What Are You Eating?

“Children don’t want puakzo, they want popcorn,” someone said and smirked.

To understand the joke, you need to know both Mizo and English. And also a general understanding of colonialism or at least a functional, practical comprehension of what White Man Culture has come to manifest as in an ex-colony. In JNU, whenever she’d encounter these little details in everyday life, one of my friends would sneer and say: Tchah, safed pujari. White worship, you could say.

It is a strange concept but very widely accepted. Anything white is better than anything tribal. Sometimes you can substitute white for Korean these days. But the basic foundation remains.

Puakzo is the Mizo word for popcorn, for those that don’t speak Mizo. And it is true about the joke. Children really don’t want puakzo. They want popcorn. Especially the kinds that come in brightly coloured paper bags. Or maybe microwaved in a fancy glass bowl. Or flavoured, although that’s more about taste than safed pujari.

But even as we give children grief over this, they’re not isolated. Children do have to learn this from somewhere. And that somewhere is the society at large and the family in specific. Mostly.

There is a good chance that among the people who think it beneath them to eat sa kawchhung/ pumpui because it is disgusting, that they might not feel the same about tripe. Very UK sounding dish. I’m sure I’ve read it mentioned in Harry Potter. Or by Enid Blyton, somewhere.

Or, say, pork rind. AKA chicaronnes, as I learned recently from Young Sheldon. It’s just your basic vawk vun kan puah. A very nice snack especially if you’re having a cold brew. Or in this same vein, chicken crisps – ar vun kan puah. And I don’t know how algorithms work but I’ve recently seen a lot of different pork trotters dishes recently, even in fancy restaurants; again, just your basic vawk ke.

I’m not judging, just exercising my sociological curiosity. Because you can’t tell people to value something and expect them to just obey you. Like how we hear this constant refrain that “tHe yOuTh” needs to start respecting Kut Hnathawktu and not just worship money and the moneyed. Simply on the basis of “Correct Heroes To Worship”. I very firmly believe that when we find a Kut Hnathawktu whose success has translated financially, “tHe yOuTh” will give him that respect. You can’t expect people to strive for poverty. It doesn’t work that way. People value who they value. It is what it is.

For now, we may not always value Thingsemim but we might like Hazelnuts. Ooh, side bar: I knew Thing Sia and Thingsemim separately and it was not until I went to (I want to say) Vanzau that it clicked that the latter was the seed of the former; felt amazingly stupid that day. It was in the name!

Or we might enjoy cinnamon sticks and not give much thought to Thakthing. Or be a Tea Lover but would resolutely describe ourselves as precisely in that term and not as a Thingpui Heh, although the Mizo term has a weirdly negative connotation related to greed so maybe that’s part of the deal. I don’t know. Maybe the foreign words are just that much cooler. And we want to be fancy. It’s just human.

And I know it’s already February but this is my first blog of the year, so Happy New Year 2024.

I Might Be A Little Drunk

A peg of single malt whiskey in the evening is what Khushwant Singh is said to have indulged in for the greater part of his life, up till he died, aged 99. He has always been my favourite Indian author. Mr Singh invited you liberally into his own life and I imagine he gets a kick out of being known as a dirty old man who is addicted to Scotch. Got, I suppose. It’s hard to think him gone, even now. I wish I’d met him in real life.

Ernest Hemingway is another person known for both his drinking and writing prowess. I’ve only read The Old Man And The Sea because we studied it in school. He’s not my favourite author but if he wrote that book drunk, he has my respect. It seems to be a very layered book with multiple meanings and many things to be read between the lines. Although, to be fair, it could just be English Literature teachers who think everything is a metaphor for something else. Mostly nihilism and great human sorrow.

Being drunk, in and of itself, is not the end of the world. Far from it, in fact. Most of the best stories from Uni invariably started out with, “This one time I was so drunk…” Not just Uni, actually. Even life post-Uni. Of course, to be fair, some of the worst stories also come with the “…was so drunk” theme but these are usually in the 3rd person retellings. Most people don’t want to remember the truly awful things they did when drunk, much less recount them personally.

Drunk is a state of mind. Very often, I’ve noticed, people don’t need alcohol to be drunk. Some people are just very off. Billie Piper, of Because We Want To fame, mused in her autobiography that the two most empowering things you can give anyone are a clipboard and a badge. I understand this so well. I remember an ugly biat*h back in high school boarding myself who was study hall monitor and she had faaaaaaarrrrr too much power in her hands. Or even in adult life, smarmy men and women with well-oiled tongues practised in the art of sycophancy and a**-kissing, all the people who live in between the lines that regular law-abiding people live by. Drunk. With illegitimate power.

They say the pen is mightier than the sword. But I don’t know. Shakespeare lives on well after his death, yes, but so does Ghenghis Khan. Or Cain, you know, from Genesis, although I think he might have used a stone and not a sword. But I guess neither Cain nor Ghenghis Khan are as beloved in memory as say, Jane Austen. And then again, you have Adolf Hitler who committed genocide but also wrote a book.

The world is a funny little place where it’s hard to make blanket statements! Even so, I’d say words are magic. This is why I like writing. This is why I blog. In the vain and narcissistic hope that some fragment of my soul gets through someone else’s soul (the eyes are the windows of the soul, they say; have you heard?) and takes root there. Or as plebeians might say, connect.

And in all honestly, I fear I might be a little drunk on the power of words right now.