Recently, a bhai sahib very nearly scrunched up his nose when he saw me break a chicken leg, politely warning me that “you become what you eat”. If that were true, I almost told him, half of India would have turned into samosas by now. The (not-so) gentleman went on about the violence of killing, and how the emotions of animals were also being eaten by “you people”.

I’ve run into this often — our favourite yoga posture: Moral Superiority. Many among us look down upon meat-eaters who supposedly contaminate not just their stomachs but their souls. Even onions and garlic are accused of stirring up passions. It all comes from old spiritual lines of thought where food wasn’t mere fuel but personality programming: sattvic foods made you serene, rajasic made you ambitious and tamasic made you sluggish or sinful. Meanwhile, we’ve spent centuries eating rice and wheat, which have no qualities whatsoever except silently putting up with all our theories.

For many Indians, vegetarianism is not just diet — it’s identity, hierarchy, morality, sometimes even politics. Yet this belief that a “gentle diet” equals non-violence is a pleasant myth. We love discussing it between spoonfuls of ghee sourced from an industry that treats calves as collateral damage. The hypocrisy runs deeper than a single industry. We draw a moral line at the individual act of killing, yet we’ll cheerfully destroy their homes for roads, farms, minerals and malls, wiping........

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