If you want to make Indians laugh, show them what Europeans call a “buffet”. Even in a luxury hotel, the spread is so small that it would fit the look of an Indian, who is broad in nature. In a slick Parisian hotel, the buffet plate was the width of my palm, perhaps to discourage guests from piling on too many things. On the other hand, in most of Asia, especially in India, a five-star buffet is designed to convey that the hotel has done damage on it. Buffet is such a spread of dishes that one has to explore the land first. The entire spread has to be circulated. Still, there will be surprises, the nooks from where the food comes out and some things that are not on display but can be requested or extorted.
There’s a lot wrong with an Indian buffet. To understand why this is so, take a walk with me, as though we Indians are among a vast array of perversions.
Indian buffet is primarily a spectacle. There’s food, too, but most people, especially when they fill up their plates—some of them in their pajamas. They feel at home; They’re eating at the same address where they sleep, and they pay to sleep here, and that should be the definition of home. So they show up in clothes they would never wear otherwise if they were going to be in the line of sight of a hundred strange strangers. Maybe they wear pajamas because they don’t want their stomach to be weighed down during this unlimited meal.
There is so much to choose from in an Indian buffet that people are able to fill their plate according to their mental state. Larger people’s plates are usually filled with fruit, which is usually their first course in public. They are also happy to display a plate of fruit, as opposed to later spread visits which are usually more discreet. But most people fill their plate with bread and sugar, because most people are honest most of the time about their choices.
The entire buffet scene is like a rave party, with distressed waiters doused in sugar and flour; And addicts of these two sources of nutrition want more and more, screaming for dealers’ attention, asking why something is taking so long, how long they should wait; How long will their poor hungry children have to wait before the next fix. These eager food addicts know that, unlike in the West, the waiters here are so powerless they can never tell, “It’s a buffet, go and have it yourself.” All this survey is the holy man on a low-carb diet, for whose spread is not much, but he comforts himself by saying that humans don’t need much.
The buffet is an open incentive to eat as much as you can, which means you should consume more than you need. Everything about the food and the food is about the extras and the space.
Even a modest buffet, as offered on a Hindi film set, requires a back-end supply system that takes up considerable space, and is not just physical space. I have always associated the sets of Indian films with food. Location of food and food residues. One of the first vehicles to arrive at the location is the caterer van. And the saddest part of a set are those unequally cheap aluminum tables with white cloth shrouds on them, plus the sad men who make elaborate but empty foodstuffs and put them in massive vats.
In a significant way, the Indian buffet, especially at a five-star resort, is akin to Indian democracy. Every major area is represented and there is a sense that there is something for everyone. To be precise, everyone with a real voice, ie. The buffet reflects its own tyranny of the majority. The minority that is very fit is not represented, and even some of the things the superfit get to eat, because some well-known foods are, somehow, by some miracle, healthy.
At the end of it, much of the Indian buffet goes to waste. Some people tell me that about half the food in a typical buffet goes to waste. This scares most Indians, including those who say they will never forgive a five star hotel for not having a buffet breakfast. But then again, I never fully understood the horrors in ruin. As in, I have no idea why waste is such a bad thing. What does it matter if a kilo of biryani is consumed by a man who does not need that much food, or is wasted as uneaten food on his plate, or is left in a vat on a buffet which Left to throw? Food has been paid for at every level, and if the leftovers are eventually passed on to the animals and microbes whose existence makes up a complex ecosystem, what’s so sad about it? The planet’s woes of carbon emissions and lack of fresh water are no longer tolerable as one man sits and serves biryani.
Nevertheless, there is a certain obscenity in excess and waste, especially in a poor country.
Consider a huge Indian five-star buffet from the point of view of a new waiter who hails from a distant impoverished village. When he recovers from the discovery that a meal at a hotel costs about half of his monthly salary, perhaps imagine when he sees people taking heaps of delicious things and leaving them all behind, or When the hotel throws away hundreds, what’s on its mind. kilos of fully edible food. This is porn.
Often, obscenity has no consequences for us. But it’s hard to deny that obscenity is a way to show disrespect to the unlucky. Some hotels say they have arrangements to provide extra food to the poor, but I totally don’t buy it. Even if this is true it is rude to send rotting food to the poor.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist and producer of the Netflix series ‘Decauld’.