Kuchh Pyaaz

Chopping onions is tricky business. Try it, and you will find it injurious either to your eyes or to your fingers. If you decide to brave it out and focus directly on the job at hand, very soon you will be focussing on trying to figure out a way to keep the perennial stream of tears out of your precious concoction. If you think you are using your brains and try to protect your peepers by doing the chopping shut-eyed, 9 times out of 10 you will miss aim and your poor innocent finger will have to undergo due retribution.

We have a winner here. The onion is one vegetable that cannot be outsmarted.

After having attempted the second option mentioned above and faced the consequence also mentioned above, i spent the better part of the morning weeping away like there was no water left in the country. At one point i was thinking on the lines of what the hell, i might as well make it look more realistic, and added a few sniffles here and there. I guess the special effects worked because i had a cousin telling me not to take the role of Princess Diana loyalist too seriously. More on that in a later post. In any case, my discoveries about the onion are far more intriguing to me than the discovery of Charles and Camilla that it is indeed true love that exists between them. For one, it did not take me 35 years to realise that chopping onions will be one chore i will move hell and high water to avoid henceforth. It also didn't cost me the peace of mind of a dozen people, the life of one person and about a gazillion pounds.

Anyway, two people have actually compared the onion to life in the long run. One is an American critic, who said,
“Life is like an onion; you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it.”

I am wont to prefer the other, who said,
"Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.”

Then there was the ilk of Shakespeare who was more concerned with the haliotis aspect of the whole affair, and was forever extolling his actors to "eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath."
Quite understandable too.

I have developed my own philosophy as regards the saucy vegetable. It is way more practical and down to earth than the ones listed above, and it is simply that if ever you run into the rotten luck and inescapable situation of having to chop an oinion, pay attention to the criss-cross details. Spot the contours Mother Nature provided and then cut across them and voila! you will have cut your weeping time into half.

And then, like yours truly, you can switch on the telly and do some more weeping watching Pakistan kick our ass in the 3rd ODI in Jamshedpur.