http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=32234
Daily Star, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Potatoes, politics and a few other things
By Syed Badrul Ahsan
POLITICS and potatoes have been getting into a rather interesting mix
of late. With the caretaker government letting us in on the thought
that one way of handling all those problems relating to rice would be
for us to go for a consumption of potatoes, it is quite evident why
potatoes should now take centre stage in our thoughts.
Let us face facts: there is a deep, perhaps even deepening, crisis in
the country. Whether you call it the signs of impending hunger or a
silent famine or a plain problem with the supply and distribution of
food, the truth is out there for you to see. And it is that people are
actually worried about their meals, indeed about their ability in the
days ahead to come by the morsels of rice they need to sustain
themselves physically.
To be sure, there are all the people ready to pounce on the media (and
everyone unable to administer the state has historically fallen back
on the media in the search for a scapegoat to explain away his or her
failure) and tell you that all these stories about a crisis are
fundamentally the result of journalistic inventiveness. You do not
have to buy their arguments, or even to listen to them. The caravan
must move on.
What you must really do is reflect on the question of why such a
crisis has come to pass, and what those in charge of the state in
these times mean to do about it. And we have already had an inkling
into their thoughts, which, of course, becomes obvious with all this
emphasis on the place of potatoes on our dining tables. Only the other
day, it fell to the chief of army staff to offer before an august
gathering of newspaper editors as many as ten dishes prepared with
potatoes.
Those of us who were not there are not in a position to comment on the
nature of the dishes or even on the fact of how savoury or otherwise
those items may have been. But that really is not the point. What is
of essence is this realisation once again of how significant a place
potatoes have acquired for themselves in history.
Those of us familiar with the long story of Ireland and its people
know, too, how potatoes once got entwined with the terror of a famine.
That may have been a dot in the long tale of civilisation, but there
is the far bigger symbolism that comes into it. And it is that
whenever people have faced the prospect of hunger anywhere, it is
potatoes they have fallen back on.
Potatoes have, in a diversity of ways, come to the aid of men and
women everywhere. But if potatoes have themselves gone missing, or
have become prey to a shortfall, fortunes have taken a nosedive. And
quite naturally, too. In Bangladesh, at least till this point in time,
we have not been confronted with the problem of a potato shortfall,
which, of course, gives us hope that we as a people will not go
hungry.
But what happens if one of these days you wake up and find, to your
exasperation and helpless indignation, that the very traders who have
in these past fourteen months made a misery of our lives through their
predatory pricing instincts decide that the cost of potatoes must go
up as well?
Having been part of the collective experience in this country, you and
I know as well as anyone else that almost everything is possible in
this land of endless dreams. You watch the government going after a
class of the corrupt, and you cheer. But then you remember, as a
sudden afterthought, that there are people who, despite their manifest
bad doings, seem to be getting on rather well.
You see all the men who have messed up our lives in the past many
years being carted off to prison. And you cheer vociferously. But then
comes this disturbing talk of a Truth Commission, the implication
being that if one of these villains admits to his criminality and
coughs up his questionably acquired wealth to the state, the state
will let him off the hook. You turn to the window, you feel the
gathering force of a kalbaishakhi storm, and you wonder where this
noble thought of rule of law has, with alacrity, gone missing.
So there you have all these worries eating you up from within. You
pray hard, before the Almighty, for potatoes to remain within the
bounds of our limited ability to buy them. Perhaps the Lord of the
Universe will deign to hear our collective prayers. Remember how in
the old days, when drought threatened to stalk the land, a collective,
concerted prayer for rain coming in the nature of a song led to
instant showers and so revived the life in the souls of the parched
fields? That prayer could be what we need today. But then, there is
the worry, men being the grasping creatures they have become today, of
whether such worries can draw the sympathies of the heavens any more.
Why not give it a try anyway?
And as you do so, go looking into the nature of the potato again.
Where would you be without it? There are far too many food items that
are in huge requirement of the potato. It is like water, which takes
the shape of any vessel you pour it in. Potatoes, if you have had the
time or inclination to observe it all, can be added to any dish you
would like to prepare for the family. A whole lot of us, a horde in
fact, have grown habituated to meat being cooked to the accompaniment
of potatoes.
Of course, you can cook meat all by itself. It goes down your palate
pretty well, but when you throw some potatoes into it, a certain
degree of glamour is brought into the whole enterprise. Do you see the
point?
There are the potato chips our children keep munching in school, and
later at home, as they watch those ubiquitous cartoons on television.
You cannot have a hamburger without a good helping of French fries,
all made from potatoes.
Boiled potatoes, along with beans and some condiments, serve as
civilised food in any home in the West. Here in Bangladesh, the aloo
(our translation of "potato" which, incidentally, is referred to as
"potata" by the Pathans inhabiting the western regions of Pakistan)
has positioned itself as a dominant player on the dining table, or on
the more traditional paati as the case may be.
We have aloo bhorta that, through its sheer appeal in taste makes us
eat more rice than we normally would. Then there is aloo bhaji, an
item we particularly enjoy with parathas on a holiday. We have known
women who simply swoon over thoughts of preparing, for their friends
or families, aloor dom. The aloo puri is what we eat in our
restaurants over a cup of tea. And these days there is a ubiquity of
shops in the urban areas happily selling aloo parathas to people who
have no problem with eating, or little embarrassment in seeing their
waistlines cross the frontier into unabashed unwieldiness.
Let all these thoughts of the beauty of the potato, of its seductive
appeal, insinuate their way into your consciousness as you reflect on
the political significance being accorded to the food in our times.
Who knows? There might come a time when you will remember someone
called Dan Quayle, and remember how he once mis-spelt the word
"potato" (when a little boy in a school he happened to be visiting as
United States vice-president spelt it right) by adding an "e" at the
end of the last "o." There could well be reverse inspiration in the
thought. But, beware! There is, too, such a thing as a couch potato.
Look around you. Whole platoons of couch potatoes are waiting out
there, to run you over.
|
