How a time-tested recipe for the humble karela is testimony that India doesn’t need to look beyond its shores for a healthy future

At the table were my nephew and friends, aged between 24 to 30, each of them nervous to taste this dish. For some because it was new to them and for others because it was a dish they knew was bitter — a taste profile not popular in Western cuisine, which has had a chokehold on our mindscapes since colonial times. Luckily for me this lot was both reverential and deferential to me and my likings, and this made it easy for me to convince them to give karelas a try. From the first bite, most were hooked.

Karun Deep Sagar, my US-born nephew, has a palate that is sophisticated and ecumenical. For him, everything is worth trying at least once. But he wasn’t the one I needed to convince. It was Nirbhay Choudhary, a proud Delhi-born Jat, who would be the stickler in this lot, a self-proclaimed mama’s boy who has been sheltered in that loving way most Indian kids are and so has lost out on eating the very foods that are our nation’s heritage.

Nirbhay, who has never left home to go beyond our borders, is a good human being and a proud Indian and has a lot going for him. But much is still waiting to capture his attention and take him to places of greater fulfilment and personal growth. Out of respect for me, his ‘bestie’ and ‘family’ as he calls me, Nirbhay gave these painstakingly made stuffed bitter gourds a taste. He was soon going back for more, and before the meal ended, he was asking me about the recipe and how tedious it was to make. That was the best outcome of the lunch.

Bitter gourds are loved by the Indian and Chinese and in geographies further south and east of the two populous nations. This love is savoured and cherished by the gourmands who aren’t swayed in their thirst for culinary adventures by ratings, awards and popularity of eateries. This is a relationship that is generational, cultural, and deeply societal, with religion and geography also coming into play.

The table at lunch found a sweet connection to our family yarn that went back generations. Occasionally, we burst into conversations that had us going off on tangents. But we kept coming back to the possibilities that food offers in its ability to bring comfort and connection no matter how divided or broken a community might be for other reasons.

These young diners at my mom’s table were smiling big. They had found a new dish to add to their own gourmand repertoires. What excited me most was that one taste of a dish as ancient as India had brought them joy and grounded them deeper in the delicious depths of their nation’s cuisine and its lore and legend. This modest vegetable, its storied preparation by our family’s guardian of familial recipes, our Brahman chef Vinod Tiwari, and the symphony of spices that gives it the taste and flavor these young minds found appealing, are all as local as can be, and as old as time.

Food is nothing if not an insightful mirror image of a people and the pervasive ethos that defines them holistically. Humble dishes that go back eons into a people’s past, that are healthy and nutritious, that pack robust flavour, that are easy to source locally and connect people to their heritage, are nothing the world peddles in the times we live in. Our lives are styled to be seduced and ruled by clever marketing and messaging led by commodity consortiums that are least interested in human well-being and driven purely by the economics of capitalism and market success.

What these karelas that my dadi, my paternal grandmother Kamla Bhatnagar, was most famous for did that day was to connect these young and impressionable minds to the devious ways in which our world is being puppeteered by a few MNC’s or HNI’s. They saw in their unconscious bias against a simple vegetable the hand that corporate greed and personal agendas are playing in our lives and the choices we make.

It tickled me pink to see these kids drive the engine demanding change and a shift in attitudes and that they were open to not labeling our own food ‘ethnic’, even as those eaten in Northern European nations come without any prefix. The humble karela, with a profoundly bitter and enigmatically heartwarming taste when prepared with passion and love, is one of the many million tasty bites of delectable discovery with potential to reverse the dangerous trend of increasing metabolic syndrome in India, where Ayurveda and plant-based cooking once gave diners a very holistic handle on wellness.

I am distressed by the empty and hollow simplistic promises of age-reversing remedies and baldly fake cures for diabetes and obesity being peddled by godmen and their blind followers with nary a care given to the lack of evidence attached to their claims. There is deafening noise created by fake news and dopamine-heavy reels in today’s hyper-national and insta-ready world, but these kids at the table and their reactions give me hope.

My last bite of the stuffed karelas and the smiles I saw across the table on the faces of the future were a sure sign of India never having to look outside its shores for a recipe to its own healthy and successful future. The ingredients are here, the spices and herbs, too. Better still, we have time-tested recipes and many comforting sagas and tales that perpetuate a sensible and holistic way of living and being. Without becoming jingoistic, with eyes wide open, with minds that think global and bodies that eat local – we are only a few bites away from taking our destiny into our own hands and making a tomorrow as layered, tasty and healthy as a bharwaan karela made with love.