Away on a business trip and seated alone at the corner table of the swanky restaurant of the 5-star hotel, with the customary bowl of salad in front of me, I find that I am at a vantage point to observe the feeding habits of some typical representatives of the human species. There is a lavish buffet spread and there is much movement of people. hither and thither, resembling the Brownian motion of molecules. The place is teeming with epicures, gourmets, gourmands, gluttons and trenchermen engaged in the ritual of ensuring ‘beast-like satisfaction of their bellies”.

Over at the table near the entrance, a man has just gone off on a reconnoiter trip to check out the menu. This man is clearly a pro. Many a customer would start filling the plate with the first dish that he or she can lay the hands on, only to realize that that they had wasted valuable ‘belly space’ when more interesting items awaited them downstream. But not our entrance-table man.  Having scanned the entire foodscape, he goes about the task of prioritizing and picking out those items on which, in his assessment, the hotel would have incurred most costs.

In the adjacent table, the waiter is asking the guest if he would prefer mineral water and the man says ‘yes’ readily. It is obvious that the guy is charging this lunch to his corporate account. No sane man paying for the meal out of his personal income would order mineral water at Rs 80 per bottle. The cost of the mineral water is disproportionate to the claimed hygiene value.

Two tables away, there is a young and boisterous lot, bent on getting its money’s worth. A woman of fairly large proportions ( “hey, round is a shape”) settles down into the chair with some difficulty, wishing that the hotel management had the foresight to place a long-handle shoe horn, along with the forks and knives, to tuck herself into the chair. Or to scoop her out of it later on.. Her idea of a balanced diet is to carry back two equally full, large plates, one in each hand. One of her table-mates is so engrossed in his meal that he doesn’t even pause to wish her “Bon Appetit”.  Conversation at this table languishes, unless you want to count Don Martinese sounds like “chomp chomp”, “ crunch crunch”, “gnash gnash”, “burp burp”, as evidence of social intercourse.

In yet another table, the main course is over and the members of this pack are inspecting the debris and asking the waiter to clear the deck, preparatory to the imminent launch of  “Operation Dessert Storm”. As someone said, “ Inside each one of us is a thin person struggling to get out, but who can be silenced with a few pieces of chocolate cake”. Presently these dessert foxes return from their foray, plates overflowing with puddings, pastries, mousse and milk sweets. No ice creams yet. There will be an exclusive round for that.

At the table over there the family has finally finished the meal and the contended members resemble beached whales in their posture and in their inability to move.The waiter is getting their check. What!  The  head of the family is paying for the meal in cash. In these enlightened times, when credit cards and debit cards have liberated us from the tyranny of carrying wads of cash, can you imagine anybody going around with bundles of banknotes in his pockets? There can be only one explanation. This fellow is one of those corrupt Govt officials, loaded with ill-gotten cash. A meal at a 5-star hotel provides a good outlet for the booty. I wish I had my camera. Could have carried out a sting operation right here and sold the story to NDTV for a tidy sum.

I can’t help thinking that if the Indians of the 1920s and 30s had access to such sumptuous meals as the ones being consumed today, we would never have got our freedom. At the height of the Indian Civil disobedience movement in the 1930s, P.G. Wodehouse had attributed the non-violent protests to the fact that Indians subsist on a frugal diet. "Why is there unrest in India?” he wrote.“ Because its inhabitants eat only an occasional handful of rice. The day when Mahatma Gandhi sits down to a good juicy steak and follows it up with roly-poly pudding and a spot of Stilton, you will see the end of all this nonsense of Civil Disobedience”.

Rudyard Kipling wrote about the jungle laws that decreed that all animals must hunt only when hungry and never to satisfy their greed. These laws obviously don’t apply to Man who is on top of the food chain, I reflect as I leave the restaurant sipping my mineral water and asking for my bill to be debited to my company.