1. 6 rotis with bison ghee spread on them. Two curries: one bowl full of arabi, tomato, green pepper and about four teaspoonfuls of beans. Two teaspoonfuls of apple salad. Having requested just four rotis without ghee didn’t have any effects on the kitchen.
2. Need to compare it with Sallekhana diet: it was one roti with two teaspoonful of curry: it meant 600 rice grains.
3. This plate had 2400 ( 2700 ) rice grains worth of rotis ( though I still consider ghee to be complementary as I had requested to not add it ). Vegetables bowl with arabi is equivalent to at least 30 teaspoonful of rice grains: 3000 rice grains. Bean curry is worth 600 rice grains. Apple salad, two teaspoonful is at least 200 rice grains ( that’s an understatement not litotes or meiosis because apple is costlier compared to rice. )
4. Total: 6500 rice grains worth of lunch. It was posh-No. It was a middle class lunch: it wasn’t posh. It was a lunch I used to have a few months ago. Middle class people here consider themselves kings and queens. That’s where the delusional term posh is born from. Upper middle class people start considering themselves to be sole nutrition givers, as if entire world economy revolves around them. Even in terms of pure rice grains worth it was 10.33 times costlier compared to Sallekhana diet.
Cost comparison:
1. Apple: about 90 rupees per Kilogram it’s 2.25 times costlier compared to rice grains so one on one comparison used here isn’t justified though I have no other way to convert these else I won’t be able to manage on a regular basis in the given rubric.
2. Comparing ghee with apple: ghee wins as the costliest item in your plate. Giving up ghee altogether might save your pocket and do a good, a lasting good to your health and happiness if you can convince the kitchen for it.
3. Ghee is 6.88 or 7 times costlier compared to even apple: the second highest in terms of cost.
4. Wheat is 25 rupees per Kilogram which means it’s one item worth less than rice grains which are 40 rupees per kilogram.
5. On an average, 30 grams of wheat flour or atta is needed to prepare one roti.
6. One teaspoonful of heaped sugar is 7.5 grams of sugar. Normal teaspoonful is 4 grams.
7. Let’s take heaped teaspoonfuls as rubric to measure rice grains and wheat grains.
8. Six rotis are worth 180 grams of wheat which is, at the rate of 40 grams per rupee, less than a rupee per roti. Adding cooking cost, LPG ( Liquid Petroleum Gas) cost and serving, some hotels here sell twenty rupees per four pieces or four rupees per roti. Which means 25 rupees for six rotis. Which means 9375 rice grains at the rate of 375 rice grains per rupee. This won’t be a good conversion.
9. Equivalent conversion which is sustainable is 180 grams of wheat or 2700 rice grains. Here, we haven’t added cooking cost similar to ghee cost. We can update the total rice grains amount today into conversion and arrive at 6500 rice grains. If we added ghee cost it would have been 12-15 times costlier compared to Sallekhana diet. Sallekhana diet was just a few days ago: one roti without ghee and two teaspoonful of curry or rice which was sometimes stale and sometimes fresh.
Lunch
Lunch 11/12/2025
1. It took me 10:15:66 minutes to finish lunch, put rest of the food on table, put plate to the wash basin and wash my hands in the washroom.
2. Grandmother had served two rotis without bison ghee ( as requested) and a small bowl of moong pulse with three spoonfuls of potato-mooli leafy greens and about half teaspoonful of chutney made with guava, garlic, onion and coriander mixed with salt.
3. She asked me repeatedly if I was keeping an oath. Why wasn’t I eating enough like before. Why wasn’t I taking tea. When I told her I was taking tea, in fact I took tea in the morning -she didn’t believe me. I told her I would prepare tea in the afternoon. Then I asked if she had tea. She said she takes tea many times everyday. I told her I was taking tea only once everyday. Then she left the room with the bowl which had khichdi and potato brinjal vegetable curry in it.
4. I had a roti, one teaspoonful of rice ( not more than 75-80 boiled rice grains) and one teaspoonful of potato-mooli leafy greens with half a glass of water.
5. I have continued with a similar regimen for twenty days now. Almost three weeks. I recall how after the VocabTrainer program finished on November 20th and for the next week I felt very troubled. The coercion was of the worst kind of abuse ever experienced in my life. It brought me to questions about the family, village, neighborhood, city or country : were they going through an acute famine. I was reading a book on Halifax Disaster and I thought we were supposed to cut down our requirements including mobile data used, electricity consumption, water consumption and of course detergent powder ( which was now being supplied rarely, that’s , once per two months. I used to wash my dishes regularly but now no more). I compared the Halifax Disaster with COVID 19 and thought it was the reason. It wasn’t.
6. I decided to find out why were they continuously giving out normal portions which I wasn’t supposed to eat. I was supposed to be a transformed individual who not only touched feet of elders but also cared about whether parents and grandmother had food before me or not.
7. It wasn’t gentle. What I couldn’t figure out was why were they insisting on not just serving normal portions but also on consuming medicines which might have increased hunger in case I was suffering from bulimia. They kept doing that without any sense because eating full meals meant subjecting oneself to even more of abuse of the same kind. I thought it was Sallekhana, Paryopvesh or Euthanasia given without declaration.
Dancing light of grace 