Woman's Day - a tribute to the best cooks in the world

This post is part of the Chennai Bloggers Club which is celebrating a week long "marathon" in the honor of womanhood.

Over the past few months, there has been a huge hue and cry all over the media (social and mainstream) against the brutal assault on an innocent girl in our capital. Suddenly India seems to have awaken to this call and people are making loud comments concerning women. Several bloggers I interacted with during those times made some really bold talk about this and sadly some even went on to call men certain names. Well, all this vehemence is truly understandable, and being a guy it is difficult for many of us to actually empathize with their plight.But I am not going to speak about that in this post. In fact, I am going to talk of something that many of us see daily, but really do not fail to appreciate.

When I moved abroad, I thought it would be fairly easy to find food, considering its Singapore. But no, finding real "food" in Singapore is somewhat difficult. By real, I don't mean the scores of Indian restaurants around Little India. What I mean is authentic Tam-Brahm food. Something only each one of our mothers' can make. Well, that's really when I realized the value of the food my mother makes.

I cook my own food, but there are two problems to it. One being that no matter how well I do it, it certainly never matches what my mother makes. Secondly, it sure is an ordeal to actually make all pre-cooking preparations, something that is time consuming. More than that, the choices being limited, sometimes one tends to get crazy. I mean, how many veggies can you put in a sambhar?

But our mothers never seem to run out of choice. Each day, even before you think of getting your lazy arse out of bed, there she is, toiling in the kitchen to prepare your lunch before you rush off to work. Sometimes with working mothers, this rises their work scope all the more, for they have to prepare food for the entire family before she can actually get dressed to work.

Yet, beyond all this, I can sense certain things with the food a mother makes. One, it sure does have a "secret" ingredient (which most people would term love, but I beg to differ), that only a mother knows. Second, she never seems to tire out, or atleast pretends not to. Why? Just so you are well fed. Thirdly, she seems genuinely happy about it.

Many of us would actually observe this daily, but never really realize how much a mother does, just to make you happy. In the honor of all mothers who just feed their kids well, here's wishing you a Happy Woman's Day. Thank you for being there for us each day. You certainly know the way to a man's heart.

-Prashanth Ashok