The Japanese meanwhile had removed the pickled worms and all other offending dishes from the table and presumed our objections were on religious grounds- they were largely Buddhist or Shinto but never made fun of our Hindu or Jain sentiments, including the reluctance of even the men in our group to bathe nude in mixed community spas – our religion demanded it, they presumed.You have to do as your religion says and we must help you to do so, they oft repeated even as the line, ‘My religion does not permit me,” became a joke among us Indians.The Japanese were not known to be a particularly peaceful, non-violent or tolerant race before World War II as seen from their ritual suicides and their atrocities on the Chinese and others. But I guess the atom bomb changed them quite a bit.Whatever it may be, their accommodation of our religious sentiments and ready willingness to pull out all the stops to make it possible, in many ways shaped my own attitude to such issues, particularly the food interests of others – you do not force your food preferences on others, you do not eat what you don’t want to, even if it is the very healthy cluster beans which I hate – though here I will get booted out of the house if I raise religious grounds for my objections!Then, again, I recall some years ago, my rather conservative Hindu aunt had a conservative Muslim guest to dinner, among others. “I will come,” he said. “But if you are serving non-veg, could the meat please be halal? Otherwise, I could eat vegetarian, that would be no problem.”My aunt insisted we accompany her cook to the halal shop (so that he didn’t cheat) and insisted she must feed her guests what they wanted, not what she thought was desirable. That night she had both kinds of meat on her table and other guests partook of both.That is why I think the controversy over BCCI ordering only halal meat for all its players is a manufactured one.Where is the ban on halal meat in the Hindu scriptures? Even when Lord Ram goes hunting for deer in the jungles, at least I did not find any mention anywhere in the Ramayana whether the animal was killed by halal or jhatka I presume it was killed by an arrow, which is neither here nor there; and isn’t that the beauty of the practice of the Hindu way of life- no dogmas, no rigid traditions, no hard and fast rules?
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