The other day, I visited a newly opened vegan café in the city. Normally, I steer clear of those because I don’t care much for dairy-free coffee. Not to mention, when I eat out, I like to order chicken—real chicken, not something conjured up from chickpeas and wishful thinking. Nor do I relish the feeling of sanctimonious virtue pressing down on me while I eat. But I do have a weakness for new cafés, so, against my better judgment, I decided to give this one a try. The café made its stance clear from the moment I stepped inside. A ukulele-heavy rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine drifted through the speakers. Each song that followed stayed firmly in that lane—soft, breathy folk and country tunes lamenting the encroachment of concrete over grassy fields, the rain that no longer comes, fossil fuels that should have stayed buried, and the general inhumanity of humanity. Now, I like me a good folk song just as much as the next hillbilly, but what I do not appreciate is is the selective curation that recasts the entire folk and country genre as the song of the hunted, rather than that of the hunter, which—if we’re being honest—it has been for most of its history (think Hank Williams Jr.’s famous A Country Boy Can Survive). The coffee, I will admit, wasn’t bad. A little thin, perhaps, as if it had passed through too many hands and too many principles before reaching my cup, but drinkable. The real disappointment lay elsewhere. The service was slow, not in a leisurely, old-world, we-don’t-let-a-clock-run-our-lives kind of charming way, but in the manner of people who have no particular interest in promptness of any sort. The waiters moved with the languid indifference of people who had just woken up from a long and unsatisfying nap. Their pants clung to their hips with the last desperate grip of fabric resisting gravity. Whether this was a deliberate fashion statement or an unfortunate oversight, I cannot say. Either way, there was a general air of indifference about them, a collective understanding that efficiency and professionalism were for people with fewer opinions about the ethics of dining. At one point, I attempted to catch the attention of a waiter who had been standing by the counter, staring into the distance with a vacant expression. He turned his gaze towards me, slow and unfocused, as though emerging from a deep meditation, and with a sigh so pronounced it could have—ironically—powered one of those wind turbines the café probably championed, he drifted over to take my order. This, I have long since realised, is a phenomenon unique to vegan cafés. Nowhere else would you find such an insistent combination of moral instruction and self-satisfaction. Even the furniture seemed designed to evoke a sense of rustic virtue. The chairs were mismatched and uncomfortable, likely sourced from some thrift shop where they had been selected not for their function but for their place in a narrative. The tables were made of unfinished wood, the kind that left tiny splinters in your fingertips if you dared rest your hand too long. A small chalkboard near the counter listed the café’s composting policy in loving detail. The customer was not so much invited as tolerated, provided he entered in the correct spirit of contrition. * * * In a country where vegetarianism is so deeply ingrained that even many meat-eaters such as myself observe days of abstinence, there is little patience for this kind of moral heavy-handedness. India has plenty of vegetarians—more than anywhere else, in fact. But for all their avoidance of meat—especially beef—Indian vegetarians have never quite taken to veganism. Here, vegetarianism is less about moral posturing and more about tradition, about offerings placed before temple idols, about grandmothers coaxing children to finish their ghee-laden rotis, about the deeply held belief that a glass of warm haldi doodh (turmeric milk) before bed is just as essential as locking the front gate for the night. Needless to say, little Lord Krishna stole butter, not tofu. So while a meatless restaurant is hardly a foreign concept in India, a vegan restaurant is something else entirely. It’s not that these exist; it is that they exist with the air of a missionary, determined to convert rather than to invite. And we Indians are generally skeptical of people who seek, so persistently, to convert us away from our own leanings. The issue is not the absence of dairy or meat, but the presence of a moral crusade that leaves no room for pleasure, culinary creativity, or the possibility that someone might simply want a cup of coffee without a lecture on carbon footprints. The tone is not, “Come in, have a meal, try something new.” Instead, it is, “Sit down, reconsider your life choices, and repent.” Contrast this with your everyday South Indian eatery, many of which serve only vegetarian food. The dosas arrive golden and crisp, the sambar is free-flowing, and no one feels the need to inform you that your meal is cruelty-free because, well, why would they? This is the tragedy of the vegan café, not that it lacks meat or dairy. It’s not even the languid service or the insufferable music. It is that it lacks warmth, that it trades the joy of sharing a meal for the dour obligation of eating responsibly. And in a country where food has always been about community, about hospitality, about feeding even the stranger at your door, that is the one thing that struggles to succeed. Good food should speak for itself, something that all vegan eateries (barring one or two) that I have had the misfortune to frequent, somehow miss. * * * What then happens when everything is political? Take, for example, your usual cup of morning coffee. The choice of bean, the source of the beans, the method of preparation, all become loaded with significance. Is it organic? Is it fair-trade? Is it consumed in an ethically sourced cup? All of a sudden, the very act of sipping the beverage takes on the significance of a political statement. It is no longer an act of personal preference or indulgence; it becomes a sign of loyalty, a declaration of political identity. Moreover, the constant demand for political engagement fosters an atmosphere of suspicion and divisiveness. There is no room for nuance, no space for the shades of gray that make human life so rich. A man couldn’t tell you what he thought of the weather without someone trying to figure out if he was really talking about the climate or the economy or the latest crisis. Any joke can be viewed as a microaggression. Every word becomes a weapon, every silence a betrayal. In this scenario, the quest for truth itself is corrupted. Politics, by its nature, demands allegiance to a side, a camp, a cause. Truth becomes what is useful to the cause rather than what is necessarily accurate or just. The very act of questioning, of seeking out the inconvenient truths that lie outside the prescribed narrative, becomes an act of subversion. A world in which everything is political is one in which a man cannot wake up in the morning and simply stretch, feeling the pleasant creak of his joints, without wondering whether he is unconsciously taking up too much space. He cannot whistle an old tune while walking down the road without considering whether the song has an unsavoury past. He cannot buy a loaf of bread without asking whether the hands that kneaded it were paid fairly, whether the wheat that made it was grown in the right way, whether the plastic that wraps it signals his complacency in a system that should, by all rights, be torn down. If everything is political, then nothing is freely given. There is no kindness that is not seen to carry the weight of a statement, no generosity that is not a transaction. The small graces that once made life bearable—an old man tipping his hat to a passing woman, a shopkeeper wrapping a fragile trinket with care, a neighbour bringing over soup to a sick friend—become subject to interrogation. Did the old man’s politeness carry an outdated assumption? Was the shopkeeper’s caution an act of capitalist servitude? Did the neighbour, by choosing soup, make an inadvertent political statement about the ethics of broth versus stock? Men used to know, instinctively, that there was something sacred in the ordinary, that there was more truth in a shared meal than in ten intelligent discourses. There is an old Hindi saying: ‘Neki kar, darya mein daal.’ Do good and cast it into the river. Let it be carried away, unmarked, done for its own sake and not for praise. But the more political everything becomes, the more we trade real, unguarded kindness for tweet-worthy, performative virtue. In his fascinating essay, Why I Write, George Orwell wrote: “The more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.” Orwell was right, of course, in the way that all keen-eyed men are right when they observe the world for what it is and not for what they wish it to be. But perhaps he underestimated the sheer force of politics when it has been allowed to seep into every crack of human life, filling the gaps like floodwater, leaving no room for the dry land where a man might sit, unbothered, and simply exist. And what is lost when all things are made political? The old friendships that persist despite ideological differences. The ability to delight in a story simply because it is well-told, and not because it reinforces a particular worldview. The long, meandering conversations around a fireplace that have no goal other than to pass the time. These things, the small and the sacred, are swallowed whole by the ever-expanding maw of politics. None of this is to suggest that we should retreat into a cocoon of apathy, pretending that politics is a distant storm we can simply ignore. That would be both naïve and irresponsible. It goes without saying that political responsibility must not be abdicated, for men who forsake their say in the order of things wake up one morning to find themselves ruled by tyrants. The price of inaction is paid in regret. Civic responsibility, after all, remains the price of civilisation. Yet, there is a difference—an essential one—between participating in the civic sphere and allowing politics to colonise the soul. There is wisdom, perhaps, in that ancient counsel to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s—a separation of church and state not merely a matter for governments but for individuals as well. There is also wisdom in the recognition that not every meal, every conversation or story, or every small act of kindness need bear the weight of a cause. To live as though it must is to risk losing sight of the very things that make life worth defending. Image source: The Potato Eaters by Vincent van Gogh.
