Punjab Food Quotes

A Wrong Planet Chef always take an interest in the origins of the food he cooks. A particular dish of vegetables, herbs and spices could, for instance, have begun life 5000 years ago on the Indian subcontinent, perhaps in Central India where vegetarian Hindi food is considered as God (Brahman) as it sustains the entire physical, mental, emotional and sensual aspects of the human being. The dish may then have migrated to the Punjab region of the Indian-Pakistan border - The Land of Five Waters - around 250 BC, and from here could have moved on to Western Asia or North Africa as soldiers and merchants moved west with their families into the Eastern parts of the Roman empire, where the cooks would have experimented with new combinations of food, adding fruits, shellfish or poultry to the exotic dish. The dish could then have travelled in any direction heading North through Germany or Sweden to Britain or maybe migrating through Persia or North Africa to Spain and Portugal, creating two very distinct and separate menus but meeting once again in France

Khalil always gives me food as though I’m worse than a dog. Misty-eyed, I note he doesn’t look the same as usual. He stares at me. He’s about to say something, laughs and tells me: ‘Your guardian angel has just been assassinated because of you. Your beloved Governor Salman Taseer, that Muslim traitor, is now bathing in his own blood. He was killed with twenty-five bullets in Islamabad for defending you. Good riddance! You’d better keep your head down!’ Salman Taseer was a good man. He was governor of my province, the largest and richest in Pakistan. With its ninety million inhabitants, they call Punjab the ‘land of the five rivers’ and ‘the land of the pure’; Salman Taseer was one of those. He wasn’t a typical politician, he wasn’t power-hungry and greedy like some, he was a humanist who was quick to oppose the Taliban and the Islamic extremists. When he heard about my death sentence, he defended me in public.

Indeed, in many agricultural regions — including northern China, southern India (as well as the Punjab), Mexico, the western United States, parts of the Middle East, and elsewhere — water may be much more of a constraint to future food production than land, crop yield potential, or most other factors. Developing and distributing technologies and practices that improve water management is critical to sustaining the food production capability we now have, much less increasing it for the future. Water-short Israel is a front-runner in making its agricultural economy more water-efficient. Its current agricultural output could probably not have been achieved without steady advances in water management — including highly efficient drip irrigation, automated systems that apply water only when crops need it, and the setting of water allocations based on predetermined optimum water applications for each crop. The nation’s success is notable: between 1951 and 1990, Israeli farmers reduced the amount of water applied to each hectare of cropland by 36 percent. This allowed the irrigated area to more than triple with only a doubling of irrigation water use.37 Whether

The next morning, elements of 23 Punjab who had survived the Dogra ambush were captured. The prisoners were herded on to a bridge and I saw a captain who was their adjutant. He was older than me and I asked him if he had eaten anything. ‘No, we’ve been on the run for the last two days.’ ‘Here,’ I reached into my bag and gave the captain a fistful of shakarpara. ‘Have some,’ I said, ‘these are our emergency rations.’ He stood there looking most uncertain, almost frightened, but he made no move to eat the shakarpara. He was just staring at them. The realization hit me suddenly: he thinks they are coated with poison! I reached out and took a couple of pieces from his hand and popped them into my mouth. The captain burst into tears. The other prisoners and my men had all been watching this little drama unfold. Almost to a man, our boys dug into their kit bags and gave the Pakistanis whatever they could find, a few men even sharing their water canteens. Their adjutant looked at me and said, ‘Thank you.’ I turned to walk away, but he put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You know, I was brought up to believe Indians were the biggest bastards—demons who were cruel and would torture us before killing us. Here you people are giving us your food and water.’ Tears were still streaming down his face. There was nothing to be said, so I moved away, leaving at least one Pakistani soldier to ponder the folly of it all.

Marathas failed to enlist the support either of Rajasthan’s chiefs or of the Hindu Jats around Delhi, although for a few days one Sikh leader, Ala Singh, like most Sikh chiefs a Jat, procured food and fodder for the Marathas.

Active demonization of the protest movement had already begun while it was still limited to Punjab. At the end of November, when the farmers’ march was finally stopped on the borders of Delhi, the rhetoric against them was ratcheted up. The BJP general secretary in Uttarakhand on 29 November 2020 called the protestors pro-Pakistan, pro-Khalistan and anti-national. Gujarat’s deputy chief minister called the farmers anti-national elements, terrorists, Khalistanis, Communists and pro-China people having pizza and pakodi. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Chouhan wrote an article blaming the protests on vested interests. Law and justice minister Ravishankar Prasad associated them with the mythical ‘tukde-tukde’ gang. The BJP vice president in Himachal Pradesh called the protests the work of anti-nationals and middlemen. The same day, the party’s spokesman in the state called the protestors miscreants who were the same people behind Shaheen Bagh. On 17 December, the BJP chief minister in Tripura, Biplab Deb, said Maoists were behind the protests, while Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath claimed Opposition parties were using farmers to fuel unrest in the country because they were unhappy about the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. He also blamed communism and those who wanted to promote disorder and didn’t want to see India prosper. BJP national spokesman Sambit Patra called the farmers extremists in the garb of food-providers, another spokesman called them terrorists, and BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya called them anarchists and insurrectionists. On 17 January 2021, a BJP MP from Uttar Pradesh said the protests were backed by anti-national powers. A BJP MLA from Gujarat wrote to Amit Shah asking him to hang or shoot the protestors. Even in March 2021, the slander of calling the thousands of protestors fake farmers and terrorists continued. The New York Times reported that this demonisation cleaved to a pattern from Modi’s playbook: first the accusations of foreign infiltration, then police complaints against protest leaders, then the arrests of protesters and journalists, then the blocking of internet access in places where demonstrators gathered. All this was akin to India’s actions in Kashmir, and against the protestors of Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere