About twenty minutes ago, I came closer than I have in over six years to not finishing all the food I had put on my plate. They were serving a vegetarian version of haggis this evening, which was the only proper thing that fit under my newly created edibility definition of 'non-beef or non-beef-looking'. I've never had haggis before and therefore it came onto my plate with the kind of enthusiasm that accompanies trying new food for the first time when you still have eight articles to read for class the next morning. Unfortunately, it looked awful and tasted even worse, but somehow, I pulled myself through it, like I have done countless times in the past.
Why put yourself through the torture, you might ask. You'd find my Mum agreeing with you on that, actually - as early as the instructions accompanying my home-cooked lunch handed over to my pre-school teacher, I have been encouraged to mould my eating habits according to the "if you find that you really can't eat it, then don't" principle. Since this was all I had known, I utilized this luxury about as much as a child could - I would dismiss food on the grounds of visual appearance, quantity and quality with a reckless arbitrariness not entirely incongruent with the haughty prima donna of the child I actually was (the nickname 'Ego', as I continue to remind many of my friends, was no accident).
But the more I did it, the more I realised that some part of me rebelled against it. And then, one day, having endured another one of my legendary "yeh nahi khaana, woh nahi khaana" fits, my long-suffering mother told me I really should finish my food, not because of the good it would do me, but because, every single day and night, millions and millions of my countrymen living in extreme hunger would give an arm and a leg to be in my position. I'm sure every child has heard this in a similar setting at some point or the other and the impact it had on my eating habits may not have been instant, but its impact on my outlook to life was dramatic. To this day, it remains undisturbed near the very top of the absolute truths I believe in because, quite honestly, there's nothing satisfactory I could say in response to my Mum then and there's nothing satisfactory I can think of saying to that even now, at a distance of a decade or so.
If I could live my life all over again, I'd go back and finish all those meals I had started.
Now, back to those eight articles.
Why put yourself through the torture, you might ask. You'd find my Mum agreeing with you on that, actually - as early as the instructions accompanying my home-cooked lunch handed over to my pre-school teacher, I have been encouraged to mould my eating habits according to the "if you find that you really can't eat it, then don't" principle. Since this was all I had known, I utilized this luxury about as much as a child could - I would dismiss food on the grounds of visual appearance, quantity and quality with a reckless arbitrariness not entirely incongruent with the haughty prima donna of the child I actually was (the nickname 'Ego', as I continue to remind many of my friends, was no accident).
But the more I did it, the more I realised that some part of me rebelled against it. And then, one day, having endured another one of my legendary "yeh nahi khaana, woh nahi khaana" fits, my long-suffering mother told me I really should finish my food, not because of the good it would do me, but because, every single day and night, millions and millions of my countrymen living in extreme hunger would give an arm and a leg to be in my position. I'm sure every child has heard this in a similar setting at some point or the other and the impact it had on my eating habits may not have been instant, but its impact on my outlook to life was dramatic. To this day, it remains undisturbed near the very top of the absolute truths I believe in because, quite honestly, there's nothing satisfactory I could say in response to my Mum then and there's nothing satisfactory I can think of saying to that even now, at a distance of a decade or so.
If I could live my life all over again, I'd go back and finish all those meals I had started.
Now, back to those eight articles.
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