My
Saturday regime is fairly interesting and inquisitive to everyone except
me. I always try to get away from the places where I have to explain
people why and since when I started.
I am
glad that I have held up this form of 'fasting' so far, minus a number of
countable times, two or three may be that I had eaten one of those products
mistakenly. The funniest one was on 'Johannus'- mid
summer festival in Finland, the time of summer solstice.
It
was a long road trip, we had driven approximately 500miles and when we woke up
in the hotel room, I thought it was already the next day. I didn't realize
it was late afternoon and we slept for 2 hours only.
So,
if anyone is curious about what exactly is my Saturday regime and for what, the
question that I get every time when I say, “I can't it's a Saturday”, I do not
eat meat, fish and eggs on Saturdays. No alcohol either! So it makes me a
vegetarian on Saturdays, not Vegan though as I eat dairy products. It has
been around 4 or 5 years now.
It is
not hard to avoid meat for one day, but I’ve realized that choosing a day
particularly like Saturday is a real challenge. Whenever I find the
invitation on Saturday, either I tell them ahead so there would be some
alternatives for me or I do not go to the weekend gathering. And, I
chose the day deliberately so that I can watch how well committed I could be, or a test of my endurance. Does it sound ridiculous?
Perhaps,
it gets along to someone and it is not a huge sacrifice to pull in, but believe
me it gets hold of a bunch of exertion to say NO when whenever one is cooking
delicious 'pork' that you have been craving for a week, or when you're starving
and you see everything has either egg or meat in it.
To a
greater extent than a culture or religious belief or devotion, it's more about
measuring my capacity to hold my temptation, since I am a hardcore
foodie. As a child, I was brought up in a Hindu-Bhuddist family, and more
often than not in our civilization, religion is something you inherit from your
parents & grandparents. Since I belong to one of the ethnic groups in
Nepal, KIRAT, we follow our own ethnic rituals and for us our ancestors are our
God. We are not very religious family nor are we atheist or agnostic. Everyone in my
family believes in Karma and respect humanity.
Besides,
if I have to remark the most challenging thing about this Saturday regime, it
would be those times when I travel, 'coz then, it gets really tougher. On
one of my air travel, the flight attendant handed over me a non-veg meal, and
instead of explaining that I don’t eat meat on Saturday, I told her that I am a vegetarian, and then came a new plate with fish curry and
sometime, you just don’t get an alternative.
Now,
it's more like a normal routine, people who are closer to me know it very well
that I have this special reservation for Saturday. Few of my friends manage to
cook non-meat products if it happens to be a Saturday, and then, home-pack my
share of non-veg cuisines for the next day. I usually don't avoid Saturday
fun though, I simply enjoy seeing people having fun and cracking jokes about my
so-called 'fasting'.
A number of times, I hear them say, 'she has been
on this intense fast to get a good husband’ and in reply, all I do is
mysteriously smile and say, ‘’TRUE! :D’’