“I don’t eat a lot of onions and garlic, so don’t worry. I come from a family that doesn’t care much about onions and garlic,” was the reply given by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman when the debate on skyrocketing onion prices raged the Parliament on Wednesday.
Arguably not a malapropism for the French princess Marie Antoinette’s utterance “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” which translates roughly to ‘let them eat cake’ when the poor french peasants asked for bread, the union FMs statement could indicate an increasing fissure forming between Indian citizens in terms of social and economical frames. Layering Indians in terms of the food they consume and by the nature of their job, the changing India is forward-looking to a mirror that shows a glorious past of Vedic times. The FM was signaling the traditional omittance of Onions by Brahmins and the ‘lesser’ food is deemed to be consumed only by people of a lower social class.
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