Make America great again

It was a provincial life that I led in India.

People typically interacted within their own tribes, and our family was no exception to this unwritten rule.  Thus, I didn't know about humans in other tribes--their foods, their music, their arts, ... Even the books that I read barely gave me any understanding in those pre-Google days; it was a struggle to figure out what bacon was, for instance.

At the job in Calcutta, which was immediately after the undergraduate years, I was the only Tamil in the young group.  The rest were Bengalis, and locals at that.  Almost always, they brought home-cooked lunch with them.  I--the outsider--went looking for vegetarian Bengali food.

One day, a colleague asked me if I wanted to have a little bit of his lunch to taste.  I don't like to eat from somebody else's food, nor do I like to share mine.  So, of course, I said no.  Thinking he could tempt me with something special that he had, he said he had tasty soybeans in the food.

Soybeans?

My provincial life was slowly beginning to crumble.  Life was getting better.  I was now getting a window into the the rich varieties we humans have created.

Coming to America was one giant leap compared to going to Calcutta.  The graduate students from India who showed me the ropes remarked that Indian vegetarians typically liked Mexican and Ethiopian foods.  Ethiopian?  They talked about how an Ethiopian dish is like the dosai.  Ethiopian dosai?

I loved the Mexican rice, which was better than the best tomato rice that I had ever had in India.  And what a delight it was to taste the Ehtopian version of dosai and daal!

It has been three decades of foods that I never knew existed.  From eggplant parmigiana, which is a world away from the brinjal curry of the old country, to cheesecake that makes me forget I used to love a sweet called mysorepak to ...

Now, even the sleepy, small town of Springfield--liberal Eugene's conservative sibling--has an Ethiopian restaurant.  This is how we make American great again, with people and their foods and music from all over the world.

We ordered the vegetarian combo. "It comes with the injera, right?" I asked the waiter who looked like a reincarnation of the late Gregory Hines.

"Yes, of course."

Ethiopian dosais we had in plenty.

I made dosais during the recent trip to the old country