Food at Wedding ceremonies
Food at Wedding ceremonies
Food is an essential factor for survival. We all eat food, and that is completely normal. If you grew up in South India, you will get to visit many weddings occasionally where you will have to eat the food they serve there as their token of gratitude. At these places, you gain valuable knowledge and moral values which could help you in leading a life. It is like this - If you have ever sat at the conventional collective dinner tradition at a South Indian Wedding and if you ever learned anything from it, you can face anything in life. So let us now deeply analyze the experiences at a South Indian wedding ceremony. I Bet you could relate a few things.
Okay, so you enter the hall where everyone is expected to sit down and eat dinner. If the organizers are generous/rich enough, they provide chairs, or else you need to sit on the floor on arranged mats.
Now, since I mentioned - "South Indian" we get to eat on Banana Leaves. As the hall gets filled up, the catering department starts rolling over.
Firstly, a guy carries the bundle of banana leaves and provides everyone - one each. If you find any defect in your leaf, something like a hole, crater or even a black hole, you need to quickly identify it and replace it before he leaves your row, otherwise, you get ignored by him for the rest of your life.
Now one guy follows and gives you this incredibly lightweight plastic glass which requires your complete attention. If you leave the glass on the table without firm physical contact, it will fly away. So you need to wait for another guy who enters holding a historic steel jug to fill water into the glass, making the earth's gravity act on it and after some time making it stay stable.
Now, there is this one thing you need to do with the empty leaf. Clean it. You need to now take the water from the stable and stubborn glass and you need to splash a little of it on the leaf so as to remove the dust particles which might have invisibly stuck to the leaf. Now, since you cannot drink that water and you need to carefully make the best use of it, you need to displace it on the surface below your leaf. So due to the adhesive force of H20, the surface of the floor/table and the lower part of the leaf are temporarily attached and you can eat your food, with your banana leaf executing no simple harmonic motion.
Now, after almost completely exhausting your knowledge in science, one guy carries a heap of NaCl crystals and drops it exactly in the corner of your leaf, so that you can balance the purposely unbalanced equations which are going to land in your plate(sorry, leaf).
Then comes the pickle guy. According to me, pickle is like the least eaten thing on the leaf, so since everyone leaves the pickle, I always awkwardly assume that they must be recycled from the leaves of people who ate before me, so I don't even maintain eye contact with the pickle, and if I ever hear anyone tell me that they ate pickle at a ceremony's dinner, I immediately advise them to puke it out. Done with the salt and pickle.
Now comes the guy with palya. Basically, palya is the mixture of all the random things found in a kitchen, cut by jobless energetic aunties. One by one, catering guy places samples of all the palyas the aunties creatively invented in the kitchen and decorates your plate.Your plate should now look like a cute bonsai vegetable garden.
All these are placed only in the upper half of your leaf and everyone knows you are hardly going to look at it. Now comes the guy with the payasam. Payasam is one of the most confusing mysteries I have ever come across. It is basically the elastic form of vermicelli swimming in a pool of sweet yellow/peach colored "sticky" liquid. My question is, how do you guys eat it?? You cannot carry it with your fingers since they are lava hot. Even after lifting it, it slips halfway traveling to your mouth and all you can hardly do is lick your fingers. Now you look like you are desperate for another dose of payasam but you hardly want to thank the guy for dropping it on your leaf.
Then comes the over-fried bajjis or bondas. If you are a true South Indian, you will know the misery of foolishly considering the bajji or bonda to be at room temperature and taking a bite of it. You should never judge bajjis or bondas by their covers, since they may be incredibly hot inside, so hot that you need to remove it out of your mouth and start blowing air out of your mouth and abuse the bajji which is actually laughing at your carelessness.
If it is a high budget dinner arrangement you will get a dosa or probably poori-sagu which is very limited and the person serving it becomes too stubborn to give another one and tries to act like you are trying to grab him by the balls.
Then comes rice. You get approximately 2.303 seconds to explain the rice guy about how much you want him to serve and he will provide exactly 10 times the amount you explained. Once he has put it in your leaf, it belongs to you. You need to now dig a hole in the center of the rice heap and one guy is going to pour sambar into it. Your plate now looks like a white mini volcano just erupted. Now all the aunties around you try to speculate/guess whether you can eat it. Sometimes they even place bets on whether you will waste the rice or not. They start judging your background, upbringing, culture, DNA, brain cell count etc. Have you ever wondered what the old aunties carry in their handbags, I can guess they carry shotguns to shoot any kid leaving rice on the leaf. That's the reason why they keep an eye on you and provide social validation on such delicate issues. After the volcano cools down, the appala (or papad) comes to the rescue.
Appalas are one of the best inventions of mankind. They make the boring anna-sambar combination beautiful. They are just like wafers in ice-cream. Now after finishing the whole plate, your digestive system sends the brain signals to indicate the people around you that it is full and it cannot take any more food. Now the brain comes up with this weird idea of a burp. You can also see many kids struggling to take more of food into them and their demon moms stuff more into their mouths saying, "You will not get good food till the next functions' dinner" and express their lack of social anxiety(which is good).
Meanwhile, the water guy runs around the place filling glasses and spilling half the water during the transition between two glasses.
Now, this extremely weird thing happens. There is always a cameraman appointed to flash light on people and take a video of them eating dinner. Now there is always another cocky guy behind him pulling the wire and directing him on whom to attack next. People always try to give candid poses to the camera while eating and a few also stop chewing so that they don't look ugly in the video.
The organizer of the dinner now walks row by row, person by person and asks for their review of the food. People fake it all the time and sometimes over-rate the food. But there are times when I genuinely fell that the food tasted very good and I appreciate it. It happens very rarely, the last time it happened is I suppose when dinosaurs existed or a little before that.
Now there is the show-stopper, the ice cream guy who steals the limelight and magically glows up the atmosphere. Kids look up to that person more than they ever looked up to their parents when they ask for that cup of ice-cream. The kids who were a while back expecting their stomachs to explode, now demand another cup of ice-cream from the guy serving. The banana leaves are now folded laterally into a half and then you walk out to wash your hands, expecting them to recycle your unused pickle.😅
Sai Govardhan
