If you are the one, thinking that the curve of hospitality spirit at people’s home, is tracing a downward trajectory in today’s busily engineered life, well, it’s time you revised your opinion. For, even in these modern times, there are few folks, who, when you call on them, feed you with surfeit food, till you end up feeling stodgy, even queasy at times.
Just picture this on your mental screen. Barely you’d have put in your appearance at their place, and lo! You’re offered a tall glass of fruit drink, shortly accompanied by a piping-hot cuppa, even when you haven’t evinced any interest in having it. Next coming your way are the sizzling-hot, golden-brown, crisp dosas, precariously perching on the ‘palta’.
Remember a caveat here. You should take care to not compliment the taste of these dosas, even if they happen to be the ambrosial delight. In case you do, then be prepared to cram down, at least half a dozen of them.
Now, after bolting down a couple of dosas, you suddenly discover your digestive system doing a deadly somersault, with the dangerous combo of potatoes contained in ‘sabzi’, and roasted gram-dal in ‘chutney’. Every few seconds, you hold your breath for sometime, just to avoid letting out wrong sounds from wrong orifices, at wrong times and at the wrong places.
As you are laboriously tucking in the food, the host comes up with some wisecracks, in order to regale you. Just to humour her/him, you try laughing with great difficulty. But to your horror, your laugh sounds like a throaty sound of a turkey, which is having a nasty hiccup. To hide the embarrassment, you try to cough. Now, this sounds like your laugh. The host indulgently smiles back, as she plies you with more dosas.
By now, till the gills, you are so over-stuffed with food that you shudder at the sight /smell of even scrumptious delicacies. In fact, you’d have reached a stage wherein even if you are an irredeemable foodie, the very thought of food fills you with revulsion, even gives you convulsions. Heaven help if you start throwing up in your host’s place itself.
Strangely at that point of time, you think of all your buddies, who wouldn’t have made an offer for food to you, even when you’d have dropped in their places, precisely at lunch/dinner hour (especially during the times when you wouldn’t have whipped up any food at your place!) Somehow, you magnanimously forgive all of them, since you feel they are relatively better, compared to these over-hospitable hosts, who treat their ‘athithis’ as gluttons, and not as gods!