Gee, I can’t seem to find my soul!

Last afternoon I came face to face with a question that most people take lifetimes to ponder – is food more important than religion? It may seem like an esoteric question, but once I’m through – provided you’re still with me – you’ll realize that it is one of the most profound questions of the century...

With all of us lugging in holiday spirit and suitcases to work, I decided I had the luxury of a really long luncheon – complete with food, reading and mindless chatter. So, in preparation for it, I got the best meatball sub ever made and plonked it on my hallmark table by the window; normally, I wouldn’t leave such a marvelous piece of creation unguarded, but an irrepressible surge of thirst overcame all sense of security and I’d just disappeared for a few seconds to grab a bottle of water, when....

I return in mouth-watering anticipation only to find a pious co-worker blocking my view of the sandwich and, worse still, performing his salah. Now, this could take anywhere between 5 minutes and 5 hours, depending on his degree of spirituality. For a split second, my instinct was to dash around him and grab my sandwich – lest you think I am some kind of werewolf, imagine marinara and tender meat balls and provolone cheese spilling out from a toasted roll of Italian bread that can hardly contain its own richness. If you still don’t sympathize, I’m forced to conclude that you haven’t had the world’s best meatball sub (if you want to reverse that -- and I strongly urge that you do – I can be contacted for hours and location ;)).

Getting back to my predicament, my spiritual co-worker probably thought it was a pork roll sausage, cos at least from the angle I was in, he seemed to be directing a lot of his prayer to it. So, being the very considerate soul I am, I decided to wait it out just a wee bit longer and grabbed the next best thing – a copy of the Atlantic, deciding to satisfy my hunger for knowledge instead (some compensation).

He did finally leave after an interminable five minutes and left me thinking about our priorities as human beings. Here was a guy that obviously rendered a brown paper bag, depicting one of the three essential survival factors of life, insignificant in the face of religion. As for me, the only reason I waited was cos it was his religion and obviously extremely important to him. My own religion, I gave up the day I figured out I wasn’t getting any kind of nirvana till I ate that inexcusably juicy piece of angus; the biggest irony is that people pray to the cow without realizing jus how sal(i)vating it can be :)

Like I have said in excruciating detail many times before, I rarely make masochistic promises to myself, certainly none that include giving up food or living with rodents or freezing to death. It’s a short life we lead on this earth (though sometimes it does seem incredibly long) and there is enough misery to deal with, what with destiny and nature and god and the universe all competing to dole out their share. So, other than making sure that my right to wave my fist stops at my neighbor’s nose, I don’t really claim to have any I’m-holier-than-thou principles.

There was one thing, however, that I once told myself I’ll never ever do, mainly cos I felt I needed a “cool” principle, since everyone else seemed to be having one. “Paper bags,” my environmentalist friend would say, fixing the salesgirl with an ominous stare, rendering preposterous, even the mere suggestion of an existing alternative. “Let’s jus walk down a few more blocks, we’ll find the restaurant, I just don’t believe in 411” another would suggest, even if we are starving to death on a cold February night. “I don’t drink Starbucks coffee”, someone else would say a tad condescendingly to the warm and refreshing cappuccino in my hand; I consider telling them the “actual” crime is to stand there and shiver in the cold when a perfectly divine cup of caffeine, albeit capitalistic, is at your disposal, but change my mind. After all, my world-view is much too personal to me :)

So, my own little principle was that I’d never eat veal in my life (bad enough that I am politically incorrect in my thoughts and opinions). Moreover, I do think it’s unfair to feed a perfectly normal cow hormones and make it grow stunted all its life jus cos you wanted a certain added flavor in your meat (on a completely different note, I did believe till a week ago that bovine meat was perfectly divine as is). So, the one thing I told myself I’d never do, unfortunately had to do with food, the one thing I rarely deprive myself of. Isn’t that supposed to be the point of a principle, anyway? Deprivation, sacrifice, masochism? However, it makes it easier to break as well. And hence, last week I lost the last vestige of my ‘soul’ by giving up that little promise.

Before you make any judgments, I think you should hear me out. As it happened, we had this absolutely marvelous holiday luncheon planned in this absolutely marvelous Italian restaurant, where everyone swore the veal parmesan was absolutely divine. I must say I was a tad tempted but I decided I’d hear the list of entrees and give my principle some credence over good food. The waiter reeled off the list: veal parmesan --- long pause --- cacophonous rattle including chicken-somethin, mussels in red sauce, mussels in white whine and something indecipherable at the end. Since I sincerely believe that white meat should not be considered when there is some perfectly good red meat available (Indian cuisine exclusive) and that sea-food has no business in a meal beyond the first course (walnut encrusted salmon and mango-salsa-laced-shrimp-sushi excepted) I decided I just had to go for it. I felt a tiny little pang of guilt, but once the guy waltzed in with a dozen plates of aromatic, sizzling slabs of veal, the regret was long forgotten.

Anyway, the good thing (other than the incredibly delicious meat) was that I wasn’t the last remaining ‘soul-less’ person on earth. Everyone at the table not only ate veal for probably the thousandth time in their lives with not an ounce of remorse, but also had interesting anecdotes to share about the many ways of cervically dislocating (euthanasia, for the uninitiated, though it probably doesn’t sound like mercy-killing) the mice in the lab. Trust a bunch of stem-cell-researching, cancer-curing, evolution-touting, meat-eating scientists to always bring up the rear on the list of soulful people.

Just to clarify, I am not totally soul-less. Every time I have to snip the edge of a mouse’s tail, I feel like a monster. But then I put it in perspective --- half a million people die of heart and lung disease each year, and every experiment that involves a little rodent brings us closer to saving a human life. I gotta do what I gotta do. And in another part of the world, someone else burns a research lab to save that very mouse. They gotta do what they gotta do.

There are some things we believe in and some we don’t. Ultimately, in my opinion, the biggest sin is to not believe at all. Food and God apart, passion is but one of the most important survival factors...I might never understand what prompted my co-worker to abandon all in the middle of a work day and make a trip to the lounge and do his bidding to God, what I can understand is his intensity of feeling – that is the plane we share. You could sit in the Himalayas and count rosary beads, roll your tongue over every inch of that perfectly done steak or spend hours injecting disease-curing genes into little rodents – as long as you believe...