I shall not tell you how it is made. Come to Switzerland and see Davos, they say; I shall say, come to India and see how a poulet au Delhi is made.
It is not a chicken, it is a dream. Forget the Taj Mahal and the Kutb Minar… you cannot eat them. The poulet will melt in your mouth like butter, its aroma will give you greater delight then the sweetscented tresses of your beloved and finally it will bring the same bliss, the same summum bonum, in our language moksha and nirvana which extremely complicated religions practices alone can bring.
That might remind you of death, for you might have heard that nirvana comes after death. That is not true, for one of our poets has said, If I cannot get nirvana-salvation, in this life when I have command on actions what chances have I to get if after death?
And even if death overcomes you due to excesses in poulet au Delhi, never mind. I shall quote another scripture, this time in pure Sanskrit, to prove my thesis. I am afraid I shall have to twist it slightly, but then that is precisely what all scholars do; it is the laymen, the uninitiated the rustic who goes by the literal meaning of scriptures.
The quatrain says,
Parannam prapya, Durbuddhe,
Ma praneshu dayam kuru,
Parannam durlabham loke,
Pranah janmani Janmani.
Eat, eat, to they full, o, man of little knowledge,
And do not show any mercy for your life,
For you come across cheap exotic food rarely in life,
But life will be given to you by God free of cost
every time you are born.
Let me remind you that we Indians believe in rebirths. We believe that we come to this earth again and again till we have reached perfection.
So then, if you do not come to India, inspire of all the pleadings, I have made on her behalf, this winter or in this life, I pray, you may be born in India in your next birth.
.
What is in a name?
There appears to be little doubt that India is going to be divided soon, but at the same time there appears to be a lot of confusion in the public mind about the name to be given to the Non-Pakistan area.
Some are in favor of India, others again are suggesting Hindustan (or Hindusthan). Some are indifferent like Shakespeare who thought that a name did not matter at all, others are keen on a proper choice and cite Tagore who considered it all important and pointed out that if Draupadi, the proud possessor of five heroes as husbands (panchavira-patigarvita), had been named Urmila, her resplendent kshatriya womanhood would have been hurt at every step by this soft and tender name.
We agree with Tagore not because we are thinking in aesthetic terms, but because in addition to his artistic argument there are a few philological and historical arguments which have to be considered before we arrive at a decision.
Philologists have pointed out that the ancient Iranians changed their s to h at an early stage of their linguistic development with the result that our asura became their ahura which is the first part of Ahura-Mazda; precisely in the same manner the river Sindhu became Hindu, Hindo, and Hind to which was added the word stan, meaning land which again is cognate with Sanskrit sthana. (It will be remembered that like all other non-Indian Aryans, the Iranians lost their aspirates at an early stage- cf. ph in philosophy which is pronounced as a fracative f with the result that sthan became stan in the Iranian languages). Hindustan thus came to mean the Land of the Indus.
The Arabs turned in into Hind and used it as a general appellation for the whole of India. They still call all Indians, irrespective of the fact whether they are Hindus or Muslims, Hindi of which the plural is Hunud, a term, which surprisingly enough, is occasionally used by Indian Muslims in referring contemptuously to the Hindus.
The Greeks had lost their aspirates by the time they learnt the word from the Iranians and consequently took it as Indos (in modern Greek the d is pronounced soft, almost wet, as th in the English this) which gave birth to the English India, French L Inde, German Indien, etc.
