Operator made soup?

Operator made soup?
Or, the silliness of double standards

Everyone has been climbing to their rooftops to suddenly voice their consternation at Nestle and Maggi. It’s actually becoming strident and I am sure Arnab will make it even more so at night! But I keep wondering why this sudden noise? Is it because we have all consumed Maggi and somehow, feel vulnerable all of a sudden? Maybe we are feeling all that lead poisoning us from within?

Why is no one up in arms, for example, against all those times when we stood on the street side and eaten those paanipurisand chaats and never ever bothered about how much dust or other nonsense got into that? What about all those bottles of water that pass under ‘popular’ brands (which most of the time, is probably bottled in their backyard!). In all probability those items surely did poison you in some way or the other! Who is taking up cudgels for that? What about the millions of tons of fruits and vegetables that rot without ever reaching the common folk? What about the tons and tons of wheat and other food grains that just go waste in godowns or get rat infested or some such?

Sometimes people just get into afrenzy about something and all logic is just thrown aside. We get all righteous and moralistic about it and claim that our children eat Maggi and where is the sense of responsibility from Nestle? How dare they? Conveniently the very same parents forget that they had absolutely no qualms and morals when they fed their very same kids from road side stalls selling paavbhaji or Chinese food or some such or visited small outlets whose kitchens and sanitation were next to nonexistent! Where did the consternation go? Where did the demands for systems and fairplay vanish? Will the government get into the act and ban the local bhelwala, for example? Will they test the drinking water of most of the hotels for their content? Have they bothered to check the purity of the bottled water that is sold openly?

Double standards are prevalent all across our lives. We live it. We know we live it. We condone in it in ourselves and others. Then why single out Nestle and make all this noise? Why forget all those enjoyable moments when you ate Maggi and had a great time? If you had a choice between eating Maggi and a Vada at some remote railway station, what would you choose? I am not stating here for even a moment that Nestle is not at fault. However, the excessive response, raising this to a kind of national calamity (those clowns in Delhi have banned sales of Maggi too!!) seems ludicrous. What will finally happen is that some people will be able to buy Nestle stock at a cheaper price and everyone will soon forget about this when the next tamasha rolls into town. Maybe this whole campaign is about buying the stock cheaper and was engineered by some clever operator!!