetners to make food palatable and today, even as the situation has changed radically, our food habits haven’t kept up. Gujaratis might be one of the most successful entrepreneurial communities in the world – shoutout to my peeps at Antilia – but our food still reflects a slightly primal urge. And it is impossible for us to keep up with the health consciousness of the modern world.

In fact, in a Gujarati family, along with a ghar and family “bijness”, diabetes is passed on from one generation to another. My grandparents suffered from diabetes and my parents are carrying forward the glorious tradition. I often wonder that if I become conscious about my sugar intake, will I let them down?

Still, at the risk of being disowned, I’ve started to be a little more conscious these days. Each time my mom reaches for the extra-large dabba of sugar in the supermarket, I keep it back and pick the small one. And every time dad heads to the sweet counter at a shaadi before his meal, I distract him. Next on my agenda, is to convince them that pizza tastes just as nice even without ketchup. I may be successful in this endeavour or I might end up with diabetes – either way, I’ll have made a dent in this vestigial instinct. As for the avocado chocolate pudding… don’t call us, we’ll call you. 

Virat Kohli: The Man Who Makes Miracles Seem Mundane

Over the years, fans of Indian cricket have worshipped different gods and their virtues

– Sunil Gavaskar was an artist at the crease, VVS Laxman was a wizard, the stoic dependability of Rahul Dravid was the yin to Virender Sehwag’s yang, and Sachin Tendulkar was the genius on whose bat blade rested a billion dreams. But Virat Kohli is Gavaskar, Laxman, Dravid, Sehwag, and Tendulkar all rolled into one.

King Kohli has mastered all three formats of the game. He is immune to the colour of the ball, the size of the ground, and the quality of the pitch. When the match demands patience, he has more patience than a kindergarten teacher. When the tempo needs picking up, he shifts gears faster than a Bugatti Veyron. In desperate times, when the team needs to grind it out, his precise efficiency is like a soldier’s on the battlefield. As captain, his brain seems to work faster than a supercomputer while making calculations and taking risks.

Indians have more confidence in Virat Kohli than they have in themselves.

When Kohli comes out to bat, there is an air of inevitability about him. Unless he makes a mistake, the opposition will struggle to get him out, and this is usually the case. His technique seems flawless, his calling between the wickets is loud and clear, he finds gaps like he has a GPS fitted on his head, he has the fitness of a triathlete, and his temperament is rock solid. It’s not a surprise anymore when he gets a 100; in fact, it’s a surprise when he doesn’t. And that is an astonishing feat.

Kohli has reached a rare peak that only few sportsmen do, where he has become so good that it has become boring. When he bats, everything is so perfect that one can get lulled into thinking that batsmanship is easy. He makes things look so easy that one wonders, “Why doesn’t everyone bat like him?” However, nothing about his career and the tumbling records is normal. We are looking at an extraordinary sportsman at his ruthless best. He is head and shoulders above the rest of the competition, akin to Messi in football or Michael Jordan at basketball in the ’90s.

“Virat Kohli will break all records except Don Bradman’s average,” said Aussie legend Steve Waugh. On the eve of his 30th birthday, Virat has already become the fastest batsman to score 10,000 runs in ODI cricket, averaging close to a staggering 50 in all three formats of the game. He is a Titan of the modern era. While the records are out there for everyone to talk about, what numbers cannot quantify or record is the pressure of a big game, a mounting required run rate, banter on the field, and the pressure of a an entire nation full of cricket-crazed people counting on him. It is freakish how often he shows up in tense situations and gobbles up the pressure like it was breakfast.

Kohli has made excellence the norm, and the fans have come to expect nothing less. When he comes out to bat, there is relief. If India is in a good situation, he will make it better. If India is struggling, you know he will steady the ship. He is the number one Test and ODI batsman for a reason: he simply doesn’t make silly mistakes or throw his wicket away. The rare occasions where he does falter are made more memorable by this quality, like the Nile missing its annual flood or a Mumbai local arriving on time for once.

That is what makes Virat Kohli so special. Everytime he comes out to bat, he is capable of getting a hundred. The Indian cricket fan’s faith in Virat Kohli was perfectly summed up by former England captain Nasser Hussain, when he said, “I would bet my life on Kohli.”

You’re not alone Nasser, because a billion Indians do too.

TikTok: One Person’s Cringe Is Another One’s Cool

Everyone has seen a TikTok video, even if you have never heard about the video-sharing and Karaoke app and don’t know what it is. In that sense, it’s a bit like GST – it doesn’t matter whether you understand it, and there is no way to escape it. And it has hit the online world like a tsunami.

Remember that friend from college who posts Instagram videos, lip-syncing to famous Bollywood dialogues and songs? The ones where you watch and go “Why?” That is probably a TikTok video. If you’re wondering “Hang on, isn’t that Musical.ly?”, congratulations, you’re catching up. Musical.ly was acquired by the Chinese company ByteDance in November 2017 and they merged it with their app TikTok in August 2018. TikTok has exploded worldwide and has more users than Reddit, Twitter, Skype, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. I don’t know what’s more surprising, that TikTok has gotten so popular so quickly, or that a Chinese product has lasted more than ten days.

For the vanilla user, TikTok might just be an extension to Snapchat and Instagram. However, while “stories” disappear with time, on TikTok one can ensure that the embarrassment is etched into online history forever. People who dance showcase their dancing skills. People who are into fitness and health put up workout tips and videos. Fashion enthusiasts display new outfits everyday, and those who have nothing, upload pictures of food and their pets.

But to classify TikTok as vanilla would not only be an understatement, it would also be wrong. For TikTok hosts everything from the simple, to the bizarre, to the extremely fucking weird.

I’ve watched these videos with growing fascination and amusement every day, on FB pages with borderline offensive names like Reptiles of Kurla. Teenagers apply glycerine to their eyes and cry to emotional Bollywood songs from the ’90s, showcasing more emotions in 15 seconds than John Abraham has in his entire acting career. The trend even has a special Facebook page dedicated to it, called “Boys who cry passionately on Musically India”. For added effect, jam and juice are sometimes applied on the body to show blood and heartbreak.

If you’re not into drama, don’t worry, there’s a place for everyone on TikTok. Comedy skits are the rage. On downloading the app, the third video I saw was a man in a village jumping from the roof of his house to another roof with music from Krrish playing in the background. There were no safety precautions in place, nor was this some kind of prank – it was just 15 seconds of masti content. In another video, a bunch of guys were lip-syncing to a popular scene from Phir Hera Pheri that ends with Babu bhaiya being pushed into a swimming pool. In the TikTok video, the guy is pushed into an actual well in a farm by his friends as they try to recreate the scene. I laughed for a good two minutes.

Then, there are challenges. Remember the ice bucket challenge? TikTok has its own array of challenges that regularly feature in their trending hashtags. In the #SoapChallenge, one had to put as many bubbles as you could in your hand and then blow them out to the app’s slow motion effect. I know you believe you can visualise it, but believe me, it’s like the Trump presidency – you cannot until you’ve seen it. The #FaceChallenge was about mimicking 10 animal faces in 15 seconds. Watch out CGI, we’re coming for those animated roles in Disney movies. In the #RotationChallenge, you had to turn on the selfie camera on your phone and then try rotating the phone 360 degrees in your hand. I tried it five times, and all I had to show for my efforts were a hurt ego and a sprained wrist. Clearly, I’m far away from being a popular TikTok star.

TikTok is not merely an app, it’s an experience. It’s an avenue to a different world, a different India. It’s not populated only by your friends, people like you, or those belonging to the same economic, social and cultural environment as you. It has made inroads into rural and small town India, and they’re creating and sharing content in a massive way. It is what the meeting point of a Jio sim card and a Netflix account would look like.

The medium doesn’t have a limitation of text, grammar, or language that many other social media networks suffer from. No one’s trying to show you how great their life is or how someone spelt their name on a cup at Starbucks, like on Instagram. You don’t need to know an American show reference or what a particular contextual meme means. To a large extent, it has eroded the rural-urban divide and made it a level playing field for everyone with a camera phone and data connection. You have a camera, basic editing features and 15 seconds to earn likes and comments, the medium’s currency. “Make every second count” is TikTok’s tagline (and also the working title for the movie to every guy’s sex life).

There is a tendency to dismiss the content as bordering on the extremes of cringe: Easy for us Netflix-watching, organic-cafe-frequenting, nihilist types who couldn’t see earnestness if it hit them between the eyes. Sure, the videos on TikTok don’t match up to the quality of content we’re used to consuming. But what it has, is the spirit of rebellion against a generation defined by snark, the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of what is “cool” and what is “cringe” on the Interwebz. “This is how Dhinchak Poojas and Taher Shahs are born,” the cool kids at Reddit are already up in arms. One must never forget though, that one man’s earnest creative attempt is another man’s cringe. On TikTok, there’s place for everyone, and that is its beauty.

Why Has #MeToo Scared Every Man

For the first time in life, I got a tiny glimpse of what it might be like to be a woman. I was gripped with fear and uneasiness.

As India’s #MeToo movement gained momentum over the past two weeks, I watched a lot of supposedly woke men get called out – for sending unsolicited texts and dick pics, predatory behaviour, and outright sexual harassment. I followed some of these people on Twitter, I have enjoyed some of their work – their films, their writing. These were not those “other” dastardly men who rape women and brazenly skirt the law. These were not those men who make it to front pages of newspapers, men who’ve made you think, “Who are these monsters?” But as the past few days have taught us, these men belong to a different breed of monsters – they are one among us, or rather we are the monsters.  

We are on the news now. Our behaviour has been unacceptable and downright shameful. We the regular people who have had a decent education and enjoy privilege, who are expected to know where to draw the line. Utsav Chakraborty was a “woke comedian”, Vikas Bahl, a “liberal filmmaker”, MJ Akbar, an “informed journalist”. Many of them claimed to be champions of women’s rights. Each one of them turned out to be hypocrites.

As more and more bros were named and shamed, I did what anyone who feels some level of guilt does – maintain absolute silence. For someone who has an opinion on everything from the petrol price hike to the Rafale deal, I was uncomfortably mum as the most significant social movement in my lifetime unfolded.  

The silence came from a place of fear. Unfortunately, the source of that fear was misplaced. I was worried about being labelled a transgressor and the shame that came with it. I started going through screenshots and chats to figure out if I had indeed misbehaved – sent an unwanted text, made anyone uncomfortable, offended a woman.  It was only a few days later, as I overheard conversations of female friends and colleagues, did I realise that what I should be worried about was whether I had hurt someone and how I can correct my behaviour.

The way we rationalise our fear is by trying to defend it. On “boys only” WhatsApp groups, discussions were rife about how “#MeToo was going too far”: “Yaar ab haath pakadna bhi sexual harassment hai kya?” “Joke bhi nahi maar sakte kya ab?” “This is just a relationship gone bad, yaar.” “Why did she not speak for 20 years?” “Aren’t people innocent until proven guilty?” These were thoughts that crossed my mind and that of a handful of other men I interacted with. But we’d dare not say it out loud. Because wokeness is our brand.

Instead of looking at the positives of the movement, like how the law would never have been able to catch up with offenders such as Nana Patekar, Vikas Bahl, or Sajid Khan, I actively tried to pinpoint the imperfections of #MeToo. By focussing on legal loopholes or that one woman who made a false accusation on Twitter. I started finding reasons to convince myself that there was something wrong with the movement. But why was I making excuses?

A report titled “Why Men Still Defend Sexual Predators and Fight the #MeToo Movement,” quotes Psychologist John D Moore, “…not all men who come to the defense of someone accused of sexual crimes are themselves guilty of anything. These sympathetic men may just be uneasy about having a more tenuous position in society — about being held accountable. For these men, seeing a preferred comedian or politician face charges represents a loss of power by association.”

Truth be told, it is rare to find a man who is not guilty of having said something sexually inappropriate – intentionally or unintentionally. For the first time in centuries, we cannot dismiss our crass behaviour as locker-room talk or by simply saying “boys will be boys”. For the first time ever, women are not expected to forgive men. And hence we are more afraid than ever.

Men have been a problem and there is no better time to review and reflect than now.

If half the population cannot leave the house without being worried about its safety to some degree, it is a matter of shame for all of us. It’s not merely about the Bollywood actress who spoke up or the lone woman partner in a corporate firm who had to deal with sexual harassment, it extends to our mothers, sisters, friends and colleagues as we all know now. It extends to daily life, like travelling in the train, attending business meetings, or partying at a bar – things we men indulge in without giving any thought.  

As men, we have been either explicitly or implicitly responsible for the suffocating atmosphere that exists around us. Every man believes he has never harassed a woman and yet one can’t find a woman who hasn’t been harassed. The two things don’t add up.

A few parallels can be drawn between the #MeToo movement and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Cleanliness looks like a ridiculously complex issue to solve, and yet, all it would take is for everyone to throw trash in the dustbin, resist spitting, and the country would be immediately a lot better. Being a decent human being is a bit like that. We only have to do a series of basic things and suddenly everything would be better.

By Sheltering an Inter-Caste Couple, My Conservative Father Discovered His “Wokeness”

It was not a festival, it wasn’t anyone’s birthday in the family, as far as I could remember. It wasn’t even the weekend. So I was taken by surprise when my house was abuzz with energy in the middle of a workweek. There was a serious amount of pav bhaji and grilled cheese sandwiches that had been ordered. For a Gujarati family living in Kandivali, it felt like Navratri had arrived early.

Before I could figure out what was happening, mum told me we had guests – my dad’s colleagues. Really? When did dad start making friends at work?  

Pratik* from my father’s office had come home to visit us, all the way from Kalyan. Seated next to him was a woman, who I guessed was his girlfriend, but I couldn’t be sure. It was 10 pm on a Tuesday, way past my father’s bedtime. And yet everyone seemed quite content chatting away. “Why aren’t they leaving?” “They can’t be staying over!” “Do I have to sleep in the living room today?” My mind was overflowing with questions.

I smiled at Pratik and before I could start a conversation, mom gestured at me with her eyes, asking me to go inside. Then she followed me. Zero points for subtlety.

She came into the bedroom and started whispering, which is her code for “kuch gadbad hai”. Cutting right to the chase, she told me, “Pratik and Nisha got married but their families won’t accept it. So they will be staying with us for a few days.” Hello? Had I suddenly been transplanted into a ’90s Bollywood film? While it might have taken me a few minutes to process the information, all my claims to social media wokeness were forgotten when I blurted, “But why here? Don’t they have any relatives or friends?”   

My mother then gave me a quick backstory of how both families had opposed the marriage because they belonged to different sub-castes, but dad had helped the couple register the wedding. This indeed was a parallel universe. My father? Playing cupid? My dad, the same man who thinks Muslims are planning to take over the world? The same man who declares anyone who criticises Modi ji as a traitor and anti-national? Nothing made any sense.

With an instruction to move to the living room couch for a few days, my mother dashed out of the room. I heard her sneakily calling one of our relatives who owns a garment shop and requested them to open it for a bit. The newly-weds had no extra pair of clothes. A meeting was fixed for 11.30 pm, as if they were scoring some sort of contraband.

In all this excitement, I was getting acquainted with a new side to my father’s personality.

The couple looked worried, but dad kept trying to cheer them up. “Tension mat lo, ek do din mein sab theek ho jaayega.” Dinner was followed by some ice cream and small talk about cricket and what Nisha likes to do. Dad was cracking jokes, at least attempting to, and mom was being mom – extremely warm. I could see my introvert parents making the extra effort to make the two feel at home.

That day my respect for my father shot up faster than Chris Gayle’s strike rate in a T20 game. My dad was way cooler than I thought he was. This is a man who doesn’t know how to use a gas stove and still believed that women should do the cooking, but he had risen over and above the call of duty in helping out a young couple.

Pratik and Nisha stayed at our house for about a week. They’d head out to work in the morning and return at night. This is when the four of them would huddle up and have discussions about how to convince the couple’s family to accept them. Over a period of a few days, my father spoke to their family members and tried to reason it out with them that castes only divide us further. “The differences are all in our head,” I once overheard him saying. After days of convincing, Pratik’s family agreed and the couple moved back to their house.

I was a silent observer of all that was unfolding at home, watching my dad play peacemaker. The same father, who, like any typical middle-class uncle, still makes politically incorrect statements. He has been sexist and racist on several occasions in the past without even realising it. Often with relatives, I’ve heard him comment on politics and his thoughts have made me cringe. On days that I’ve confronted him or tried to engage with him, we’ve had endless debates, which end up with me storming out of the room.

To my mind, my dad was the conservative, the one with backward views. That’s the reason I’ve never added him as a Facebook friend – afraid that he’ll leave a comment on something I’ve posted and embarrass me. But in the days that Pratik and Nisha were with us, I saw a different side. When the time came to act, he had allowed his liberal side to emerge. He had done the right thing.

We waste no time in passing judgement about our parents, imposing our “liberal” ideas on them. Little do we realise that liberalism also includes the ability to open up to an opposing view, being unbiased and non-judgemental.

Unlike me and most people from our generation, who use social media to signal our virtues, my father had become the IRL definition of woke, without knowing or even caring what it meant. Not through his assertions but by his actions. What’s more, he did not bother tom-toming about it on Facebook. Maybe it is time to add him.    

* Names changed