Ground Realities
Potatoes, politics and a few other things
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.
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