Friday, February 3, 2012

My Toastmaster's speech 8 - "Maharashtrian Thali"

Its called "Get Comfortable With Visual Aids" and focus is on supporting your points with visual aids and handling them with ease and confidence. Also, lessons from previous projects should be kept in mind. The visual aids i used were - a thali and a single slide ppt. Plus, i was dressed in a maharashtrian style sari.

Namaskar Fellow Toastmasters.

Our country, India is an amalgamation of cultures and habits so diverse that it is said “kos kos par pani badle teen kos par bani”, meaning mile after mile even water changes and every three miles you get to hear a different language, or at least a new dialect. And every region or culture has its own traditions and rites and rituals and sometimes they are so different from each other that we could literally get cultural shocks going from, lets say Gujarat to Rajasthan or Poushchimbanga to Orissa.

The topic of my speech today is one such tradition from the Maharshtrian way of life which has baffled many a people not born into it, and that is the typical meal and its arrangement around the plate, or thali. Yes, you heard it right, I said the arrangement of the meal around the thali. Surprised? Well, we don’t do this as a regular practice, but only on special occasions, which are usually festive ones, like Navaratri, or Holi – the days differ from family to family and are actually passed on via generations as a legacy. In my family, such a meal as I am going to describe is prepared thrice a year.

On such a day, the plates are set on the ground in a line or square formation and are surrounded by a rangoli. The meal is eaten sitting cross legged and is prepared and served by the ladies of the household. This is a sample plate which is normally used, <at this point i brought out the plate> though there is no formal guideline about the shape but usually circular is preferred. A bowl or katori is placed at the center and at the top so as to divide the plate into two sections. The glass of water is placed at the left side outside the plate.

Let me tell you now about the various food items and their order. The very first item on the left is salt, but since it is considered inauspicious to serve salt in an empty thali, we start with serving a slice of lemon, and then place salt in between the lemon and the katori. Next comes the chutney, and pickles can also be included at this spot. After that any sort of salad can be served, this can be anything from a sprouted one to mashed grains or daal; followed by a cucumber or banana based raita. At the right side, there can be any number of cooked vegetables in line one after the other. Then comes something called 'pattalbhaji' in Marathi, which is essentially a leafy vegetable cooked as to form a semi solid dish to be eaten with the chapatti.

Coming to the center, the katori is filled with hot kadhi, and below it can be bhajiye and papad, etc. Then you have the sweet dish, which is often laddu, along with sweet chapatti called pooran poli. Rice is served just below this in a neat mound and is topped by yellow daal and ghee.

This is what a sample thali looks like after the first serving. <at this point the ppt with the below picture was shown

People are then invited to sit and as soon as everybody gets seated, the second round of serving starts and this goes on till the meal is over.

To someone who is coming across this method for the first time, it seems too much work to do, but believe me, once you get the hang of it, it’s not such a big deal. If you look at the ergonomic aspect of this arrangement, its almost perfect for a right handed person, and we Indians as a rule, eat using our right hands. Hence the placement of the glass of water on the left side so that it is more approachable and doesn’t get spoiled. The left part contains all the raw uncooked items usually eaten in lesser quantities. The right is for cooked portions served hot and the middle is for items eaten in major quantities and are more reachable. This also benefits the one who is serving since she knows beforehand which dish is to be served where.

But for me, this is not the real brilliance of this tradition or any other tradition from any other region for that matter. That there is a scientific explanation for everything or that our ancestors were so intelligent as to bring in such ingenious ideas in seemingly simple things – that too is not the real brilliance of it. The real brilliance, my dear friends, is the fact that there is no documentation of rituals like these. There are no scriptures, no guide, no rulebook where you can find this written. It is passed on by word of mouth from generations since centuries and it is has stood the test of time, and that is because there is something deeply rooted within each of us which keeps stuff like this alive.

Being an agnostic, I have always believed in putting a question mark to things, rules specially, written or otherwise, but I cannot for the life of me, put that salt on the right side or that laddu way below, because, that something inside me, which is also a little obsessive compulsive, cannot think up of a better way to accomplish this.

Thank You.

This speech took 8:17 minutes to deliver and was appreciated for the visuals used, however, the thali could have been used in a better way, and choice of words could have brought out more culinary feelings about the described dishes.