The Healthy Pastimes

It’s a very common notion now-a-days that each generation experiences a different world altogether. What we are experiencing today as adults may not have encountered by our parents and they might have seen the things their parents haven’t dreamed of. We are living in the times where each passing day keeps us amazing at how things are progressing and keep us excited about the awe-inspiring tomorrow. But, are we missing something, with the life in the fast lane?

I visited D-Mart few days ago, with friends, to buy some groceries. Shopping in D-Mart is fun, especially if it’s a weekend. Even though it’s quite early (11-12 am), it buzzed with parents and children running to buy the required groceries or other food articles. On any other day, it would have been empty. As we browsed through the grocery section, pushing ourselves among others, I was intrigued by the number of parents picking up ready-made food items such as pickles, spices, tamarind, turmeric, red chilli powder, etc. which could be home-made (I visited D-Mart to do the same). It’s not a surprise though, with the busy lives people go through in the metros, they hardly get time to be with their family. One cannot expect them to live as if they live in a town or village. Sidelining whether the processed and packaged foods are healthy or not, let’s look back at how the previous generation inspired us to live healthy.

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Right after the winter harvest, the weekend markets welcome people with heaps of dried red chillies, raw turmeric and tamarind. People get to select chillies from the varied choices of color, size, and price. My parents, after surfing the whole market, buy the chillies that grabbed their attention. Removing the green stalks of chillies is a whole family enterprise. Coughs and sneezes are the immediate effects and burning sensation in the hands is the later effect. They are dried perfectly for two to three days in the Sun, which will be in equinox. In the mill, our ears experience the symphony of the crackling sound of chillies, again bringing with them coughs and sneezes. The same goes with turmeric—buy, break, dry, and finally ground them in the mill. But the sound will be unbearable with turmeric.

Processing the tamarind is even more fun. But, occasionally, it involves breaking our fingers with hammer or stick while removing the seeds. Unlike others, we could eat while we work. Tamarind involves three step batch-processing where the whole family takes part in it—beating the tamarind with sticks, taking out the seeds, removing the outer layer and the inner waste.

The prices of pulses drop after the rabi season. My parents procure them in the bulk from the trusted retail stores, enough for the whole year. Drying the pulses or wheat in the Sun is even more fun. This is where my mother’s old sarees come to use. Her fingers make the beautiful furrows in the pulses while spreading it which is a treat to watch. She transforms that into a piece of art.

 We should strike a balance between our professional, digital and domestic lives.

My mother makes masalas herself. She grinds cloves, cardamom, black pepper and cinnamon into chat masala and uses it in dishes. I cannot forget the smell of coriander seeds being roasted and grinded. Their aroma fills the whole house lightening up the senses. She even makes ginger-garlic paste at home, a time taking enterprise that tests her patience.

The process of making ghee involves collecting cream from the milk and storing it in the fridge, daily. When my mom feels that enough cream is collected, she turns cream into butter and then into ghee. Even if I sit in the hall, enjoying a movie, the aroma of ghee catches up from the kitchen. Cannot describe in words the effects it create.

Cooking is her favorite pastime. There is more scope to learn, to try new recipes and combinations. It requires great patience and perseverance to make breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner and satisfy everyone in the family. Preparing dosa or idli mixes for breakfast, cooking different varieties in lunch, serving snacks in the evening to fulfill the children’s appetite and finishing with dinner looks easy but hard to execute. Occasionally she serves traditional Indian snacks, boiled groundnuts, boiled or roasted corn, boiled sweet potatoes, boiled pigeon peas, etc. She surprises us with our favorite sweets on our birthdays. She will always be a step ahead of us.

Preparing mango pickle is an art, not a difficult one but needs expertise. And our mothers excel in it. It became a part of their life. It’s very weird in the rural parts of our country to buy pickles in the grocery stores. The first and foremost precautionary step my mother takes is preventing the ingredients to come in contact with water. We clean the soaked mangoes with a cloth, my father cuts the mangoes in to pieces, we remove the seeds, and everyone occasionally savor the sourness of raw mangoes. After the process completes, my mother asks us to taste the pickle. Licking the hot pickle from hand teleports us to some other place, may be heaven, and it seems like the elixir of life. It’s worth experiencing the magic.

Apart from the mango our mothers make seasonal pickles for fun. Tomato, raw tamarind, gooseberry (amla), kenaf  (gongura), jujebi (regu), lemon and many more pickles will be ready even before we ask, providing us infinite taste combinations along with curries. Don’t know how they make all these with perfection. Experience, may be. Affection, may be.

All these chores may look naïve but they held the family together for years. These small things reaped unlikely rewards. They inculcated the habit of healthy living and at the same time teaching us how a family runs. They have shown us that sharing the work reduces burden and provides equal amount of free time to all. They demonstrated how to think long term by maintaining inventory of food stocks and not to run after grocery stores whenever we need some.They taught us the value of leading a frugal life and not going for extravaganzas. Invaluable lessons.
 
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It is not essential for us to do the same. We need not grind wheat using querns as our ancestors did. Our life-style has changed a lot in a single generation. As living in metros is becoming a new norm, we may not get the flexibilities to do all these tasks. We live in apartments where Sun could barely see us. We may have our own dreams and aspirations that do not provide ample time to focus on less important assignments. Our work-commute cycles may not permit us to do all these tasks. Some jobs demand more commitment from us for the benefit of society or nation as a whole. There we have to put aside our personal obligations. On the other hand, more and more women are joining professional services thus breaking the cultural hegemony and demonstrating that men and women should take equal responsibility to maintain home.

There is nothing wrong in becoming D-Martians/Wal-Martians or Food Pandas/Swiggies. But they are robbing our time by providing new avenues to spend it. Shopping and ordering food online can easily become our greatest pastimes. The price difference between the commodities we make at home and the ones they offer is negligible but we are missing all the stuff which bonds the family more closely. They are providing ample time to make us do the things which we are not ought to do.

If we get any chance to replicate all those healthy pastimes, we should grab the opportunities with both hands. We should embrace the technology which has made our lives simpler and at the same time focus on the things which we can control, which make our lives beautiful. The only thing we need to take care about is not to let these seemingly mundane, routine tasks hamper our productivity. We should strike a balance between our professional, digital and domestic lives.

Let’s hope that we get bored by the information/digital revolution and revert to the healthy pastimes that held families together.

(Image source: Times of India)