Defeating dish washing by a few points, buying vegetables is the most boring and arduous household task. It’s a multidisciplinary art — economics, botany, mathematics all come into play. Even when strolling through the vegetable market, an astute buyer makes a mental calculation of the time the produce on display will stay fresh. Longer that window, greater the flexibility in the kitchen. During that pre-delivery inspection, a few vegetables such as okra get mutilated. Fortunately, seasoned buyers can intuitively identify the right vegetable with panache.
Every weekend, I accompany my father to the market, a place with unmatched dynamism and uniqueness. Not many locations can boast so many entry and exit points with the core of a circuitous maze. As we move inside, the density of air gets thicker with competing aromas. In different seasons, the market expresses its richness through a variety of vegetables. Beneath its dynamic nature, there is an underlying current of aggression stemming from a sense of urgency. The area gets consumed by the repeated chants of hawkers. Gleaming in sweat with watchful eyes, they are proficient in multitasking — exchanging notes, weighing items on a shaky balance, sprinkling water on their stock, bargaining with people.
Suddenly, there is a loud shriek piercing through the commotion. Everyone stops in their tracks. A bull appears from nowhere breaking the crowds, and the buyers dash helter-skelter. Sellers collaborate swiftly to create a green corridor, steering the bull out of this madness. As time passes, the second law of thermodynamics is followed — chaos and entropy keep increasing in the market.
Everyone is busy and in a hurry. As in the gym, everyone lifts weights. Elbowing, scrambling and stretching to find their way in an overly congested place at the same time, avoiding slips and trips on pathways lubricated by biomass. Amid all this, there is never a stampede. This self-regulated crowd can be a perfect case study for group behaviour. Also, the market is a wellspring of microorganisms, and thus an ideal place to get herd immunity, training the immune system and building resilience against a spectrum of illnesses. Outside the market, the maelstrom of crowds leaves behind footprints in the form of asymmetrical parking.
Without perusing any statistical record, it is apparent that the average age in any vegetable market is higher than the median age of our country. It is one such domain where the demographic dividend is not being reaped. The art and wisdom of selecting suitable vegetables is limited to the elders in the family. Youngsters are too preoccupied with the Internet to learn such skills. Our ignorance is so firmly rooted that we cannot differentiate between white goosefoot and fenugreek. We become clueless in decoding the ripeness of watermelon from its surface web patterns.
One day, scrolling through YouTube, I happened to see a vegetable market in a western country. Prices were meticulously written in wooden placards, under the shade of glossy dome-shaped tensile structures. An old gentleman was playing soothing music on his electric guitar. Many stalls had oversized and exotic vegetables. It was a quiet place without any hullabaloo; giving the vibes of a pleasant experience.
I hope beyond the calls of smooth roads, political willpower shall place delightful vegetable markets high on its manifesto. India shall be a developed nation when teachers stop equating clamorous classrooms with vegetable markets.
Our educational institutions’ ambitious odyssey is now aligned with the evolving landscape of knowledge and employment. Now they talk of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. But no one teaches the art of buying fresh vegetables. In the distant future, pedagogy can become embedded in people’s lives only if it begins to take such experiences under its wings. Till then, our parents and online delivery portals will have to bridge the gap.At the end of tiresome grocery shopping, before one settles down at home, the shopping bag gets subjected to intense scrutiny from in-house culinary artists. After receiving a few strokes of criticism, it is satisfying to see the refrigerator overflowing with the harvest, the hard work of farmers who create magic from soil.
lalitbhardwaj005@gmail.com
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