Translated into English by Pompen Hantrakool
Explicated by Dr Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya
Text
Ripe Fruit
Who bakes
In the trunk of a tree
By another flame
Explication
Baking is so important in our everyday life.Heat transforms raw material of food for our consumption.Take finely ground whole wheat flour in a mixer. Add a little salt to it and mix it with the flour thoroughly.Next add clarified butter to the same and mix it with flour thoroughly. Now slowly add a little water to the flour. Don’t add all the water at a time. The palms should be oiled a little so that the flour does not stick to the palms or fingers.Now flour and the water and the clarified butter should be mixed to a manageable dough with the hand.Now knead the dough so that it is pliable and stretchy. The dough should rest a while.Then it should be divided into balls. Each ball should be rolled on a rolling surface with a wooden roller so that each ball turns into a flat circle. The cooking surface should be heated in the meantime. Place the flattened dough on it and keep it for 30 seconds. Then flip it and heat the other side for 30 seconds. Now enjoy the baked product.This is how a kind of flour bread is prepared in India which constitutes the main food of an Indian The bread thus made is very tasty and nutritious.. We wouldnot live without food. And baking is the art of arts that prepares food for us so that we liveWe have studied how they bake wheat flower to make a kind of bread in India rather in details.It shows how complicated and yet simple the art of baking is. Just as the food we consume is often made by way of baking so are the foods prepared through plants by way of baking as well .Indeed whatever food we consume is prepared through plants. Sometimes we consume directly what is prepared through plant such as a guava or a pomello. Otherwise we take the food prepared througha plant as the raw material such as flour from wheat plants for the food we prepare for our consumption and there baking is rather a must. The baking in plants is also a complicated process. The baking in plants needs chlorophyll or green pigments found in the leaves of plants, natural sunlight or artificial light, carbon dioxide gases from the air exhaled by men and animals ,water and nutrients and minerals which the plants collect through roots from soil. Food is made through the plant by way of the process of photosynthesis with the help of light energy . Light energy helps to make sugar from carbon dioxide and water. Thus photosynthesis is the process in plants that convert light energy to sugar energy. As it is obvious from our description the making of food in the plants for the sustenance of itself as well as for sustaining all life in the earth is quite complicated . The making of food in plants needs lot of hard work and proper understanding of the aforesaid complicated process.It is our mother who works hard in the kitchen and bakes food materials on the oven for us to consume and live.The poet asks- who bakes in the plant? This is a question put forward by a sphinx and no Oedipus has yet showed up to answer it. Had there been no plants there would be no life on earth. We see the plants through which food is prepared. We see ovens as it were. But ovens do not cook Mother cooks food with the help of the ovens Similarly plants do not cook. Someone surely cooks using the plants.This is simple logic. But who cooks using the plants? Who ?Who?Who? Because cooking cannot be done on its own . Different materials and diverse ingredients are needed for cooking and it needs intelligence to properly combine those materials and ingredients.The chefs are the greatest among men in the world and cooking is the greatest art that man can ever imagine of because it sustains life.Should we then imagine a dryad in every tree in chefs attire and be pagans worshipping trees. Yes trees must not be felled to raise built space.We must learn to worship trees. We must go to our less civilized brethren who live in the neighbourhood of Nature and forests to learn the true essence of civilization and to worship trees. Again may be there is one supreme power which has created the Sun and which has created the earth and water at whose biddings the multitudinous dryads bake in the trees. There is no conclusive answer to the question—Who bakes in the trees.Mankind has been circumambulating the existence with the question since man first appeared in the world. We have no answer to this question even today. It is often claimed that poetry reveals eternal truths.May be. But the poet Mai Van reveals before us questions that man will ever be asking.
No comments:
Post a Comment