Veg or Non-Veg
This is another phrase which has been contributed to the English language (as spoken in India) by Indian Airlines. Who can forget the bored air-hostesses of Indian Airlines as they handed out veg/non-veg packets to you ? I always stuck with Non-veg for breakfast and Veg for meals.
Now here are some interesting things about non-vegetarian, shortened to non-veg, and often abbreviated further to NV.
Non-vegetarian is not a word to be found in a standard English dictionary. So while it is widely used in India by Indians, the guys who define “official” English have yet to take note of it. It does not appear in the online versions of Oxford and Chambers dictionaries, nor in the Freeonline dictionary. What official English does have is Vegetarian.
Then again, the Indian concept of a non-vegetarian is very different from then Western one, in qualitative as well as quantitative terms. Here a non-vegetarian is someone who eats ANY flesh, including fish and fowl. A vegetarian, accordingly is someone who does not eat ANY flesh. This can lead to some funny situations. I have known Indians who when traveling abroad said they were vegetarians and have then been offered fish or chicken as an alternative to beef and pork. Then again there is the issue of quantity. In India if you eat two pieces of chicken in a week , you are non-veg and do you think that’s going to help in Europe where they eat a quarter kilo of meat every day !!
It is widely believed abroad and to an extent in India, that most Indians are vegetarians. This is not at all true. About 65 % of Indians are actually non-veg.. again non-veg being defined in the Indian way. If that looks too high a figure, here is some simple maths. In India 14% of the population is Muslim and 1 % Christian and 3 percent Sikh. All three communities are mostly non-veg. Among Hindus, in the traditional caste system only Brahmins and Vaishyas are vegetarian. Together they constitute no more than 10 % of the Hindu population. So, contrary to popular belief, India is a not a vegetarian majority country. However, given our humongous population, even at 35 percent vegetarians, we have nearly 375 million people who are veg… this is higher than the population of USA, and nearly equal to all of Europe. There is no similarly large group of vegetarians anywhere else in the world.
So where does this Indians-are-vegetarians come from ? From the fact that most of the Indians who travel abroad are from the vegetarian communities. And so strange is this vegetarianism to foreigners, that some people have actually asked me, could people survive without eating meat … to which m answer has always been to cite the elephant.
Since the eating of flesh is linked to caste and hence to religion, it carries some peculiar Indian ideas. So, it’s a sin for a Brahmin to eat meat, but okay for a Kshatriya to do so. One man’s meat is another man’s poi-sin ! And to carry this non-veg as “sin” concept further, we label adult jokes as non-veg.
This is another phrase which has been contributed to the English language (as spoken in India) by Indian Airlines. Who can forget the bored air-hostesses of Indian Airlines as they handed out veg/non-veg packets to you ? I always stuck with Non-veg for breakfast and Veg for meals.
Now here are some interesting things about non-vegetarian, shortened to non-veg, and often abbreviated further to NV.
Non-vegetarian is not a word to be found in a standard English dictionary. So while it is widely used in India by Indians, the guys who define “official” English have yet to take note of it. It does not appear in the online versions of Oxford and Chambers dictionaries, nor in the Freeonline dictionary. What official English does have is Vegetarian.
Then again, the Indian concept of a non-vegetarian is very different from then Western one, in qualitative as well as quantitative terms. Here a non-vegetarian is someone who eats ANY flesh, including fish and fowl. A vegetarian, accordingly is someone who does not eat ANY flesh. This can lead to some funny situations. I have known Indians who when traveling abroad said they were vegetarians and have then been offered fish or chicken as an alternative to beef and pork. Then again there is the issue of quantity. In India if you eat two pieces of chicken in a week , you are non-veg and do you think that’s going to help in Europe where they eat a quarter kilo of meat every day !!
It is widely believed abroad and to an extent in India, that most Indians are vegetarians. This is not at all true. About 65 % of Indians are actually non-veg.. again non-veg being defined in the Indian way. If that looks too high a figure, here is some simple maths. In India 14% of the population is Muslim and 1 % Christian and 3 percent Sikh. All three communities are mostly non-veg. Among Hindus, in the traditional caste system only Brahmins and Vaishyas are vegetarian. Together they constitute no more than 10 % of the Hindu population. So, contrary to popular belief, India is a not a vegetarian majority country. However, given our humongous population, even at 35 percent vegetarians, we have nearly 375 million people who are veg… this is higher than the population of USA, and nearly equal to all of Europe. There is no similarly large group of vegetarians anywhere else in the world.
So where does this Indians-are-vegetarians come from ? From the fact that most of the Indians who travel abroad are from the vegetarian communities. And so strange is this vegetarianism to foreigners, that some people have actually asked me, could people survive without eating meat … to which m answer has always been to cite the elephant.
Since the eating of flesh is linked to caste and hence to religion, it carries some peculiar Indian ideas. So, it’s a sin for a Brahmin to eat meat, but okay for a Kshatriya to do so. One man’s meat is another man’s poi-sin ! And to carry this non-veg as “sin” concept further, we label adult jokes as non-veg.
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