La Tomatina in Bangalore: To beat or to eat?

 Bangalore’s Palace Grounds will soon be a witness to the first ever Indian tomato festival, the Indian equivalent of the Spanish La Tomatina. Great fun throwing tomatoes, wonderful sunny afternoon in tangy red! That is only if, one has a guilt free conscious.

Look at the numbers to realize from how many hands we snatch the only meal, they possibly could have had; every time we throw a tomato to get a tingling sensation.

Officially speaking, the Tendulakar committee’s report, estimates some 37% of the population below the poverty line in India. The committee calculated the poor, based on their expenditure on food, health & education. The Arjun Sengupta report had gone on to put this number at 77% of the population living on less then Rs 20( less then one third of Euro) a day. Even the World Bank statistics have put this number at around 42%. Huge variations in numbers notwithstanding, one thing is unanimous. We are home to 1/3^rd of the world’s poor.

Now put these heart wrenching numbers in the backdrop of gloomy clouds of food crisis looming large on the horizons of the India growth story. The prices of onions, putting a mouthful of tears in the eyes of consumers is an everyday story in Indian households. Globally speaking too, food riots in Algeria, wheat prices touching the skies in UK, Mexicans speculatively buying corn to keep Tortilla prices under control, are headlines not too distant from the past.


India, officially speaking, has an over 18% food inflation every year and globally speaking, the UN Food & Agricultural Organization sees it unprecedented and all time high, on a global scale.

At this opportune moment, a plush tomato festival in the midst of this hunger and poverty in the heart of Corporate India! On one hand, the emerging corporate & IT hub talks about its Corporate Social Responsibilities and on other throws tomatoes on the face of CSR! Pretty inspiring ain’t it!?

Hungry mouths to be fed and empty hands to serve, are definitely not the inspiring backdrop for a conscious soul to throw tomatoes and have the feel good factor. As conscious citizens and the future of India Shinning, when we should be saving every bite of food and save every bit in our plates, throwing tomatoes with such careless abandon is undoubtedly, moral turpitude at best. It is not cool, but symbolic of a cold heart, blindly trying to ape the west and a culture that existed in a certain cultural context, for a certain reason. Let us not blindly ape, lest we be  relegated to the mental IQ & levels of our ancestors, the Apes.