DRAGON FRUIT
God’s gift to the spice-challenged!
I happened to pick up some dragon fruit today, when I was out for some other work. There was a time when dragon fruit existed only in photos and children’s charts showing veggies and fruits. It was an exotic item, not yet available in India. Then suddenly there was a glut of the fruit in the markets, and everyone was singing praises of the fruit and its many qualities. It could improve your gut health, give a good night’s sleep, improve digestion, prevent malaria, treat dengue, and could be used as a weapon in case of an alien invasion.
I was very scared of buying them initially. The name was very intimidating and conured images of fire-breathing dragons. Surely, this was a fruit whch would put your mouth on fire. I remember, the first time that I had brought home some dragon fruit, I had no idea of how to eat it and I had looked up a YouTube video of how to peel a dragon fruit! Contrary to what I had expected, it was deliciously tasteless and magically flavourless. I became a fan immediately.
Dragon fruit is God’s gift to the spice-challenged.
People like me, who cannot tolerate the sight and smell of chillies, let alone their taste, are in awe of this divinely bland fruit.
Later in the day, when I was savouring the complete absence of flavour, I pondered over why I was a fan of this creation which put taste and flavour in an existential crisis. It seems that my personality is very much like a dragon fruit.
It is how I like my food, with no spices and no chillies, as bland as it can be cooked. After biting upon a chilli, my taste buds are completely numbed, and not only do I need to drink litres of water to douse the fire in my mouth, but I also cannot taste anything after that. This often happens even after consuming completely benign stuff like pani puri or capsicum. Dragon fruit is God’s reassurance that he hasn’t forgotten the spice-challenged.
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Even in the matter of clothes, my choices are black and white. I mean literally black and white. Given a choice, I would wear black trousers and a white shirt every day and never ever waste a single neuron thinking about whether the shirt matches the pants or the socks match each other. But free will is an unfulfilled dream. The Missus got fed up with the black and white, and said that I needed some colour in my wardrobe. I tried explaining to her that technically white is a mix of all colours. So my shirts are actually very colourful. And black is the absence of colours and so is a good contrast.
Yin and yang! See?
She did not see.
So I went out and bought some more pants which were jet black, midnight black, matte black, quite black and a little less black. I also got some light blue, sky blue, mildly blue and almost blue colored shirts. I went back home, happy that my better half would be pleased with the added colour in my clothing. My readers are intelligent people and can imagine the events which followed next….
Even in terms of cars, I have the Maruti type of personality, not the Land Rover or BMW type. A car should be big enough to sit in comfortably, and should take one from home to the hospital and back and should not break down frequently. Everything else is mostly superfluous. Maruti ticks all the boxes. Basically, Maruti is like the dragon fruit of cars.
Same for investing. I am not the fno type but more of the mutual fund type. My philosophy is that investments should be slow, boring and unexciting. If you want excitement, you should go to a game zone or an adventure park, not the stock market.
So basically, all my personality traits match: the food I like, the clothes I wear, the car I drive and how I invest. If God ever wanted a human mascot to promote dragon fruits, I would probably be number one on the list.
Which brings us back to the centre of focus for today. When dragon fruit hit the markets, everyone was posting reels and shorts about their famed health benefits. It was a fruit previously found only in the breakfast buffets of 5-star hotels, so it had to be good, isn’t it? Then the spice crazy population of India realised that they had been tricked. A true-blue, patriotic Indian will never accept this level of blandness in his food, no matter how many health benefits it provides or promises. Spicy food is a matter of national pride!
So now, the once famous dragon fruit has become like an aged superstar. It sits at fruit stalls, neglected by the hordes of hungry shoppers, who prefer the newer stars: the tangy kiwi, the sweet-sour grapes, the juicy pear or the crisp and sweet apple. The poor dragon thingies sit aside, waiting for die-hard fans like me, who will come and remind them of their past days of glory and fame.
The dragon fruit is the anti-Osho of the fruit world. It offers everything which Osho did not. Exactly unlike Osho, it is completely uninteresting, offers no stimulation of any kind to the human taste buds, but still has its own cult following. And munching upon one raises some profound existential questions which make you reflect upon life itself, like why you are eating the stupid things, don’t you have anything better to do, and are there no more mangoes left in the fridge?
