Drowsy Dissertations - VOL I

Fifteen days is a long time. Long enough that in these last fifteen days, I have lined up a number of blogworthy thoughts (atleast three) inside my cranium. So instead of putting them as unrelated posts, I thought of making a series. So I created one and named it "Drowsy Dissertations". Why? Well, most of the things that I am gonna say occured to me last week. And if you read my previous post, you'd know that most of the time last week I was doing just two things - sleeping or feeling sleepy! So much for small talk - on to the main show now...

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On Wednesday last, one of my non-Indian friends (Kaan) and I were chit-chatting about things in general when the conversation veered towards Indian food. Kaan is a great fan of Indian food and soon enough, he started talking about kebabs and the various other non-vegetarian delicacies that are part of what one may call Mughlai cuisine. When I told him that I was a vegetarian, Kaan said, "Oh, you too! Hey man, what's it about India that about half the country is vegetarian there?"

My response was: "Well, maybe its just a matter of following what people around you do. I was born and brought up in a family where no one ate meat. So neither do I. I guess its the same for all those half a billion Indians who are vegetarians."

"C'mon! There's gotta be a better reason for giving up all the delicious non-veg stuff you guys cook in India!"

I suggested maybe its because our economy is agriculture based and so it makes sense to be a vegetarian. But Kaan countered that an agriculture based economy might actually be an effect of a vegetarian population rather than its cause. And the debate continued and I kept losing.

The truth is that I did not know why so many Indians choose to be vegetarians. Worse, I did not know why I am a vegetarian. And so I decided to do a bit of introspection. Strong animals eat weak animals all over the world. Why is it okay for a lion to eat a deer and not for a me to eat chicken?

When I tried to uncover the differences in the two situations, I came up with the following - a lion is not morally aware, while I am. In other words, a lion has no choice but to eat the deer. In fact it never explicitly chooses to be a non-vegetarian. It just is a non-vegetarian - a being that is genetically programmed to be so. However, we humans have the ability to choose what we think is correct. Hence, the moral question applies only to us and not to lions or any other creatures. Moreover most of these creatures cannot survive without meat, while we humans have a demonstrated ability to live comfortably off a vegetarian diet.

However, this only answers the question of why it is okay for lions to eat meat. It still does not answer the other half about why I shouldn't. The answer to that was tougher to find. I could not find any fault in the simple process of eating meat. The predator-prey model has infact survived millions of years of Darwinian selection and is still the prevalent ecological relationship in the wild. However, what disturbs me is the complete impersonalization of the process that humans have brought about. If I decide to become a non-vegetarian, I would not go out there to find and kill the chicken I need. Instead, the chicken would be taken out of a coop by someone I don't know, would be mercilessly hacked to death and handed to me in a plastic bag in return for some cash. And all of this would take place in a slaughter-house where hundreds of other chickens do nothing but wait ... just wait for the day when the door of their coop would open and their life would close.

A prey in the wild has a life of its own. It runs, sleeps, mates, fights and maybe someday, it falls prey to a stronger creature. Not them poor chickens! The sole purpose of their existence is to get killed. It is not meat eating that I abhor, it is this idea that a particular animal is doomed to be a piece of meat on someone's plate before it has even hatched out of its egg. Immediately, I am reminded of the movie The Matrix in which humans were subjected to a similar regime - they were reared solely to provide power to the machines. That the chicken gets killed is just incidental. It is the oppression it undergoes while it is alive that bothers me. And as far as possible, I will try my best to not to do anything that supports the meat industry which is guilty of inflicting such oppression.