8 long days...

It had been 8 long days since I ate wholesome, home cooked food. I felt like my energy was just being sapped. I felt like a plant withering and shedding all its leaves in the cold dark winter. I felt like a bee sucking water instead of honey, when all the flowers have disappeared.

A lot of activities we do in life is purely based on the pain vs gain principle. You do it if it brings you more gain than pain. Apparently cooking normally brings me more pain than pleasure. All that work in cutting vegetables, cooking, cleaning was simply not worth it. This was fine for 8 days, when I subsisted in the beginning on oil in vegetables in oil..aka curry from a shop. My stomach felt sick and twisted like a wrung cloth! The other days were spent surviving on an apple, banana and a ready to eat chapathi with pickle. In the afternoon at the cafeteria, it would be some cheesy tart, pie or sweetened noodles - lining up the stomach with chocolates as fillers. There was never a sense of being full. I once got up in the middle of the night to get a booster snack, something unthinkable for a sound sleeper like me. Yesterday the pain of the past 7 days made me overeat at an Indian restaurant, where I hogged like a pig on dirt. I then discovered that the food was indeed nothing but dirt when all day I spent with an uneasy stomach.

Enough is enough my mind decided. Ultimately, the pain in surviving without good, healthy food had exceeded the pain taken to cook. I hit the stoves immediately. A busy 70 minutes saw me dishing up some delicacies. Truly, I make no exaggeration when I say I felt like a parched desert wanderer who takes a bath and swig of fresh water in an oasis after nearly dying. In fact, food had always been a major problem, even while I stayed in the land of opportunities. I used to spend days on meagre quantities of fruits and other eatables. Like a moth to the light, I was attracted back to homeland, where there was no necessity to put up a big fight just for 2 square meals a day. How true that we choose our own destiny thanks to the habits and simple pleasures of life, given up for riches and glory.